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Advent calendar 2011

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This is it! Merry Christmas to all you beautiful Plus readers and listeners from the Plus team! We hope you'll have a marvellously happy 2012! And since Christmas is all about getting together with the folks, here's some family maths. You might not be able to choose them, but at least you can analyse them!

Oh! Look! The Higgs! If only we'd known it has been hiding behind this door all along.

Christmas is a time of mysteries so we thought we'll give you the chance to put your favourite mystery to the experts. Pick a question in the poll on the right — after Christmas we'll answer the most popular question in articles and podcasts based on interviews with physicists and mathematicians who really know about these things.

Apart from the Olympic Games and Alan Turing's centenary, 2012 will see another important event: the 15th birthday of Plus! To get into party mood, here are the 5 most popular Plus articles since current records began. A big thank you to the wonderful and generous people who have contributed these and all other Plus articles!

It's dark and grey this time of year, that's why we cheer ourselves up with lovely sparkly tinsel and colourful baubles. But if that isn't enough for you, here's another chance to bask in some glorious colour.

Everybody needs a little love on a cold, wet Monday morning, so here's some for you with lots of kisses from the Plus team!

2012 is Turing year, celebrating 100 years since the great mathematician and code breaker's birth. We'll be joining in the celebrations, but here's a little preview.

Plus has been working with lots of fascinating, funny and famous mathematicians over the years. And since we've started producing podcasts in 2007, we can bring their voices directly to your ears. From Roger Penrose and Paul Davies to the science writer Simon Singh and the engineers behind the London 2012 velodrome, find out what they have to say.

Having trouble wrapping your presents? Paper always ends up in a mess? Well, whatever geometrical shape you've accidentally produced, we bet it's not as wonderful as these favourites.

Snow flakes, ice crystals, beautiful round baubles — Christmas is the time of symmetry, so here's a few articles to celebrate it!

Maths is a creation of our brains, so how come it describes the world around us so amazingly well? How is it that ideas from pure maths suddenly find real-world applications decades or even centuries after their discovery? Here are some articles exploring the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.