Plus.Maths.org
List by Author: Marianne Freiberger
Playing billiards on doughnuts 
The paths of billiard balls on a table can be long and complicated. To understand them mathematicians use a beautiful trick, turning tables into surfaces.
Life after the Higgs boson 
We might have found the Higgs boson, but the search for new physics at the LHC isn't over yet.
Chaos on the billiard table 
If you thought that billiards was a harmless game to play in the pub, think again. It's a breeding ground for chaos!
Polar power 
Like spirals and flowers? Then you'll love polar coordinates and the pretty pictures they allow you to draw!
Satanic science 
There's no doubt that information is power, but could it be converted into physical energy you could heat a room with or run a machine on? In the 19th century James Clerk Maxwell invented a hypothetical being — a "demon" — that seemed to be able to do just that. The problem was that the little devil blatantly contravened the laws of physics. What is Maxwell's demon and how was it resolved?
The Gömböc: The object that shouldn't exist 
A Gömböc is a strange thing. It wriggles and rolls around with an apparent will of its own. Until quite recently, no-one knew whether Gömböcs even existed. Even now, Gábor Domokos, one of their discoverers, reckons that in some sense they barely exists at all.
How do we hallucinate? 
Geometric hallucinations are very common: people get them after taking drugs, following sensory deprivation, or even after rubbing their eyes. What can they tell us about how our brain works?
Picture perfect 
In 2004 three physicists decided to dabble in a field they knew little about. Within weeks they had developed a new technique that transforms weeks' worth of computer calculations into something that could be done on a single page in an hour. It's used in particle accelerators such as the LHC at CERN.
The making of the logarithm 
The natural logarithm is intimately related to the number e and that's how we learn about it at school. When it was first invented, though, people hadn't even heard of the number e and they weren't thinking about exponentiation either. How is that possible?
Struggling with chance 
A 1 in 14 million chance to win the lottery, a 5% risk of cancer, a 50:50 chance of heads on a coin — we deal with probabilities all the time, but do they actually mean anything? We explore the philosophy of probability and ask whether the probabilities that come up in physics differ from those in every day life.