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diffusion

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Close up of milk mixing into coffee (Image: Adobe Stock)

Mixing it up: Understanding the boundaries of anti-diffusion

The process of diffusion has been studied for centuries.  But reserachers have recently begun to study a competing process –  anti-diffusion. Find out more in this collection of content from a recent research programme at the INI.

Referenced articles
Article
Close up of milk mixing into coffee (Image: Adobe Stock)

Mixing it up

Researchers from different fields recently came together to improve our understanding of anti-diffusion, the process behind the distinct bands of Jupiter, that also plays a role in our oceans and in developing plasma fusion reactors.

Article
cup of tea

Maths in a minute: Diffusion

Whenever you smell the lovely smell of fresh coffee or drop a tea bag into hot water you're benefiting from diffusion. Find a quick introduction to the concept here.

Article

The calculus of the complex

Calculus has long been key to describing the world. Now fractional calculus is providing new ways of describing complex systems.

News story

Face fusion

The maths behind music has inspired software that can merge faces.
News story

Diffusion plays by the rules

Whenever you smell the lovely smell of fresh coffee or drop a tea bag into hot water you're benefiting from diffusion: the fact that particles moving at random under the influence of thermal energy spread themselves around. It's this process that wafts coffee particles towards your nose and allows the tea to spread around the water. Diffusion underlies a huge number of processes and it has been studied intensively for over 150 years. Yet it wasn't until very recently that one of the most important assumptions of the underlying theory was confirmed in an experiment.
Article

Eat, drink and be merry: making it go down well

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.
Blog post

Things never get simpler - the work of Cédric Villani

What would you think if the nice café latte in your cup suddenly separated itself out into one half containing just milk and the other containing just coffee? Probably that you, or the world, have just gone crazy. There is, perhaps, a theoretical chance that after stirring the coffee all the swirling atoms in your cup just happen to find themselves in the right place for this to occur, but this chance is astronomically small.
News story

Things never get simpler - the work of Cédric Villani

What would you think if the nice café latte in your cup suddenly separated itself out into one half containing just milk and the other containing just coffee? Probably that you, or the world, have just gone crazy. There is, perhaps, a theoretical chance that after stirring the coffee all the swirling atoms in your cup just happen to find themselves in the right place for this to occur, but this chance is astronomically small.
Article

How the leopard got its spots

How does the uniform ball of cells that make up an embryo differentiate to create the dramatic patterns of a zebra or leopard? How come there are spotty animals with stripy tails, but no stripy animals with spotty tails? Lewis Dartnell solves these, and other, puzzles of animal patterning.