"Imagine the scene of a violent murder where the victim has been bludgeoned to death."

This isn't the kind of sentence we were expecting to deal with when we agreed to help edit a book to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA). But we did. The book contains fifty articles about maths in all its shapes and guises — the gruelling sentence comes from one that explores how analysing the shape of blood stains can tell you how someone was killed.

It's not all that violent though: there are articles about champagne, Sherlock Holmes, space travel, gambling, sports, and much more besides, written by some of the best authors in maths and science. The foreword is by Dara Ó Briain and if you get tired of reading, you can look at the selection of fifty beautiful mathematical images that adorn the book. We have featured some of them as our images of the week.

Happy birthday IMA!

This image by Tim Jones, showing the ceiling of the Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona, is one of the images featured in the book.

Return to the Plus Advent Calendar