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Content about “ mathematical modelling
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Article
El Niño: What on Earth will happen next?
El Niño is a climate event without equal, causing droughts, floods, hurricanes and typhoons around the globe. How can we understand and predict it?
Article
Ebola: Evidence from numbers
Why maths is an important tool in the fight against Ebola.
Article
Blink and you'll miss it: The free kick in football (part II)
In the first part of this article we let maths set the scene for a free kick. Now we continue the drama, tracing the trajectory of the ball throughout the milliseconds it takes it to reach the goal line.
Article
How do we hallucinate?
Geometric hallucinations are very common: people get them after taking drugs, following sensory deprivation, or even after rubbing their eyes. What can they tell us about how our brain works?
Article
Sex, evolution and parasitic wasps
Some things are so familiar to us that they are simply expected, and we may forget to wonder why they should be that way in the first place. Sex ratios are a good example of this: the number of men and women in the world is roughly equal, but why should this be the case? A simple mathematical argument provides an answer.
Article
Measuring catastrophic risk
Insurance companies offer protection against rare but catastrophic events like hurricanes or earthquakes. But how do they work out the financial risks associated to these disasters? Shane Latchman investigates.
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.
Article
Eat, drink and be merry: making sure it's safe
This article is part of a two-part series exploring ways in which mathematics comes into food, and especially into food safety and health. In this part we'll look at how maths can tell us the safest way to cook food.
Article
Modelling cell suicide
Martino Barenco and Mike Hubank shed light on suicidal cells and a mathematical model that could help fight cancer.
News story
What can birds tell us about flying through ash clouds?
Why does a financial mathematician think about birds when trying to understand the grounding of aeroplanes after the Icelandic volcano eruption?
Article
Modelling catastrophes
Hardly six months go by without a natural disaster striking some part of the globe. While it's next to impossible to predict these catastrophes, let alone prevent them, mathematical modelling gives a way to prepare for their impact. Shane Latchman explains.