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Editorial

  • Allergic to mathematics?
  • The inner beauty of pure mathematics
  • A journey with mathematics
  • Staff room
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Call routing in telephone networks

Find out how modern telephone networks use mathematics to make it possible for a person to dial a friend in another country just as easily as if they were in the same street, or to read web pages that are on a computer in another continent.
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Agner Krarup Erlang (1878 - 1929)

The mathematics underlying today's complex telephone networks is still based on his work. Erlang was the first person to study the problem of telephone networks.
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What mathematicians get up to

After 5,000 years, the game of Nine Men's Morris has succumbed to the power of modern computing, plus other recent mathematical discoveries in the world of games.
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Are the polls right?

The British General Election (May 1997) is an example of how simple mathematical ideas help in understanding information that involves numbers.
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Daniel Bernoulli and the making of the fluid equation

Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782) discovered the relationship between the density of a fluid in a pipe, the speed it is travelling in the pipe and the pressure exerted by the fluid against the walls of the pipe. This is the story of what happened.
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Student interview - Mark Langley

Mark Langley, a student at Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge, tells us about his experiences doing A-level Mathematics.
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Understanding turbulence

Have you ever been in an aeroplane on a smooth flight when suddenly the plane bumps up and down for a short time as it goes through turbulent air? The study of turbulence is used to understand a range of phenomena from the simple squirting of a jet of water to the activity of the sun.