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Want facts and want them fast? Our Maths in a minute series explores key mathematical concepts in just a few words.
Generating electricity without the use of fossil fuels is not just an engineering and industrial challenge, it is also a huge mathematical challenge.
In this podcast author Coralie Colmez shares insights into her novel The irrational diary of Clara Valentine.
We talk to early career mathematicians who spent some of their summer holiday solving problems posed by industry — such as how to blend a perfect smoothie!
Don't like plant-based meat alternatives, but want to spare animals and the environment? There's hope on the horizon, aided by a good helping of maths.
Inverse problems are mathematical detective problems. They can help solve crimes, are used in medical imaging, and much more.
Game theory models are ubiquitous in economics, common in political science, and increasingly used in psychology and sociology; in evolutionary biology, they offer compelling explanations for competition in nature. But game theory has been only sporadically applied to the humanities; indeed, we almost never associate mathematical calculations of strategic choice with the worlds of literature, history, and philosophy. And yet, as Steven Brams shows, game theory can illuminate the rational choices made by characters in texts ranging from the Bible to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and can explicate strategic questions in law, history, and philosophy.
Much of Brams's analysis is based on the theory of moves (TOM), which is grounded in game theory, and which he develops gradually and applies systematically throughout. TOM illuminates the dynamics of player choices, including their misperceptions, deceptions, and uses of different kinds of power.
Brams examines such topics as the outcome and payoff matrix of Pascal's wager on the existence of God; the strategic games played by presidents and Supreme Court justices; and how information was slowly uncovered in the game played by Hamlet and Claudius. The reader gains not just new insights into the actions of certain literary and historical characters but also a larger strategic perspective on the choices that make us human.