George Watkins

I am a mathematician and education specialist based in London.

After spells in teaching, government, finance and academia I have carved out a niche in maths education. My work allows me to combine my love for maths with my desire to have a positive impact on the world.

The majority of my projects centre on the provision of opportunities for capable young mathematicians, encouraging their enthusiasm and supporting them in reaching their full potential.

I also give talks in schools, publish maths puzzles and use my background in AI to build EdTech products.

Speaking to young people about maths is one of my great joys in life. I loved the five years I spent as a classroom teacher; now, when I deliver talks, I understand what a privilege it is to be able to speak to students about maths, unconstrained by the requirements of the curriculum.

I have written and delivered talks on a range of topics including AI and Game Theory, plus my favourite, "Seeing Statistics", in which I present examples of distributions that we can observe in the physical world. I have also spoken in schools about my own personal story, sharing experiences and lessons from my own life.

If you would like to contact me about giving a talk, please get in touch.

I completed my PhD at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Juergen Branke and Giovanni Montana. My research was in the field of Artificial Intelligence, with a particular focus on Reinforcement Learning, exploring new methods for learning in environments with states that are represented as graphs.

My thesis was titled Generating heuristics for graph-based problems using reinforcement learning. At the time, integrating graph neural networks with reinforcement learning was a new idea. In my research I developed frameworks and algorithms that demonstrated how these methods could be combined to tackle challenging optimisation problems.

My academic webpage can be found here.