Tope Omitola looks back at the tragically short but inspiringly productive life of a true original: Evariste Galois.

According to Shakespeare, music is the food of love. But Jeffrey Rosenthal follows Galileo's observation that the entire universe is written in the language of mathematics - and that includes music.

In the first of two articles, Artur Ekert takes a tour through the history of codes and the prospects for truly unbreakable quantum cryptography.

During the Second World War, the Allies' codebreakers worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the supposedly unbreakable Enigma code. Claire Ellis tells us about their heroic efforts, which historians believe shortened the war by two years.

The tsunami of December 26th 2004 has focused the world's attention on this terrifying consequence of an underwater earthquake. Michael McIntyre explores the underlying wave mathematics.

Most of us have heard of "stealth" - a technology used by the military to disguise craft from enemy radar. But nature's stealth fighters are not so well known - creatures that use motion camouflaging to approach their prey undetected. Lewis Dartnell looks at the vector mathematics behind the phenomenon.

Did you know that you can't average averages? Or that Paris is rainier than London ... but it rains more in London than in Paris? Andrew Stickland explores the dangers that face the unwary when using a single number to summarise complex data.