Collection

Teacher package: Classical mechanics

Whether it's the planets moving around the Sun or building the perfect cycling track, the key to many questions in our lives lies in classical mechanics. This teacher package brings together all our content on mechanics.
Article
Horse head

Walk, trot, gallop

Horses, like all animals, have a number of different gaits. But how can they perform these complicated leg movements without having to stop and think? And why do they switch to a new gait when they want to go faster? Mathematics can shed some light on these questions.

Article

Outer space: Canoeing and Kayaking

A simple question to ask about kayak races is whether having lots of paddlers helps or slows the boat down? The kayak with two paddlers has twice as many "engines" to power it but it also has twice as much weight to drag through the water. Which is the dominant factor?
Podcast

The puzzle of time: The podcast

This podcast comes to you from a conference on the nature of time. We talk to philosophers of physics Jeremy Butterfield and David Wallace, as well as the eminent Roger Penrose about the puzzle time poses to physicists and what it has to do with the Big Bang and the second law of thermodynamics.
News story

Does it pay to be clever?

Why are we so clever? In evolutionary terms this isn't obvious: evolution tends to favour cheap solutions and the human brain is expensive. It consumes about 20% of our body's energy budget yet it only makes up 2% of our body mass. So why did it make evolutionary sense for us humans to develop powerful brains? Game theory provides a possible answer.
Podcast

Imaginary Barcelona

Imaginary is an interactive mathematics exhibition that inspires the imagination with beautiful images. And what is more exciting it allows anyone to step into the world of maths and play with beautiful mathematical surfaces, symmetry and much more. We went along to the Imaginary Barcelona conference, which brought together people involved in the original exhibition in Germany and its recent successful run throughout Spain.
Article
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Does it pay to be nice? – the maths of altruism part i

Does it pay to be nice? Yes, it does. And we're not just talking about that warm fuzzy feeling inside, it pays in evolutionary terms of genetic success too. We talk to Martin Nowak about how the mathematics of evolution prove that being nice is unavoidable.

Article

Meet the mother theory

The holy grail for 21st century physics is to produce a unified theory of everything that can describe the world at every level, from the tiniest particles to the largest galaxies. Currently the strongest contender for such a theory is something called M-theory. So what is this supposed mother of all theories all about?