Chalkdust dissertation prize winner 2024

Chalkdust and Molly Ireland

17 March 2025

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Last summer we launched our first ever dissertation prize. Final-year students were encouraged to write up a summary of their dissertation and why they thought it was interesting and fun. The winner was offered a feature on the website and to have their article published in the magazine, with a stylish T-shirt thrown in too. Oh, and there’s also infinite bragging rights.

After reading through many fantastic submissions, Molly Ireland won with her article, Winning Wythoff’s game. It details exactly how to win a variation of chess which is guaranteed to both annoy and impress your friends.

Molly is a student at Durham University currently studying for a master’s in mathematics, but submitted her dissertation as part of her undergraduate degree also at Durham. Her favourite areas of maths are mathematical biology and statistical modelling in general, and is “especially enjoying uncertainty quantification”. If Molly’s not studying then she can definitely be found either working on a puzzle, a crochet project, or ballroom dancing.

When asked about her favourite thing in maths, she immediately came back with “Fractals! I could look at them for hours; they are just gorgeous. I also find the occurrence of Fibonacci numbers in nature fascinating and was happily surprised to come across them in the context of Wythoff’s game”.

Chalkdust and the future

“My favourite thing about Chalkdust is how it showcases the joy of maths,” Molly recounts. She learnt about the magazine from seeing all of the copies spread around her maths department. “I always feel inspired by the colourful diagrams and can feel the enthusiasm in every page”. It’s good to know that Scroggs’ hard Tikz work and Clare’s Cosmo-ification does not go unnoticed.

We asked Molly about the article submission in general and if she had any advice for undergraduates who might want to submit articles, both for fun and for possible future prizes. Her initial advice was to find a hook that will interest readers from the get-go: “as my dissertation focused on impartial games, I picked one that I would be able to describe quickly enough in the feature, so that readers would be able to play after reading”. That way, Molly felt there would be something people can take away from the article and enjoy the maths with others. “Being able to work with the editors afterwards was great and I learnt a lot from the process, shout out to Adam for being awesome”.

Her future goals in life include working in biological modelling, “be that environmental or epidemiological”. This would be an example of using the mathematics one learns at university to gain a better understanding of the world around us—a dream shared by many an undergraduate student. “It would be awesome to be able to use [mathematics] to make impactful decisions based off real-world data”.

We are thankful that Molly took the time to share her experience with us as our first ever prize-winner. You can read her article here and let her know what your friends think of the game!