Imagine stepping inside your favourite painting, walking around the light-filled music room of Vermeer's "The Music Lesson" or exploring the chapel in the "Trinity" painted by Masaccio in the 15th century.
With 8 bits, we have 28= 256 possibilities (each bit can be zero or one, and the possibilities multiply together). We call 8 bits a byte. The very common ASCII system makes each letter of the alphabet, both capital and small (plus punctuation and some other symbols) correspond to a number from 0 to 255 (for example a=97, b= 98 and so on), so one letter can be expressed with one byte.
A new series of More or Less, BBC Radio 4's series devoted to all things numerical, starts on November 12th. Presenter Andrew Dilnot tells Plus about the motivation behind the programme.
Today's digital world with its free flow of information, would not exist without cryptography to guarantee our privacy. Plus meets mathematician, author and broadcaster Simon Singh to find out about the science of secrecy.
Fluid mechanics is the study of flows in both liquids and gases, and is therefore enormously important in understanding many natural phenomena, as well as in industrial applications.
Neuropsychologist Brian Butterworth tells us about research showing that even newborn babies have a basic understanding of number. It seems we are all mathematicians!
This issue of Plus is a special, marking the occasion of Stephen Hawking's 60th birthday.
