Article
Lyapunov exponent

Extracting beauty from chaos

Images based on Lyapunov Exponent fractals are very striking. Andy Burbanks explains what Lyapunov Exponents are, what the much misunderstood phenomenon of chaos really is, and how you can iterate functions to produce marvellous images of chaos from simple mathematics.

Article
Mandelbrot set

Computing the Mandelbrot set

Almost everyone reading this article has no doubt encountered pictures from the Mandelbrot Set. Their appeal is not limited to the mathematician, and their breathtaking beauty has found its way onto posters, T-shirts and computers everywhere. Yet what is a fractal?

Article
alt

The origins of proof III: Proof and puzzles through the ages

For millennia, puzzles and paradoxes have forced mathematicians to continually rethink their ideas of what proofs actually are. Jon Walthoe explains the tricks involved and how great thinkers like Pythagoras, Newton and Gödel tackled the problems.
Article

Editorial

  • New in this issue
  • Ever-increasing standards: a problem of communication?
News story

Doing the twist

Perhaps the most sinister weather phenomenon in the world is the twister - that dark, dangerous funnel drooping from the clouds that weaves its way across the landscape, leaving a narrow trail of devastation in its wake.
News story

Jackson's fractals

Combining the computational powers of modern digital computers with the complex beauty of mathematical fractals has produced some entrancing artwork during the past two decades. Intriguingly, recent research at the University of New South Wales, Australia, has suggested that some works by the American artist Jackson Pollock also reflect a fractal structure.
News story

Oops!

Dr Yvan Dutil has been losing sleep lately. Why? Because he and his colleague Dr. Stéphane Dumas have proved to be only human.
News story

12:00 PMT?

Tax harmonisation, a common market, EU-wide laws: the trend is for ever-increasing standardisation across Europe. Ironically, there is currently a popular rebellion in France against one of the earliest pan-European standards, the Prime Meridian - the line of longitude from which all time zones are referenced.
News story

Maths on the brain

Human beings seem to have an inborn mathematical ability. Research has shown that even tiny babies seem to have a built-in awareness of numbers. But is this the only way our brains process mathematics?
Article

Mathematical mysteries: Foucault's pendulum and the eclipse

You may have seen Foucault's pendulum. There's one in the Science Museum in London (part of the National Museum of Science and Industry), and there are many more in various locations around the UK (for instance, in Glasgow) and the world (including one at the United Nations Headquarters and a famous example at Le Panthéon in Paris).
News story

A knotty sartorial question

Who says that academics don't have a sense of style? Two researchers from the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics have brought a whole new sartorial dimension to the daily ritual of putting on a tie.
News story

Spiralling stars

Using a telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, astronomers have discovered a new star where spun-off stellar material is being dragged into a spiralling tail.