Imagine if your doctor had a digital model of your heart, personalised to you and updated with your latest medical information. This isn't science fiction this revolutionary healthcare is being tested now. In this podcast we speak to Steven Niederer, who leads the CVDNet project developing and testing these ideas, and his colleague Richard Wilkinson, from the University of Nottingham.

Richard is one of the organisers of the long research programme, Representing, calibrating & leveraging prediction uncertainty from statistics to machine learning (RCL), held earlier this year at the Isaac Newton Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (INI).

We first spoke to Steven back in 2019 when he helped organise the Fickle Heart programme at the INI. In this podcast, Richard and Steven tell us about digital twins, digital hearts, and how the RCL programme and CVDNet build on the work started back in 2019 with the Fickle Heart programme.

This content was produced as part of our collaborations with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) and the Newton Gateway to Mathematics.

The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. The Newton Gateway is the impact initiative of the INI, which engages with users of mathematics. You can find all the content from the collaboration here.

"I have learnt that even if you are not a master in mathematics and science you are still able to grasp the essence."

This is Céline Broeckaert talking, believe it or not, about the famously difficult theory of quantum mechanics. Céline knows what she's talking about. She's not a physicist, in fact she's a Romance languages scholar, author and playwright. Yet she's written a book about quantum mechanics together with her physicist husband Frank Verstraete, Leigh Trapnell Professor of Quantum Physics at the University of Cambridge. The book is called Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - and everyone needs to know something about it. And it's good timing: quantum mechanics celebrates its 100th birthday this year.

In this episode of Living Proof we talk to Céline and Frank about the book, what it was like writing it, and what their different backgrounds brought to the project.

We met Céline and Frank at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, where Frank is co-organising the research programme Quantum field theory with boundaries, impurities, and defects.

For a brief introduction to quantum mechanics see A ridiculously short introduction to some very basic quantum mechanics. To find out more about the overlap of maths and art, see here.

This content forms part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from the collaboration here.

The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.

You are blue, and are surrounded by other blue people: swirling together in a dot, identical and indistinguishable. From somewhere above you hear the ticking of a clock, and suddenly find yourself and some of your fellows pulled upwards, sucked through a tube arcing high above...

Intrigued? That is a description of one of Jess Enright's adventures in her mathematical models. This is an exciting new approach that researchers are using to invite people into the worlds of their models, both to communicate their research to the people outside of academia, but also for the researchers themselves to reflect on what aspects of reality these models actually do, and don't, describe.

These adventures in model land build on the work of Erica Thompson in her book, Escape from Model Land: how mathematical models can lead us astray and what we can do about it. Any mathematical description of a process in the world around us is a mathematical model: whether it's describing the processes in our climate, the spread of a disease through a population or the movement of water across a landscape. They are incredibly useful and key to research in modern mathematics and science. But these mathematical models are, by necessity, simplifications of the real world.

Erica's book inspired geoscientist Chris Skinner to use principles of role-playing games to explore and communicate mathematical models. And this approach was a perfect fit with Jess' experience building board games to communicate her research - we event get to play some in this podcast at the huge UK Games Expo in Birmingham earlier this year!

Jess Enright, along with Emma Gort Tarrus, in action at the UK Games Expo in Birmingham earlier in 2025. (Photo: Rachel Thomas)

In this podcast we talk to Jess (a reader in the school of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow and member of the JUNIPER partnership of disease modellers from across the UK), Chris (an independent geoscientist and researcher and a visiting fellow at York St John University)and Erica (Associate Professor of Modelling for Decision Making at University College, London) about their explorations of these ideas.

You can find out more information about the ideas discussed in the podcast here:

• Maths in a Minute: Mathematical model – a brief and an accessible introduction to mathematical models and where they are used.
• Escape from Model Land: how mathematical models can lead us astray and what we can do about it – Erica's book
• Adventures in Model Land– the framework, developed by Chris, Erica and Jess, together with Liz Lewis, Rolf Hut and Sam Illingworth, for exploring mathematical models using table-top role-play games
• You can find some of the adventures in model land and other games that Jess took to the UK Games Expo in Birmingham

This podcast is part of our collaboration with JUNIPER, the Joint UNIversity Pandemic and Epidemic Response modelling consortium. JUNIPER comprises academics from the universities of Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol, Exeter, Oxford, Manchester, and Lancaster, who are using a range of mathematical and statistical techniques to address pressing questions about the control of COVID-19. You can see more content produced with JUNIPER here.