Articles

A bright ideaWhat do computers and light switches have in common? Yutaka Nishiyama illuminates the connection between light bulbs, logic and binary arithmetic.
How to measure a millionThe risks in Who wants to be a millionaire?
Life as we don't know itPhysicist and cosmologist Paul Davies has made an unusual move into the infant discipline of astrobiology. He tells Plus about his interest in the big questions: what is life, how would we recognise aliens - and are they all around us?
Editorial, mathematics education, mathematics in the media, public understanding of mathematics, adrian smith
  • Where is the next generation? - more bad news for maths education.
  • Can Plus cure crazy scientists? - the science stereotype persists.
Outer space: The rule of twoThe maths of infinite series
What's so special about special relativity?Most of us are aware that Einstein proved that everything was relative ... or something like that. But we go no further, believing that we aren't clever enough to understand what he did. Hardeep Aiden sets out to persuade readers that they too can understand an idea as elegantly simple as it was original.
Lagrange and the Interplanetary SuperhighwayIn the last issue Lewis Dartnell explained how chaos on the brain is not only unavoidable but also beneficial. Now he tells us why the same is true for our solar system and sends us on a journey that has been travelled by comets and spacecraft.
EditorialStirring the electoral soup
Outer space: The rule of twoInfinities are tricky things and have perplexed mathematicians and philosophers for thousands of years.
Chaos in the brainSaying that someone is a chaotic thinker might seem like an insult - but, according to Lewis Dartnell, it could be that the mathematical phenomenon of chaos is a crucial part of what makes our brains work.
Cracking codes, part IIIn the second of two articles, Artur Ekert visits the strange subatomic world and investigates the possibility of unbreakable quantum cryptography.