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Stirring the electoral soup

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

Keith Devlin is a well-known populariser of mathematics, author of many books and appearing regularly on American radio as "The Math Guy" In this latest offering he walks us through the astounding mathematical capabilities of both plants and animals, and on to the abstract abilities of humans.

The author of this book is Statistics Editor of the Financial Times, the only newspaper in Britain to employ someone with this job title. He is therefore uniquely well placed to write this fascinating and timely book, which sets out to provide a fact-based picture of the society we live in.

Anyone who has ever tried to analyse a game mathematically knows that things can get very complicated very quickly. In a game like chess, the number of possibilities for just the first three moves is already enormous, while, in poker, the roles played by chance, strategy and psychology seem to be mysteriously interlinked.

Shane Whelan likes a challenge, and his career path has been defined both by what he enjoyed and by a desire to keep learning. Becoming an actuary seemed like the perfect solution.

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.

In the second of two articles, Artur Ekert visits the strange subatomic world and investigates the possibility of unbreakable quantum cryptography.

Saying that someone is a chaotic thinker might seem like an insult - but, according to Lewis Dartnell, it could be that the mathematical phenomenon of chaos is a crucial part of what makes our brains work.