Date: Tuesday 20 November 2012, 6.30 pm

We're very excited to be hosting the UK premiere of acclaimed indie film Travelling Salesman, a mathematical thriller imagining the consequences of solving the P vs NP problem.

Travelling Salesman is an intellectual thriller set in a fictional reality where four brilliant mathematicians solve the P vs NP problem, one of the hardest open problems in maths with profound implications for computer science and cryptography. Offered $10 million dollars by the US government for exclusive access to the solution, they must grapple with the practical and moral repercussions of discovering a proof that P = NP. (Find out more about the P vs NP problem here.)

This is the first time that Travelling Salesman has been shown in the UK. The screening will be prefaced by a short introductory talk by Professor Jonathan Oppenheim (UCL) and will be followed by a live Q&A session with the writer/director, Timothy Lanzone.

Entry is by ticket only (£7.50 each - please note the event is now sold out). The event will start at 6.30 pm, and should finish by 8.30/8.45pm.

See the official Travelling Salesman website.

"It is not often that espionage thrillers feature a round of peer review, but this early scene is a natural fit for Travelling Salesman, a film based on the premise that the biggest unsolved problem in computer science has been cracked. ... P = NP ... is a great premise that writers Andy and Timothy Lanzone use to explore the theme of scientific hubris. Travelling Salesman’s mathematicians are all too aware of what their work will do to the world, and watching them argue how to handle the consequences offers a thriller far more cerebral than most." New Scientist

Today is Ada Lovelace Day celebrating the work of women in mathematics, science, technology and engineering. For this year's celebrations we bring you a selection of our favourite female interviewees from the last 15 years. The interviews are part of our careers library, a collection of in-depth interviews with people who use maths in their jobs every day. To find our more about the pioneering work of Ada Lovelace herself read our article Ada Lovelace - visions of today. You can also check out last year's Ada Lovelace Day blog for a selection of Plus articles by and about women mathematicians.

Career interview: President of the European Mathematical Society — What's it like being a research mathematician and figurehead of Europe's representative body for mathematics? Find out in our interview with Marta Sanz-Solé.

Career interview: Actor and mathematician — Victoria Gould has always known she would be an actor, and went straight from studying arts at school to running her own theatre company. But she eventually had to come clean about her guilty secret - she loves maths - and has since managed to combine a career as a research mathematician and teacher with a successful acting career on television and in theatre. She tells Plus why she needs to use both sides of her brain.

Career interview: Cost engineer — Heather MacKinlay's work as an engineer has taken her from the civility of Surrey to the wild west of Australian mining towns and multibillion pound projects in the Algerian desert. And along the way she has also become a successful painter. Heather tells Plus that engineering and painting are just different ways of looking at the world, and how her work as a cost engineer is all about understanding the big picture.

Career interview: Brazil correspondent, The Economist — Helen Joyce is a former editor of Plus magazine who now works as a journalist for The Economist. In August she's off to Brazil to be the paper's Brazil Bureau Chief. In between packing and learning Portuguese she has found time to tell Plus all about her varied career and the role maths has played in it.

Career interview: Fashion designer — Sandy Black, Professor of Fashion and Textile Design, has combined her love of art and design with her love of mathematics in her career as a knitwear designer. Sandy talks to Plus about the mathematics in fashion, knitting, and how science and fashion could make the world a better place.

Career interview: Government statistician — Emily Poskett works as a government statistician for the Department for International Development. With lots of travel and the opportunity to make a real difference in poorer countries, her job is far more than just number crunching.

The first ever National Biology Week is happening between October 13th and 19th 2012. It's organised by the Society of Biology and there'll be events around the country giving everyone the chance to learn about the second-most fascinating science (if you count maths as a science). But if you'd rather stay in and cuddle up with your laptop you can read about the many overlaps between maths and biology here on Plus. They not only drive biology but also pose new challenges for maths. Here are some of our favourite maths and biology articles (and there's more in our project Do you know what's good for you: Mathematics and the biomedical sciences).

Biology's next microscope, mathematics' next physics — It is thought that the next great advances in biology and medicine will be discovered with mathematics. As biology stands on the brink of becoming a theoretical science this article asks if there is more to this collaboration than maths acting as biology's newest microscope.

How the leopard got its spots — How does the uniform ball of cells that make up an embryo differentiate to create the dramatic patterns of a zebra or leopard? How come there are spotty animals with stripy tails, but no stripy animals with spotty tails? This article solves these, and other, puzzles of animal patterning.

Reconstructing the tree of life — At the heart of Darwin's theory of evolution lies a beautifully simple mathematical object: the evolutionary tree. In this article we look at how maths is used to reconstruct and understand it.

Finding your way home without knowing where you are — When insects go foraging, they zoom off from their nest in complex zig-zag paths. How do they manage to find their way back home? And how do they manage to do so along a straight path?

If you're a teacher looking for hands-on activities on maths and biology, try the Maths and our Health and Disease Dynamics schools packs from our sister site Motivate and the stemNRICH Living World collection from our sister site NRICH.

Good news! The first episode of a new maths podcast, Relatively Prime, came out this week and it's a good 'un. Host Samuel Hansen has taken the plunge by interviewing our favourite statistician, David Spiegelhalter, and a host of others to explore some fascinating mathematical tools: game theory, risk and relief geometry.

There'll be a new episode every monday for the next seven weeks, so stay tuned to the website, or subscribe using RSS or iTunes.