chaos

Artur Avila is being honoured for "formidable technical power, the ingenuity and tenacity of a master problem-solver, and an unerring sense for deep and
significant questions."

It's one of the most beautiful sights in nature: fireflies illuminating the night with their synchronised flashing. Mathematicians have just solved a 40 year-old problem behind this striking phenomenon.

The paths of billiard balls on a table can be long and complicated. To understand them mathematicians use a beautiful trick, turning tables into surfaces.

If you thought that billiards was a harmless game to play in the pub, think again. It's a breeding ground for chaos!

Fields medallist Cédric Villani talks to us about our solar system, chaos, and what it's like being a mathematical superstar.

The ability to see order in chaos has won the mathematician Yakov G. Sinai the 2014 Abel Prize.

Struggling to solve today's sudoku? Is your tried and tested method hitting a brick wall and you feel like you are going around in circles? New research might make you feel a bit better: you might not necessarily be stuck... perhaps you are just in a patch of transient chaos on your way to the solution.

This article is part of a series of two articles exploring two ways in which mathematics comes into food, and especially into food safety and health. In this article we will take a dive into the rather smelly business of digesting food, and how a crazy application of chaos theory shows the best way to digest a medicinal drug.