The Abel Prize 2011 goes to John Willard Milnor of Stony Brook University, New York for "pioneering discoveries in topology, geometry and algebra".

Knots crop up all over the place, from tying a shoelace to molecular structure, but they are also elegant mathematical objects. Colin Adams asks when is a molecule knot a molecule? and what happens if you try to build a knot out of sticks?

Who says that academics don't have a sense of style? Two researchers from the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics have brought a whole new sartorial dimension to the daily ritual of putting on a tie.