 Plus magazine opens a door to the world of maths, with all its beauty and applications, by providing articles from the top mathematicians and science writers on topics as diverse as art, medicine, cosmology and sport. You can read the latest mathematical news on the site every week, browse our blog, listen to our podcasts and keep up-to-date by subscribing to Plus (on email, RSS, Facebook, iTunes or Twitter). |
Does it pay to be nice? Yes, it does. And we're not just talking about that warm fuzzy feeling inside, it pays in evolutionary terms of genetic success too. We talk to Martin Nowak about how the mathematics of evolution prove that being nice is unavoidable. |
A recent study from Harvard reported that eating red meat is associated with a 13% increased risk of death. But what does this mean? Surely our risk of death is already 100%, and a risk of 113% does not seem very sensible? To really interpret this number we need to use some maths. |
The holy grail for 21st century physics is to produce a unified theory of everything that can describe the world at every level, from the tiniest particles to the largest galaxies. Currently the strongest contender for such a theory is something called M-theory. So what is this supposed mother of all theories all about? |
Why are we so clever? In evolutionary terms this isn't obvious:
evolution tends to favour cheap solutions and the human brain is
expensive. It consumes about 20% of our body's energy budget yet it only makes up 2% of our body
mass. So why did it make evolutionary sense for us
humans to develop powerful brains? Game theory provides a possible answer.
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This month 70 teenage girls from nineteen countries including Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia and Finland came to the University of Cambridge to participate in the inaugural European Girls' Mathematical Olympiad (EGMO). |
This year's Abel Prize goes to Endre Szemerédi for his
"fundamental contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical
computer science."
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Today sees the launch of The Aperiodical, a new maths magazine/blog aimed at people interested in mathematics who want to read stuff. Aperiodical will post news stories related to maths, opinion pieces, maths videos, feature articles, as well as blog posts. It will also publish accounts of monthly MathsJams and host the Carnival of Mathematics, a monthly blogging carnival. |
Imaginary is an interactive mathematics exhibition that inspires the imagination with beautiful images. And what is more exciting it allows anyone to step into the world of maths and play with beautiful mathematical surfaces, symmetry and much more. We went along to the Imaginary Barcelona conference, which brought together people involved in the original exhibition in Germany and its recent successful run throughout Spain. |
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If you've never heard of cubic Hamiltonian graphs before then take a look at Christopher Manning's wonderful cubic Hamiltonian graph builder. No, really, do! We too had never heard of them and now we think they are the bee's knees! |
This podcast comes to you from a conference on the nature of time. We talk to philosophers of physics Jeremy Butterfield and David Wallace, as well as the eminent Roger Penrose about the puzzle time poses to physicists and what it has to do with the Big Bang and the second law of thermodynamics. |
Sometimes it doesn't feel like the world is a very nice place. The news is filled with war, political conflict, crime – it seems we just can't get along. So it is very cheering indeed to read a book dedicated entirely to convincing you that we are actually very helpful to one another and that the whole world as we know it is only possible thanks to cooperation. And surprisingly the authors don't use psychology or sociology to make their argument – they use maths. |
