List by Author: marianne freiberger

The power of good questionsAsking good questions is an important part of doing maths. But what makes a good question?
The art gallery problemSometimes a piece of maths can be so neat and elegant, it makes you want to shout "eureka!" even if you haven't produced it yourself. One of our favourite examples is the art gallery problem.
Playing billiards on doughnutsThe 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 bosonWe 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 powerLike spirals and flowers? Then you'll love polar coordinates and the pretty pictures they allow you to draw!
Satanic scienceThere'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 existA 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 perfectIn 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.