Alumni Newsletter

presentation on the business challenges that either Mercer
or Morgan Stanley will face over the next five years. The
presentations and prize-giving took place on Wednesday
16th March 2016, with all participants receiving certificates.
The six finalists were also awarded £20 Amazon vouchers.
2016 Interview Programme Head of School. winners announced
After deliberation by the judging panel, Molly Reeve (below
left with Professor Peter Duck), a second year Mathematics
and German student was chosen as the overall winner, with
Joseph Leach (below right), a first year MMath student being
awarded second place. Both Molly and Joseph were
awarded their winners' certificates by Professor Peter Duck,
During the summer holidays, Molly will travel to Morgan
Stanley’s offices in Canary Wharf, London for her work
shadowing experience, including a Manchester alumni networking
lunch. Joseph will also take up his prize of work
shadowing with Mercer at their Manchester base, as well as
a networking lunch.
The School of Mathematics congratulates all the participants
of this year’s Interview Programme.
Deep Space, Time, and Probability
By Peter Johnson
Imagine you are betting on some dice being rolled. The dice are fair, however, after a period of time, they are secretly replaced
by weighted dice. Clearly you need to detect this change very quickly and accurately, so you can call your opponent
a cheat or adjust your betting strategy. However, after how many unusual dice rolls would you decide the dice are surely
weighted?
Detecting changes in random processes such as this, as quickly and accurately as possible, is important for many scenarios.
Examples include: detecting a plane using radar; identifying nuclear material at ports; reacting to breakages in atomic
clocks on satellites or; determining when is the best time to buy/sell stocks and shares. Using advanced applied probability,
it is possible to provide an 'optimal' time to stop and
declare that a change has occurred (optimal in the sense
of after the change) with a fixed probability of error.
The previous best image of Pluto taken using the Hubble telescope and an image
from the New Horizons mission 2015.
At The University of Manchester, we have a strong
group in applied probability working on research which
looks at problems of this type. Most recently Prof. Goran
Peskir was involved in helping engineers from NASA
detect an unusual change on-board the New Horizons
space craft which was launched in 2006. One of the satellite’s
main aims was to take the stunning photographs
of Pluto which appeared in the news in late 2015.
The satellite has two on-board quartz clocks which are
relied upon to beam accurate data back to earth. Due to
the speed and gravitational effects of the satellite,
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