Articles

  • article

    How do we hallucinate?

    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?
  • article

    Picture perfect

    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.
  • news
    icon

    Looking for lost primes

    Prime numbers — we've often reported on them here on Plus, and in particular we've followed the progress of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. It's one of the longest-running grassroots distributed computing projects. Users donate their computing power to search for these special type of primes, and of course the goal is to find bigger and bigger ones. The latest prime to be discovered by the project is 257,885,161-1.

    off
    Read more about...
    prime number
    GIMPS
    Mersenne prime
    Mersenne search
  • article
    napier

    The making of the logarithm

    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?
  • article

    Establishing the philosophy of cosmology

    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.
  • article

    Mathematical man Friday

    Who knew that Robinson Crusoe contained a lost chapter about maths? Help us find the hidden mathematical references and win a prize!
  • article

    Struggling with chance

    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.