List by Author: Chris Budd

Everybody's talking about Big Data. But what exactly do they mean?

In 2012 the UK government launched a list of the Eight Great technologies of the future. Here's what they are and what role maths has to play in them.

How to add up quickly

The number pi can be expressed beautifully in terms of infinite sums. For practical purposes though, these sums are rather disappointing: they converge slowly, so you need to sum a large number of terms to get accurate estimates of pi. Here's a clever way to make them converge faster.

Eat, drink and be merry: making it go down well

This article is part of a series of two articles exploring two ways in which mathematics comes into food, and especially into food safety and health. In this article we will take a dive into the rather smelly business of digesting food, and how a crazy application of chaos theory shows the best way to digest a medicinal drug.

Eat, drink and be merry: making sure it's safe

This article is part of a two-part series exploring ways in which mathematics comes into food, and especially into food safety and health. In this part we'll look at how maths can tell us the safest way to cook food.

Crime fighting maths

Maths is not the first thing that springs to mind when you think about fighting crime. But a closer look reveals that it is behind many of the techniques that modern detectives rely on. Chris Budd investigates.

Finding order in chaos

All of science can be regarded as motivated by the search for rules behind the randomness of nature, and attempts to make prediction in the presence of uncertainty. Chris Budd describes the search for pattern and order in chaos.

How maths can make you rich and famous: Part II

One million dollars is waiting to be won by anyone who can solve one of the grand mathematical challenges of the 21st century. In the second of two articles, Chris Budd looks at the well-posedness of the Navier-Stokes equations.

How maths can make you rich and famous

One million dollars is waiting to be won by anyone who can solve one of the grand mathematical challenges of the 21st century. But be warned...these problems are hard. In the first of two articles, Chris Budd explains how to hit the bigtime.