Articles

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    Number crunching ants

    Liz Newton finds that having a small brain doesn't stop you doing great things.
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    Andrew Wiles

    Fermat's last theorem and Andrew Wiles

    Neil Pieprzak tells the fascinating story of Andrew Wiles who, with intense devotion and in secret, proved a deceptively simple-looking conjecture that had defeated mathematicians for almost 400 years.
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    Maths on a plane

    Phil Trinh discovers how maths helps solve the mysteries of flight and love.
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    Natural selection, maths and milk

    According to Darwin, natural selection is the driving force of evolution. It's a beautifully simple idea, but given the thousands of years that are involved, nobody has ever seen it in action. So how can we tell whether or not natural selection occurs and which of our traits are a result of it? In this article Charlotte Mulcare uses milk to show how maths and stats can provide genetic answers.
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    Editorial

    • The league table lottery
    • Plus and presidents
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    Reconstructing the tree of life

    Next year is a great one for biology. Not only will we celebrate 150 years since the publication of On the origin of species, but also 200 years since the birth of its author, Charles Darwin. At the heart of Darwin's theory of evolution lies a beautifully simple mathematical object: the evolutionary tree. In this article we look at how maths is used to reconstruct and understand it.

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    Maths and climate change: the melting Arctic

    The Arctic ice cap is melting fast and the consequences are grim. Mathematical modelling is key to predicting how much longer the ice will be around and assessing the impact of an ice free Arctic on the rest of the planet. Plus spoke to Peter Wadhams from the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge to get a glimpse of the group's work.