The Plus anniversary year — A word from the editors

String theory is a theory of everything in which everything's made of strings — but why strings? What do they do? Find out in our equation-free introduction for beginners.

Life is full of coincidences, but how do you work out if something is really as unlikely as it seems? In this article Rob Eastaway and John Haigh find chance in church and work out the odds.

Squares do it, triangles do it, even hexagons do it — but pentagons don't. They just won't fit together to tile a flat surface. So are there any tilings based on fiveness? Craig Kaplan takes us through the five-fold tiling problem and uncovers some interesting designs in the process.