Articles

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A tip of the hat: Celebrating an aperiodic monotile

Here's a look at the shape that can tile the plane in a non-repetitive pattern — and some of the creative uses people have found for it.
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Maths in a minute: Odds ratios

Is your new face cream associated to getting spots? The odds ratio can help figure it out.
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Maths in a minute: Gödel's incompleteness theorems

Find out about these important results that destroyed a mathematical dream.
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The holographic principle

Over the last few decades physicists have been developing a curious idea. Perhaps the world we inhabit is a hologram, lacking a crucial feature of the world as we perceive it: the third dimension.
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Maths in a minute: Mathematical models

A basic introduction to the most powerful tools in science and engineering.
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e for exponential

At the beginning of an epidemic the number of infected people grows exponentially. But why does the number e appear in descriptions of this growth?
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What is the generation time of a disease?

To work out how a disease will spread you need to know the time between infections.
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How can maths fight an epidemic?

How can we use mathematics to model the spread of a disease?
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The doubling time of a disease

The doubling time of a disease is the time it takes for the number of cases of the disease to double. How do you calculate it?
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The growth rate of a disease

What is the growth rate and what does it tell us about an epidemic?
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R and herd immunity

What is herd immunity and what does it have to do with a number called R?
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Maths in a minute: Algorithms

The word "algorithm" has probably got more usage over the last few years than it has in its entire history. But what exactly is an algorithm?