Can you measure information? It's a tricky question — but people have tried and come up with very interesting ideas.

To celebrate the release of more English translations of Einstein's papers, we revisit one of his previously unknown models of the Universe.

The self-taught Indian genius would have turned 127 this month.

A little trig helps to find the relative distance to the Sun and Moon.

How to derive the famous quadratic formula from pictures, just like the Babylonians did.

Euclid's fourth axiom says that all right angles are equal. But isn't that obvious?

Five basic facts from the father of geometry.

Does light have weight? Newton thought so. His laws predicted that gravity would bend light, two centuries before Einstein's revolution.

The bitter battle for the cubic equation.

The Mayan civilisation brought forth many great things — including this clever way of making a right angle.

Something called quantum field theory has been hugely successful in describing the fundamental forces and particles. But what exactly is it? This series of accessible articles traces the history of quantum field theory, from its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century to the tantalising questions that are still open today. It's a story of pain and triumph, hardship and success.

There's no doubt that information is power, but could it be converted into physical energy you could heat a room with or run a machine on? In the 19th century James Clerk Maxwell invented a hypothetical being — a "demon" — that seemed to be able to do just that. The problem was that the little devil blatantly contravened the laws of physics. What is Maxwell's demon and how was it resolved?