Geometric hallucinations are very common: people get them after taking drugs, following sensory deprivation, or even after rubbing their eyes. What can they tell us about how our brain works?
In 2004 three physicists decided to dabble in a field they knew little about. Within weeks they had developed a new technique that transforms weeks' worth of computer calculations into something that could be done on a single page in an hour. It's used in particle accelerators such as the LHC at CERN.
The natural logarithm is intimately related to the number e and that's how we learn about it at school. When it was first invented, though, people hadn't even heard of the number e and they weren't thinking about exponentiation either. How is that possible?
Georgian school maths: bushels of corn, kilderkins of beer and feeding soldiers. All without algebra!
Do the dramatic advances in cosmology in the last century herald a new golden age of philosophy? A new collaborative project between cosmologists and philosophers is leading the way.
Who knew that Robinson Crusoe contained a lost chapter about maths? Help us find the hidden mathematical references and win a prize!
A 1 in 14 million chance to win the lottery, a 5% risk of cancer, a 50:50 chance of heads on a coin — we deal with probabilities all the time, but do they actually mean anything? We explore the philosophy of probability and ask whether the probabilities that come up in physics differ from those in every day life.