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Clutching at random straws and untangling knotty DNA
Did aliens help prehistoric Britons found the ancient Woolworths civilisation? And what does tying your shoe laces have to do with DNA? Find out with this year's popular lectures organised by the London Mathematical Society. Matt Parker of Queen Mary, University of London, will explore how seemingly incredible results can actually be meaningless random patterns, and Dorothy Buck of Imperial College, London, will look at how mathematical knot theory helps to understand DNA.
Survival odds: are all soldiers equal? 
Being killed in a peacekeeping mission apparently depends on your nationality, at least if you're a soldier in the Spanish army. On the 1st of February 2010 the Colombian soldier John Felipe Romero serving in the Spanish army was killed in a terrorist attack in Afghanistan. It was then made public that so far 43% of the Spanish troops killed in attacks by local forces in Afghanistan and Lebanon have been foreigners. This is in striking contrast to the fact that foreign nationals make up only 7% of the Spanish army as a whole.
Random, but not by accident 
Researchers from the University of Maryland have devised a new kind of random number generator that is cryptographically secure, inherently private and — most importantly — certified random by the laws of physics. Randomness is important, particularly in the age of the Internet, because it guarantees security. Valuable data and messages can be encrypted using long strings of random numbers to act as "keys", which encode and decode the information. Randomness implies unpredictability, so if the key is truly random, it's next to impossible for an outsider to guess it.
Electoral impossibilities 
One advantage of the UK voting system is that nobody could possibly fail to understand how it works. However, the disadvantages are well-known. Differently sized constituencies mean that the party in government doesn't necessarily have the largest share of the vote. The first-past-the-post system turns the election into a two-horse race, which leaves swathes of the population un-represented, forces tactical voting, and turns election campaigns into mud-slinging contests.
There are many alternative voting systems, but is there a perfect one? The answer, in a mathematical sense, is no.
