Article

Analemmatic sundials: How to build one and why they work

We've all seen a traditional sundial, where a triangular wedge is used to cast a shadow onto a marked-out dial - but did you know that there is another kind? In this article, Chris Sangwin and Chris Budd tell us about a different kind of sundial, the analemmatic design, where you can use your own shadow to tell the time.
Article

Mathematical mysteries: Right angle race

The German mathematician Adam Ries (1492-1559) was the author of the most successful textbook of commercial arithmetic of his day. The book, published in 1552, earned such a high reputation that the German phrase nach Adam Ries is used to this day to indicate a correct calculation.
News story

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.
Article

Codes, computers and trees

Underlying our vast global telecommunications networks are codes: formal schemes for representing information in machine-readable and transmissible formats. Kona Macphee examines the prefix property, one of the important features of a good code.
Article

Editorial

  • New Millennium, New Name and New Look
  • How to lie with statistics
  • World maths year 2000
  • Network capacity problem - issue 3 revisited
News story

Planets, planets everywhere

Up until the late 1990s, astronomers couldn't be certain that any planets existed outside our solar system. These days, not only are astronomers confident that planets are out there, but new ones are being discovered all the time.
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Maths Year 2000

Around the country, maths is set to have a high profile this year with the launch of a new initiative.
Article
torus

In space, do all roads lead to home?

Is the Universe finite, with an edge, or infinite, with no edges? Or is it even stranger: finite but with no edges? It sounds far-fetched but the mathematical theory of topology makes it possible, and nobody yet knows the truth. Janna Levin tells us more.

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Martian mayhem

In a major and expensive setback for NASA's Mars program, both the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander spacecraft appear to have been lost. Soberingly, while the fate of the Mars Polar Lander is unclear, it appears that the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost due to a simple mathematical error.