Article

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.
Article

Natural frequencies and music

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

Designing loudspeakers

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

Article

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
Article

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.

Article

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.
Article

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.
Article

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...