Articles

Measuring catastrophic risk

Insurance companies offer protection against rare but catastrophic events like hurricanes or earthquakes. But how do they work out the financial risks associated to these disasters? Shane Latchman investigates.

Hidden dimensions

That geometry should be relevant to physics is no surprise — after all, space is the arena in which physics happens. What is surprising, though, is the extent to which the geometry of space actually determines physics and just how exotic the geometric structure of our Universe appears to be. Plus met up with mathematician Shing-Tung Yau to find out more.

Understanding Uncertainty: Pure randomness in art

This article is based on a talk I gave at the recent John Cage exhibition in the Kettles Yard gallery in Cambridge. Cage is perhaps best known for his avant-garde music, particularly his silent 1952 composition 4′33″ but also for his use of randomness in aleatory music. But Cage also used randomness in his art.

Florence Nightingale: The compassionate statistician

Florence Nightingale died a hundred years ago, in August 1910. She survives in our imaginations as an inspired nurse, who cared passionately for injured and dying soldiers during the Crimean war, and then radically reformed professional nursing as a result of the horrors she witnessed. But the "lady with the lamp" was also a pioneering and passionate statistician. She understood the influential role of statistics and used them to support her convictions. So to commemorate her on the centenary of her death, we'll have a look at her life and work as a statistician.

Flying home with quantum physics

Quantum mechanics is usually associated with weird and counterintuitve phenomena we can't observe in real life. But it turns out that quantum processes can occur in living organisms, too, and with very concrete consequences. Some species of birds use quantum mechanics to navigate. And as Plus found out at a recent conference, studying these little creatures' quantum compass may help us achieve the holy grail of computer science: building a quantum computer.

Visual curiosities and mathematical paradoxesWhen your eyes see a picture they send an image to your brain, which your brain then has to make sense of. But sometimes your brain gets it wrong. The result is an optical illusion. Similarly in logic, statements or figures can lead to contradictory conclusions, which we call paradoxes. This article looks at examples of geometric optical illusions and paradoxes and gives explanations of what's really going on.
Diophantine problems for garden gnomesMr and Mrs Magnus are a happy gnome couple. Unfortunately, foreseeing that they will be unable to keep up with their rising mortgage repayments, they've been forced to move into my back garden, where they've acquired a plot to build a house on. Gnome by-laws state that the total number of bricks used in any construction project must be 177 or planning permission will not be granted. How can they manage to stick to the rules?
Magnetic tangles

What happens when magnetic fields get tangled up in knots? This does happen in the Sun's atmosphere and mathematical models predict that once the magnetic field becomes tangled, it must retain some vestige of this complexity for a long time. This enables the storage of vast quantities of energy. In this article I will outline how the notion of magnetic topology helps us to understand the physical situation and draw such conclusions.

Curious dice

In this article we present a set of unusual dice and a two-player game in which you will always have the advantage. You can even teach your opponent how the game works, yet still win again! We'll also look at a new game for three players in which you can potentially beat both opponents — at the same time!

Making a racket: the science of tennisAs London is heading for the 2012 Olympics, it's not just athletes who are gearing up for action. Engineers, too, are working hard to produce the cutting-edge sporting equipment that guarantees record performances. If you're a tennis player, your most important piece of equipment is your racket. Over recent decades new materials have made tennis rackets ever bigger, lighter and more powerful. So what kind of science goes into designing new rackets?
Understanding uncertainty: how psychic was Paul?

England's performance in the World Cup last summer was thankfully overshadowed by the attention given to Paul the octopus, who was reported as making an unbroken series of correct predictions of match winners. David Spiegelhalter looks at Paul's performance in an attempt to answer the question that (briefly) gripped the world: was Paul psychic?

Wiring up brainsThe human brain faces a difficult trade-off. On the one hand it needs to be complex to ensure high performance, and on the other it needs to minimise "wiring cost" — the sum of the length of all the connections — because communication over distance takes a lot of energy. It's a problem well-known to computer scientists. And it seems that market driven human invention and natural selection have come up with similar solutions.