Issue 47 of Plus is our biggest issue ever and a mathematical showcase! Not only are we bringing you the best young writing talent with the winners of the Plus new writers award, but we are overloaded with features about the ways maths influences and shapes our lives. We investigate the overlap between the arts and maths, find out why mathematicians are always portrayed as mad in the movies, and learn about the nature of infinity and of prime numbers. We also challenge 118118 with some mathematics, uncover the mathematics of surprise and respond to recent newspaper reports that maths is no longer relevant. There are also all our usual puzzle and teacher package.

And if you want to give you eyes a break, tune your ears into our podcast, with 3 new episodes out today.

More information:

• Competition winners

• The 2008 Plus new writers award has been run and won. This year's competition saw an exceptional standard of writing. The winning entries include biographies of two of the greatest mathematicians of the last 100 years, as well as articles on the mathematics of Google, ants that do maths, why we should (or should not) woo brunettes, the dangers of probing the infinite, and joining the mathematical mile-high club...

• Plus Podcast

• We are releasing 3 new podcast episodes in conjunction with the stories in this issue:

  1. Podcast 11, June 2008: Catching waves
     The magical Fourier transform;
  2. Podcast 10, June 2008: Maths in the Movies
     The maths film festival at the Edinburgh science festival;
  3. Plus Careers Podcast 2, June 2008: Exhibition Curator
     Exhibition design is not a career that the mathematically inclined tend to think about, let alone pursue.

  Happy reading from Plus!