What would you think if the nice café latte in your cup suddenly separated itself out into one half containing just milk and the other containing just coffee? Probably that you, or the world, have just gone crazy. There is, perhaps, a theoretical chance that after stirring the coffee all the swirling atoms in your cup just happen to find themselves in the right place for this to occur, but this chance is astronomically small.

The work of Fields Medallist Stanislav Smirnov will take mathematics and physics into a new phase with his mathematical proof of the understanding of phase transitions.

Journey to the frontiers of maths with Plus as we cover the International Congress of Mathematics in Hyderabad, India

The work of Fields Medallist Stanislav Smirnov will take mathematics and physics into a new phase with his mathematical proof of the understanding of phase transitions.

What would you think if the nice café latte in your cup suddenly separated itself out into one half containing just milk and the other containing just coffee? Probably that you, or the world, have just gone crazy. There is, perhaps, a theoretical chance that after stirring the coffee all the swirling atoms in your cup just happen to find themselves in the right place for this to occur, but this chance is astronomically small.

A very tired Marianne and Rachel discuss the atmosphere at the first day of the ICM when the Fields medals were awarded...

Eron Lindenstrauss got the Fields Medal for developing tools in the area of dynamical systems and using them to crack hard problems in the seemingly unrelated area of number theory.

Results in mathematics come in several flavours — theorems are the big important results, conjectures will be important results one day when they are proved, and lemmas are small results that are just stepping stones on the way to the big stuff. Right? Then why has the Fields medal just been awarded to Ngô Bào Châu for his proof of a lemma?

Results in mathematics come in several flavours — theorems are the big important results, conjectures will be important results one day when they are proved, and lemmas are small results that are just stepping stones on the way to the big stuff. Right? Then why has the Fields medal just been awarded to Ngô Bào Châu for his proof of a lemma?

Eron Lindenstrauss got the Fields Medal for developing tools in the area of dynamical systems and using them to crack hard problems in the seemingly unrelated area of number theory.

We talk to delegates of the International Conference of Women Mathematicians, taking place in Hyderabad, India, about the challenges faced by female mathematicians around the world.

To kick off our ICM adventure, Plus attended the International Conference of Women Mathematicians, which started yesterday in Hyderabad. Women from around the world gathered to present their mathematical work to each other, but mostly to network and exchange experiences. It was great talking to women whose experience as professional mathematicians is quite different from what we're used to in Europe.