Articles

Maths in a minute: The graph isomorphism problem

How fast can you tell whether two networks are the same?

Spontaneous spirals

Simple mathematical rules can make for some interesting psychedelic science.

Simone Biles: Defying the laws of physics?

Simone Biles stunned audiences at the 2016 Olympics with a move that appeared to defy gravity. Did it really? Two sports scientists explain the physics of the Biles.

Maths in a minute: The catenary

Chains, arches and Wembley Stadium.

Andrew Wiles: what does it feel like to do maths?

We were very excited to meet Andrew Wiles this summer! In this interview and videos he tells us what it was like to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, and what it feels like to do maths.

Maths in a minute: Fourier series

How the heat equation inspired the maths that powers the entertainment industry.

Bach and the musical Möbius strip

Discover (and listen to) the Möbius strip that's hidden within one of Bach's famous canons.

The shape of things to come: part i

This year's Nobel Prize for Physics brings together the physics of materials with one of our favourite areas of maths – topology.

Watching the cosmos

When it comes to the entire cosmos, we humans are incredibly small and insignificant. But that's precisely why we need to take ourselves into account when thinking about the Universe. Find out why.

Watch and learn

A brief introduction to the strange theory of quantum mechanics and how it appears to afford a special role to observers.

Maths in a minute: Maths and navigation

How the need to locate your location at sea led to some interesting mathematics.

Taming big data

A new institute on the maths of information has just been launched at the Faculty of Mathematics in Cambridge.