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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, listen to our podcasts and keep up-to-date by subscribing to Plus (on email, RSS, Facebook, iTunes or Twitter).


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Deciding who is to blame and who should pay for the financial crisis will be a hot topic at the G8 next week. Financial mathematics received a lot of bad press in the aftermath of the crunch and many believe that it was the popularity of mathematical models – often borrowed from physics — that put the financial system at risk. But now models borrowed from biology are helping us understand how this risk might be reduced.

Alan Turing was a mathematician and WWII code breaker who was convicted of homosexuality in the 1950s, chemically castrated as a result, died young in mysterious circumstances and still hasn't received all the recognition
he deserves. His life clearly makes great material for a play — but a musical? We talk to the directors and lead actor of The Universal Machine.

Ben Allanach is a theoretical physicist who has worked at CERN and is interested in something called supersymmetry, which predicts particles that could be dark matter and might be produced in the collisions at CERN. Watch Ben explain it all in this TEDx lecture.

A quick and easy way of adding using handshakes.

At 9:59 pm (UK time) on Friday, May 31, 2013, asteroid 1998 QE2 will sail serenely past Earth, getting no closer than about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the Moon, its closest approach for at least the next two centuries. And you can also catch a glimpse of the asteroid by the power of the internet.

When we arrived at the The New Diorama Theatre in London we didn't know what to expect. The universal machine is a musical about the life of mathematician and WWII code breaker Alan Turing. I have only seen one musical in my whole life, Cats, and it made me feel ill, so I really could not fathom how this was going to work. But as it turned out, we loved it.

The universal machine is a musical about Alan Turing, the mathematician and WWII code breaker who was convicted of homosexuality in the 1950s, chemically castrated as a result, and died young in mysterious circumstances. How do you turn such a story, and the maths in it, into a musical? We talked to writer and director David Byrne, Richard Delaney, who plays Turing, and Assistant Director Natalie York.