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    Looking for lost primes

    Prime numbers — we've often reported on them here on Plus, and in particular we've followed the progress of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. It's one of the longest-running grassroots distributed computing projects. Users donate their computing power to search for these special type of primes, and of course the goal is to find bigger and bigger ones. The latest prime to be discovered by the project is 257,885,161-1.

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    The making of the logarithm

    The natural logarithm is intimately related to the number e and that's how we learn about it at school. When it was first invented, though, people hadn't even heard of the number e and they weren't thinking about exponentiation either. How is that possible?
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    Establishing the philosophy of cosmology

    Do the dramatic advances in cosmology in the last century herald a new golden age of philosophy? A new collaborative project between cosmologists and philosophers is leading the way.
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    Mathematical man Friday

    Who knew that Robinson Crusoe contained a lost chapter about maths? Help us find the hidden mathematical references and win a prize!
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    Struggling with chance

    A 1 in 14 million chance to win the lottery, a 5% risk of cancer, a 50:50 chance of heads on a coin — we deal with probabilities all the time, but do they actually mean anything? We explore the philosophy of probability and ask whether the probabilities that come up in physics differ from those in every day life.
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    Physical finance

    The fact that a sizeable proportion of the financial workforce is made up of physicists is one of the industry's best-kept secrets. We talk to Laura Tadrowski, who has made the leap from physics to finance.
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    The life and numbers of Fibonacci

    The Fibonacci sequence – 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... – is one of the most famous pieces of mathematics. We see how these numbers appear in multiplying rabbits and bees, in the turns of sea shells and sunflower seeds, and how it all stemmed from a simple example in one of the most important books in Western mathematics.