On the face of it, an artist and a theoretical physicist might seem an unlikely pairing. But Turner Prize-winning sculptor Grenville Davey and string theorist David Berman's collaboration is producing beautiful, thought-provoking work inspired by the fundamental structure of the Universe. Julia Hawkins interviewed them to find out more about how the Higgs boson and T-duality are giving rise to art.

The Strong Fields, Integrability and Strings programme, which took place at the Isaac Newton Institute in 2007, explored an area that would have been close to Isaac Newton's heart: how to unify Einstein's theory of gravity, a continuation of Newton's own work on gravitation, with quantum field theory, which describes the atomic and sub-atomic world, but cannot account for the force of gravity.

The Isaac Newton Institute celebrates its 20th birthday this year, having opened in July 1992. To join in the celebrations we bring you a selection of articles exploring some of the research programmes that have been held there. The Institute asked us to produce these articles in 2010 and we were honoured by being afforded this rare glimpse behind its venerable doors. And as you'll see, what started out as abstract mathematics scribbled on the back of a napkin can have major impact in the real world.

Few things in nature are as dramatic, and potentially dangerous, as ocean waves. The impact they have on our daily lives extends from shipping to the role they play in driving the global climate. From a theoretical viewpoint water waves pose rich challenges: solutions to the equations that describe fluid motion are elusive, and whether they even exist in the most general case is one of the hardest unanswered questions in mathematics.

When the mathematician AK Erlang first used probability theory to model telephone networks in the early twentieth century he could hardly have imagined that the science he founded would one day help solve a most pressing global problem: how to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and switch to renewable energy sources.

Progress in pure mathematics has its own tempo. Major questions may remain open for decades, even centuries, and once an answer has been found, it can take a collaborative effort of many mathematicians in the field to check that it is correct. The New Contexts for Stable Homotopy Theory programme, held at the Institute in 2002, is a prime example of how its research programmes can benefit researchers and its lead to landmark results.

Artificial neural networks grew out of researchers' attempts to mimick the human brain. In 1997 the Isaac Newton Institute hosted a landmark research programme in the area. Today, neural networks are able to learn how to perform complex tasks and are crucial in many areas of life, from medicine to the Xbox.