Article

Editorial, Maths education

  • Wisdom from above - An intriguing debate in the House of Lords on standards in maths education
  • Readers' corner - How many computers does the world need?
Article
icon

Cracking codes

In the first of two articles, Artur Ekert takes a tour through the history of codes and the prospects for truly unbreakable quantum cryptography.

Article
icon

Exploring the Enigma

During the Second World War, the Allies' codebreakers worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the supposedly unbreakable Enigma code. Claire Ellis tells us about their heroic efforts, which historians believe shortened the war by two years.
Article

Tsunami

The tsunami of December 26th 2004 has focused the world's attention on this terrifying consequence of an underwater earthquake. Michael McIntyre explores the underlying wave mathematics.
Article

Ubiquitous octonions

Mathematician and physicist John Baez declares himself fascinated by exceptions in mathematics. This interest has led him to study the octonions, and, through them, to find out more about the origins of complex numbers and quaternions. In the second of two articles, he talks about the characters of the different dimensions, beauty and utility in mathematics, and just why he likes dimension 8 so much.
Article

Maths and art: the whistlestop tour

Many people find no beauty and pleasure in maths - but, as Lewis Dartnell explains, our brains have evolved to take pleasure in rhythm, structure and pattern. Since these topics are fundamentally mathematical, it should be no surprise that mathematical methods can illuminate our aesthetic sense.
Article
fly

They never saw it coming

Most of us have heard of "stealth" - a technology used by the military to disguise craft from enemy radar. But nature's stealth fighters are not so well known - creatures that use motion camouflaging to approach their prey undetected. Lewis Dartnell looks at the vector mathematics behind the phenomenon.