News

Plus Advent Calendar Door #9: Numbers, toys and music

Meet one of our favourite mathematicians: Manjul Bhargava!

Plus Advent Calendar Door #8: The Königsberg movie

One of our favourite maths problems in movie form.

Plus Advent Calendar Door #7: A gaping hole

Can you cut up an old playing card to make a hole big enough to walk through?

Plus Advent Calendar Door #6: Guarding a gallery

How many guards to you need to supervise an art gallery?

Plus Advent Calendar Door #5: Got it!

Here's a number game with a clever strategy.

Plus Advent Calendar Door #3: Throwing shapes

If you want to draw a rhombus on dotty paper, can you start with any two dots?

Plus Advent Calendar Door #4: Origami fractions

How to fold exact fractions without guessing or fiddling.

Plus Advent Calendar Door #2: Shake to solve

How shaking hands with people in two different ways leads to a mathematical proof.

Plus Advent Calendar Door #1: Feeding the meter

Find out how an annoying parking metre can get your creative juices flowing!

Playing with numbers

Here's a game: pick a positive natural number and if yours is the smallest number no one else has picked, you win. What's the best strategy?

A new particle for Christmas?

A bump in the data from the LHC promises exciting news.

Middle class problems

A famous question involving networks appears to have come closer to an answer.

  • Want facts and want them fast? Our Maths in a minute series explores key mathematical concepts in just a few words.

  • What do chocolate and mayonnaise have in common? It's maths! Find out how in this podcast featuring engineer Valerie Pinfield.

  • Is it possible to write unique music with the limited quantity of notes and chords available? We ask musician Oli Freke!

  • How can maths help to understand the Southern Ocean, a vital component of the Earth's climate system?

  • Was the mathematical modelling projecting the course of the pandemic too pessimistic, or were the projections justified? Matt Keeling tells our colleagues from SBIDER about the COVID models that fed into public policy.

  • PhD student Daniel Kreuter tells us about his work on the BloodCounts! project, which uses maths to make optimal use of the billions of blood tests performed every year around the globe.