List by Author: Chris Budd

Eight great reasons to do maths

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.