Arts & Entertainment

Plus bumped into an old friend at the International Congress of Mathematicians this year: Keith Mansfield is the author of the Johnny Mackintosh series and commissioning editor for mathematics at Oxford University Press at the same time. In this interview he tells us how his he's built a career around his two talents, writing and maths.

Sandy Black, Professor of Fashion and Textile Design, has combined her love of art and design with her love of mathematics in her career as a knitwear designer. Sandy talks to Plus about the mathematics in fashion, knitting, and how science and fashion could make the world a better place.

Alexis Wajsbrot is a visual effects specialist who has worked on a number of high-profile films including Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, and also on some of those visually stunning commercials you see while waiting for your film to start. His speciality is anything that behaves like a fluid: water, smoke, fire, even fur or cloth. Plus went to see him to find out more.

Victoria Gould has always known she would be an actor, and went straight from studying arts at school to running her own theatre company. But she eventually had to come clean about her guilty secret - she loves maths - and has since managed to combine a career as a research mathematician and teacher with a successful acting career on television and in theatre. She tells Plus why she needs to use both sides of her brain.

Exhibition design is not a career that the mathematically inclined tend to think about, let alone pursue. Barry Phipps is the first interdisciplinary fellow with the Kettle's Yard gallery in Cambridge. His remit is to develop projects of an interdisciplinary nature — "to find the common ground between things." Whilst most people think that art and science are two completely separate non-overlapping areas of human endeavour, Phipps does not see it this way.

Two designers tell us how they took the long way round to design, and how the maths and science they took in on the way helps them with their work today.

Teaching a machine to understand music is an incredibly difficult task, which uses all the mathematical power of digital signal processing. But teaching a machine to compose music is quite another matter, and the wonderful world of mathematical patterns proves to be a gold mine. Nick Collins talks to Plus about his artificial musician.

Francesca Harris has always known she wanted to work in the music or film industry, and she has found that her maths skills have stood her in good stead as she works her way up.

In the real world, balls bounce and water splashes because of the laws of physics. In computer games, a physics engine ensures the virtual world behaves realistically. Mathematician and computer programmer Nick Gray tells us about playing God in a virtual world.

Andrew Wensley works at Eidos Interactive, the company who publish the mega-successful computer game Tomb Raider, featuring 90s icon Lara Croft. Andrew is a long-term computer game fan with an academic background in maths. PASS Maths caught up with him at Eidos's Wimbledon offices.