Last week, I attended a free public talk at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) here in Boston. This is a wonderful public outreach concept which too few conferences sport. The speaker, Tadashi Tokieda of University of Cambridge, illustrated a number of fascinating phenomena which can be demonstrated with simple toys or household objects. Tokieda didn't lecture from a bunch of slides; most of the talk was in the form of live demonstrations -- and demonstrations made with overt glee! There's a Storify of the entire meeting, in which mine and others of the Tokieda talk can be found.
