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Mathematical mysteries: The Solitaire Advance

Solitaire is a game played with pegs in a rectangular grid. A peg may jump horizontally or vertically, but not diagonally, over a peg in an adjacent square into a vacant square immediately beyond. The peg which was jumped over is then removed.
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Millennial wobbles

The Millennium Bridge across the Thames opened in June 2000 and was subsequently closed two days later because of the now-famous "wobbles". Given that, at any instant, two thousand people were suspended above a very dangerous river, this presented a serious problem.
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Death and statistics

Actuarial science began as the place where two branches of mathematics meet: compound interest and observed mortality statistics. Financial planning for the future is therefore rooted firmly in the past. John Webb takes us through some of the mathematics involved, introducing us to some of the colourful characters who led the way.
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Fishy business

'Of the myriad strategems I employ to avoid useful work, the one I most enjoy is to envision how scientists of earlier eras would have made use of modern computers.' John L. Casti tells us how today's mathematicians are using computers to carry on the work of turn-of-the-century polymath d'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who showed how mathematical functions could be applied to the shape of one organism to continuously transform it into other, physically similar organisms.

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Faster than light

Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton have carried out an experiment in which a pulse of light appeared to emerge from a cloud of gas before it even entered.
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barcode with take a break written above

Take a break

There are many errors that can occur when numbers are written, printed or transferred in any manner. Luckily, there are schemes in place to detect, and in some cases even correct, such errors almost immediately. Emily Dixon takes a break and discovers that codes are not just for sleuths.

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Lensing helps see in the dark

Earlier this year, a group of scientists at Bell Labs announced that they had succeeded in observing the effects of "dark matter" - invisible matter that can be detected only by its gravitational effects.
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In perfect harmony

The harmonic series is far less widely known than the arithmetic and geometric series. However, it is linked to a good deal of fascinating mathematics, some challenging Olympiad problems, several surprising applications, and even a famous unsolved problem. John Webb applies some divergent thinking, taking in the weather, traffic flow and card shuffling along the way.
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Worldly wobbles

More than a century ago, an American astronomer named Seth Carlo Chandler discovered that, as the earth spun on its axis, it also wobbled. This wobble, now known as the Chandler wobble in honour of its discoverer, didn't disappear over time, as would have been expected if no further force reactivated it. The source of the continuing activating force has remained a mystery ever since - until now.
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Old problem, new spin

Have you ever noticed what happens when you spin a coin on a table? As the coin starts to fall over and roll on its edge, its spin gets faster and faster until it suddenly stops altogether.
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Prehistoric printer

More than a century after the death of its inventor, the world's first computer printer has finally been constructed at the Science Museum in London.
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Gold for Goldbach

In 1998, Goldbach's Conjecture was shown by computer to be true for even numbers up to 400,000,000,000,000. In addition, some progress has been made towards formally proving the conjecture. As of this year, mathematicians with Goldbach fever have some extra incentive for their labours.