Articles

Moduli spaces: Introducing Riemann surfaces

How many different surfaces are there? The question seems impossible to answer, but mathematicians have a way of dealing with the multitude. Follow us on a journey into the world of moduli spaces.

Beating bird flu with maths

With bird flu spreading through cattle herds in the US and infecting humans, the diseases poses a severe threat to wild life, poultry and also people. What can mathematical modelling do to help?

Maths in a Minute: Group actions

What exactly do we mean when we say group theory is the study of symmetry? Group actions make precise what it means for a group to act by symmetries on an object.

How to (im)prove mathematics

Find out how a story starting with the simple notion of counting ends in a revolutionary new way of doing maths that uses computers to harness the power of human collaboration!

The beautiful game (theory) of why penalty takers ignore statistics

Why do penalty takers not heed the advice of statisticians? We find out with a little game theory.

Relevelling the playing field: Football sweepstakes revisited

Make your sweepstake for the Euros fairer and more exciting!

Maths in a minute: Partition functions

How many ways can you write a number as the sum of smaller numbers?  

Differential privacy: Keeping your data safe

The age of Big Data poses a risk to our privacy as even anonymised data can sometimes be linked to individuals. Differential privacy provides a way of protecting sensitive information even when some of it is made public.

Maths in a minute: Stochastic gradient descent

How does artificial intelligence manage to produce reliable outputs? Stochastic gradient descent has the answer!

Keeping your data safe in the face of AI

The advent of artificial intelligence poses new threats to the privacy of our personal data.  We explore the challenges and a way to address them.

Generative AI: Examples of the future?

Here's a tour of some of the interesting things generative AI has achieved recently — from Hollywood to advertising!

AI and GoPro physics

Will AI one day be able to spot the equation that describes a physical process just by looking at a video of it?