The UK National Lottery - a guide for beginnersIn the early days of the UK National Lottery, it was quite common to see newspaper articles that looked back on what numbers had recently been drawn, and attempted to identify certain numbers as "due" or "hot". Few such articles appear now, and John Haigh thinks that perhaps the publicity surrounding the lottery has enhanced the nation's numeracy.
101 uses of a quadratic equationIt isn't often that a mathematical equation makes the national press, far less popular radio, or most astonishingly of all, is the subject of a debate in the UK parliament. However, as Chris Budd and Chris Sangwin tell us, in 2003 the good old quadratic equation, which we all learned about in school, reached these dizzy pinnacles of fame.
Outer space: Wagons RollThe concept of a speed limit seems a simple one - until you think what can happen when a speed camera clocks a rotating wheel...
Beaglemania - The Beagle is missing in action, but it is inspiring a new generation of would-be astronauts.
Careers with Maths - Plus has been given a grant to produce posters based on our popular careers library.
Pools of bloodA biologist has developed a blood test for detecting a certain minor abnormality in infants. Obviously if you have blood samples from 100 children, you could find out which children are affected by running 100 separate tests. But mathematicians are never satisfied by the obvious answer. Keith Ball uses information theory to explain how to cut down the number of tests significantly, by
pooling samples of blood.
Practice makes perfectIn 1997 Garry Kasparov, then World Champion, lost an entire chess match to the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, and it is only a matter of time before the machines become absolutely unbeatable. But the human brain, as Lewis Dartnell explains, is still able to put up a good fight by exploiting computers' weaknesses.
Making the grade: Part IICalculus is a collection of tools, such as differentiation and integration, for solving problems in mathematics which involve "rates of change" and "areas". In the second of two articles aimed specially at students meeting calculus for the first time, Chris Sangwin tells us how to move on from first principles to differentiation as we know and love it!
The music of the primesFollowing on from his article 'The prime number lottery' in last issue of Plus, Marcus du Sautoy continues his exploration of the greatest unsolved problem of mathematics: The Riemann Hypothesis.
Outer space: Rugby and RelativityHuman beings are famously prone to error, and proof-readers are, after all, only human. But who picks up the errors a proof-reader misses? John D. Barrow challenges readers to estimate the errors that aren't found from the errors that are.
Games people playCombinatorial Game Theory is a powerful tool for analysing mathematical games. Lewis Dartnell explains how the technique can be used to analyse games such as Twentyone and Nim, and even some chess endgames.
