• What's in a name?
• Disaster

New technology has provided us with some amazing images - satellite images, medical images, even images beamed back from Mars. Julian Stander tells us about the increasing role of statistics in interpreting them.

In his second article, David Henwood explains the role of mathematics in the design of Hi-Fi loudspeakers.

• The Dearing report
• Network capacity problem
• References

How do you choose a partner? Is it an irrational choice or is it made rationally, based on a mathematical model which analyses the best potential partner you are likely to meet?

Sir Walter Raleigh is perhaps best known for laying down his cloak in the mud for Queen Elizabeth I. But, he also started a mathematical quest which to this day remains unsolved.

The previous feature, "Mathematics, marriage and finding somewhere to eat" investigated the problem of finding the best potential partner from a fixed number of potential partners using a technique known as "optimal stopping". Inevitably, mathematicians and mathematical psychologists have constructed other models of the problem...

An account of how a prisoner of war's diary was recently decoded. Donald Hill wrote his diary in a numerical code, disguised as a set of mathematical tables, while in Hong Kong during and after the Japanese invasion of 1941.

Space probes, like NASA's recent Pathfinder mission to Mars, have radio transmitters of only a few watts, but have to transmit pictures and scientific data across hundreds of millions of miles without the information being completely swamped by noise. Read about how coding theory helps.

After 5,000 years, the game of Nine Men's Morris has succumbed to the power of modern computing, plus other recent mathematical discoveries in the world of games.