Man who tried to measure weather & war
Lewis Fry Richardson – morality should always trump science.
Lewis Fry Richardson was one of the first people to apply maths and physics to the science of weather forecasting. ...
Mathematics
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History
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How many people can fit into Australia?
We answer a reader’s question with some fiddly mathematics.
My 6-year-old son randomly asked me this question: How many people can fit into Australia?– Hannah This is an inte...
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The AI making waves in complex mathematics
Researchers are starting to use AI to develop and test abstract mathematical theorems – with surp...
Artificial intelligence is used across myriad disciplines to trawl through troves of data too complex for the human b...
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History
Claude Shannon turns us on
Mathematician, electrical engineer, cryptographer and ‘the father of information theory’.
Claude Shannon was a 22-year-old graduate student in 1938, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the renowned...
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George Boole executes a search
The self-taught maths genius who reached the Everest of logic.
George Boole was born on 2 November 1815 in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, in the East Midlands of England. He spent his care...
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Calhoun’s prophet rodents and the creation of the "behavioural sink"
A seminal research work on overpopulation in rodent communities created an increasingly elaborate...
I first read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH as a young’un. What I didn’t know at the time was that it was inspired ...
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Do fractals exist in nature?
Finding fractals in nature isn’t too hard – you just need to look. But capturing them in images l...
What are fractals? Fractals are objects in which the same patterns occur again and again at different scales and siz...
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Why are there so many vaccinated people in hospital?
It may be confronting to hear there are more vaccinated people than unvaccinated people in hospit...
It may be confronting to hear there are more vaccinated people than unvaccinated people in hospital - but it's actual...
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A mathematician watches The Number 23
Once every decade or so, a film based on numerical ideas attempts to leap into the popular realm....
Warning: spoilers, for this fourteen-year-old film, ahead. Additional warning: the mathematical reasoning displaye...
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When bus timetables and particle physics collide
The challenges of mathematics equate to the most exciting new frontiers of science.
Imagine taking a time-lapse photograph of a clear sky at night. The photograph will be filled with circular arcs of l...
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John Maynard Keynes figures the odds
It took a deep understanding of high mathematics to reshape the world’s economy.
In his 1979 book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams introduced the concept of the Infinite Improbabi...
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Amazing gravito-electromagnetism!
How can mathematics analogies shed light on reality?
In some ways, mathematics is like literature. It has its own definitions and grammatical rules – although unfortunat...