News

Grappling with chaos: The Abel Prize 2014
The ability to see order in chaos has won the mathematician Yakov G. Sinai the 2014 Abel Prize.
Cereal, sand and snow
As your cereal tumbled into your bowl this morning, were you daydreaming of sand dunes or snowy mountains? It wouldn't be surprising given the drab grey skies outside. But now you have another excuse: the cereal, sand and snow can all be examples of granular flows.
Cosmology breakthrough raises new questions
Yesterday cosmologists at the University of Cambridge delivered their verdict on a major breakthrough that rocked science this week: the announcement of the BICEP2 project of direct evidence for an inflationary theory of the Universe and the existence of gravity waves
A first swirling glimpse of inflation and gravity waves
Data from BICEP2 gathered in the South Pole reveals swirls in the CMB, the first image of gravitational waves and evidence for inflation.
Happy Pi Day!
We love every number equally but there is no denying the fame, ubiquity and usefulness of the number pi…
In the eye of the chicken
How chickens' eyes solve a subtle maths problem.
Happy International Women's Day 2014!
Tomorrow is International Women's Day, and it got us wondering… could this be the year we finally have a female winner of a Fields Medal?
The Pointless Universe: the fascination of string theory
Strings. Image credit: Johnny Settle (used under Creative Commons licence)
"[String theory] has led us in strange directions that we couldn't conceive of; it's revealed depths of mathematical structure that we couldn't have anticipated". Watch a video interview with Professor Michael Green, winner of the 2014 Fundamental Physics Prize.
El duende flamenco de Paco de Lucía
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The funeral of the great flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía this week reminded us of the mathematical and musical reasons we love flamenco.
Finding new worlds with statistics
A clever statistical technique helped the Kepler mission to find the huge haul of new planets it announced last week.
A matter of gravity
How to catch those elusive gravitational waves.
Bridges of Königsberg: The movie
We've read the book. We've bought the T-shirt. And now, finally, here it is: the movie of one of our favourite maths problems