Articles

Bach and the musical torus

In a previous article we found a Möbius strip in Bach's music. This time it's a doughnut shape.

1012 and other such numbers

If you like playing with numbers, then this one's for you!

New windows on the Universe

Find out what gravitational waves will tell us about the Universe: from understanding its birth to figuring out whether black holes have hairs.

Listening for ripples in spacetime

Find out about the heroic effort that led to the detection of gravitational waves and the excitement of their discovery.

Maths in a minute: How does laser interferometry work?

How does LIGO detect gravitational waves? Here is a quick introduction.

Dropping Schrödinger's cat into a black hole

Since the detection of gravitational waves we know for sure that black holes do exist. To understand what really goes on inside them we need a new theory.

Maths in a minute: Gravitational waves

A quick introduction to one of the greatest discoveries of the century.

Maths in a minute: Black holes

A quick introduction to the monsters that lurk at the centre of each galaxy.

Loo-Q: Clearing aisles and relieving passengers

Here we present a worked example of a distributed system in action, to illustrate Leslie Lamport's rules of ordering history using logical clocks.

Clocks to the rescue!

Leslie Lamport explains how he used logical clocks to set history straight in distributed systems.

High fidelity

Is the Universe digital, just like the world of computers? Discuss!

Violating causality

Leslie Lamport explains how an understanding of special relativity helped him realise how to order events in computer science, and enabled the development of distributed computing.