If I tell you something you already know, then that's not very informative. So perhaps information should be measured in terms of unexpectedness, or surprise? In the 1940s Clause Shannon put this idea to use in one of the greatest scientific works of the century.

There are many ways of saying the same thing — you can use many words, or few. Perhaps information should be measured in terms of the shortest way of expressing it? In the 1960s this idea led to a measure of information called Kolmogorov complexity.

When you transmit information long-distance there is always a chance that some of it gets mangled and arrives at the other end corrupted. Luckily, there are clever ways of encoding information which ensure a tiny error rate, even when your communication channel is prone to errors.

Computers represent information using bits — that's 0s and 1s. It turns out that Claude Shannon's entropy, a measure of information invented long before computers became mainstream, measures the minimal number of bits you need to encode a piece of information.

An idea called Occam's razor states that the simplest answer is always the best. But is this really true? Computer scientist Noson Yanofsky is trying to find out, applying Kolmogorov complexity to a branch of mathematics known as category theory.

Not just the ingredients for a fairy tale...

In the TV game show Two Tribes teams can have unequal sizes. Is that fair?

Folding a piece of paper in half might be easy, but what about into thirds, fifths, or thirteenths? Here is a simple and exact way for fold any fraction, all thanks to the maths of triangles.

Why the humble average can be grossly misleading.

How to approximate the English language using maths.

Take a trip into the never-ending.

Can a mathematical model of zombies' movements allow the human race to survive impending doom?