What events should an ambitious nation target as the "easiest" in which to win Olympic medals? How does Olympic success correlate with a nation's GNP? How does the location of the Olympics affect the chance of record breaking? How can simple statistics help us understand the likelihood of winning streaks and the chance that an innocent athlete will fail a drugs test?

John D. Barrow, mathematician, cosmologist, and best-selling author, will explore these question and more in a free public lecture at Gresham College in London tomorrow, 17th January 2012. It's part of a maths and sport series — see the Gresham College website for recordings of past maths and sport lectures and details about upcoming ones.

Tomorrow's talk is at 1pm at the Museum of London, London Wall, London EC2Y 5HN.

For more on mathematics and sport, have a look at the Plus sport package and at our sister site Maths and sport: Countdown to the games.

Tickets for Stephen Hawking's public birthday symposium this Sunday 8th of January have long been sold out, but you can join the fun by watching the live webcast here on Plus. It's for a general audience and the speakers are Martin Rees, Saul Perlmutter (winner of last year's Nobel Prize in Physics), Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking himself, who will be the final speaker of the day. The programme starts at 2pm — here's the time table. Tune in with Plus!

It's Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday this week and the University of Cambridge is celebrating with a star studded conference in his honour. If it's going to be as exciting as his 60th birthday, and it definitely looks like it will, then we're in for a treat! We'll be giving you articles and podcasts from the conference soon, but in the meantime, here's what we did for his 60th:

We're proud to present Professor Stephen Hawking's symposium address for his 60th birthday.

Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees gives Plus a whistlestop tour of some of the more extraordinary features of our cosmos, and explains how lucky we are that the universe is the way it is.

Nobel Prizewinning Physicist Professor Gerardus 't Hooft has always been fascinated by the mathematical mysteries of nature. He tells Plus about his early life, and what our Universe might really be like.

Will we ever be able to make computers that think and feel? If not, why not? And what has all this got to do with tiles? Plus talks to Sir Roger Penrose about all this and more.

What happens when one black hole meets another? Professor Kip Thorne shows us how to eavesdrop on these cosmic events by watching for telltale gravitational waves.

This is it! Merry Christmas to all you beautiful Plus readers and listeners from the Plus team! We hope you'll have a marvellously happy 2012!

And since Christmas is all about getting together with the folks, here's some family maths. You might not be able to choose them, but at least you can analyse them!

The maths of your next family reunion.
The festive season can only mean one thing... getting together with the family! Find out exactly what you share in common!

Natural born mathematicians
What's the best present for the newest arrival in the family? Perhaps a maths book?

Career interview: Biomechanical engineer
Coming to think of it, how did that newest arrival make it to its present form from a tiny little speck in its mother's womb? Find out in this interview.

The mathematical Bernoullis from Basle
Here's a look at the most prodigious mathematical family ever.

Party people puzzle
Is it possible to hold a Christmas party with family and friends at which no two people have the same number of friends as each other?

Back to the Plus Advent Calendar