Can you encode a message so that errors in transmission are automatically corrected?

Crack codes, solve a mystery and even win prizes in the University of Southampton's National Cipher Challenge.

Bharat Dodia tells Plus how his love of maths has taken him from turbulent times to building better IT systems for Ford.

In this issue we talk to maths student Emily Dixon about her university studies, and where maths might take her in the future.

Underlying our vast global telecommunications networks are codes: formal schemes for representing information in machine-readable and transmissible formats. Kona Macphee examines the prefix property, one of the important features of a good code.

Space probes, like NASA's recent Pathfinder mission to Mars, have radio transmitters of only a few watts, but have to transmit pictures and scientific data across hundreds of millions of miles without the information being completely swamped by noise. Read about how coding theory helps.