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.

Infinities are tricky things and have perplexed mathematicians and philosophers for thousands of 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.

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.

Mathematician and physicist John Baez declares himself fascinated by exceptions in mathematics. This interest has led him to study the octonions, and, through them, to find out more about the origins of complex numbers and quaternions. In the second of two articles, he talks about the characters of the different dimensions, beauty and utility in mathematics, and just why he likes dimension 8 so much.