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.

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...

How do you choose a partner? Is it an irrational choice or is it made rationally, based on a mathematical model which analyses the best potential partner you are likely to meet?

• Allergic to mathematics?
• The inner beauty of pure mathematics
• A journey with mathematics
• Staff room

Can every even number greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes? It's one of the trickiest questions in maths.

Here is an experiment that you can easily do yourself to test Bernoulli's equation. There are also 2 questions and answers.

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.

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.

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.

The British General Election (May 1997) is an example of how simple mathematical ideas help in understanding information that involves numbers.

Welcome to the pilot issue!

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.