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Understand the maths behind health and medicine

Careers with maths
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Gavin Harper is a mathematician working right at the heart of genetics

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March 2010
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Underlying our vast global telecommunications networks are codes: formal schemes for representing information in machine-readable and transmissible formats. Kona Macphee examines the prefix property, one of the important features of a good code.

Tags: code : prefix property : binary code : tree : path : node


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Next year is a great one for biology. Not only will we celebrate 150 years since the publication of On the origin of species, but also 200 years since the birth of its author, Charles Darwin. At the heart of Darwin's theory of evolution lies a beautifully simple mathematical object: the evolutionary tree. In this article we look at how maths is used to reconstruct and understand it.

Tags: tree : graph theory : evolution : Genes : DNA : phylogenetics