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What computers can't do

Mike Yates looks at the life and work of wartime code-breaker Alan Turing. Find out what types of numbers we can't count and why there are limits on what can be achieved with Turing machines.

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What a coincidence!

Coincidences are familiar to us all but what are the so-called laws of chance? From coin tossing to freak weather events, Geoffrey Grimmett explains how probability is at the heart of it all.
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Natural frequencies and music

In the first of two articles, David Henwood discusses the vibrations that can be harnessed by musical instrument makers.
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turbulence

Designing loudspeakers

In his second article, David Henwood explains the role of mathematics in the design of Hi-Fi loudspeakers.

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Image analysis - a modern application of mathematics

New technology has provided us with some amazing images - satellite images, medical images, even images beamed back from Mars. Julian Stander tells us about the increasing role of statistics in interpreting them.
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Editorial

  • The Dearing report
  • Network capacity problem
  • References
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Mathematical mysteries: Kepler's conjecture

Sir Walter Raleigh is perhaps best known for laying down his cloak in the mud for Queen Elizabeth I. But, he also started a mathematical quest which to this day remains unsolved.

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Coding theory: the first 50 years

Space probes, like NASA's recent Pathfinder mission to Mars, have radio transmitters of only a few watts, but have to transmit pictures and scientific data across hundreds of millions of miles without the information being completely swamped by noise. Read about how coding theory helps.
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Decoding a war time diary

An account of how a prisoner of war's diary was recently decoded. Donald Hill wrote his diary in a numerical code, disguised as a set of mathematical tables, while in Hong Kong during and after the Japanese invasion of 1941.
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Dynamic programming: an introduction

The previous feature, "Mathematics, marriage and finding somewhere to eat" investigated the problem of finding the best potential partner from a fixed number of potential partners using a technique known as "optimal stopping". Inevitably, mathematicians and mathematical psychologists have constructed other models of the problem...