The past three decades have seen an unprecedented explosion of activity in a new sub-discipline of mathematics: financial mathematics. The emergence of this field has parallelled the expansion of the quantitative…
Paper folding may look like art, but it’s all about the math.
Mina
Origami is the ancient Japanese art of paper folding. One uncut square of paper can, in the hands of an origami artist, be folded into a bird, a frog, a sailboat, or a Japanese samurai helmet beetle. Origami…
Got him: nightwatchman Nathan Lyon was bowled by Mohammed Sharmi last week.
AAP/David Mariuz
Imagine you are captain of the national cricket team. With 20 minutes left in day one of a test match, your top-order batsman is dismissed. Do you employ a nightwatchman? That is, do you send in a tail-end…
In lots of simple ways parents can help their kids understand and enjoy maths.
Shutterstock
Teaching maths concepts has long been considered the domain of the classroom teacher, with many parents often feeling unable to help their kids develop this skill. However, parents already do many things…
Alan Turing is one of the world’s best-known mathematicians, and probably the best known in the past century. This is partly for his work on cracking German codes in World War II, and partly for his arrest…
Getting to grips with Domino’s square pizzas is easy with a bit of algebra.
Robyn Lee/Flickr
Consider a standard pizza box containing a standard circular pizza. How much more would you be willing to pay for a square pizza that filled the box? Clearly the square pizza contains more pizza: but is…
There is such a thing as ‘too precise’ when it comes to numbers. So what’s appropriate?
Erik Olsson
When numbers of any sort are presented in mathematics, science, business, government or finance, it’s fair to say a reader assumes that the data are reasonably reliable to their last digit. But presenting…
Hipsters are so mainstream now that they’re the subject of mathematical papers. Jonathan Touboul, a mathematical neuroscientist from the Collège de France, claims to have answered one of the great mysteries…
Social security is on a collision course with insolvency. A little bit of math could keep it safe.
Shutterstock
The US Social Security system has been heading toward insolvency for decades, with the program now projected to run a 25% deficit by a little after 2030, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Despite…
There has been much publicity in recent years about China and its teachers. After the most recent results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) were published in 2013, considerable…
Every living organism needs the same five basic processes – and we can now model ecosystems on them.
erban/Flickr
It may sound overly simple, but just five processes can define us as animals: eating, metabolism, reproduction, dispersal and death. They might not seem like much, but, thanks to a mathematical model from…
Maryam Mirzakhani – the first woman to win the Fields medal – was recognised for contributions to understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces.
Stanford University
The four winners of the 2014 Fields medals – the most prestigious prizes for mathematics – were announced today, including the first female and first Latin American recipients of the 78-year-old prize…
What makes people happy? Finding a definitive answer to this question could certainly make someone very rich (butwhether that would in turn make them happy is another matter). The problem is that happiness…
The answer… 56.
Multiplication table by extender_01/Shutterstock
The British Chancellor George Osborne recently refused to answer a simple times table question posed to him by seven-year-old school boy Samuel Reddings. Osborne was asked the question 7x8, but declined…
How do we make sense of numbers without stats?
Jeffrey/Flickr
Terry Speed, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)
AUSTRALIA 2025: How will science address the challenges of the future? In collaboration with Australia’s chief scientist Ian Chubb, we’re asking how each science discipline will contribute to Australia…
People are very good at moving in time to a beat. When you listen to your favourite song, you will probably find yourself nodding your head or tapping your foot along almost instinctively. And when you’re…
Manu Kapur, National Institute of Education of Singapore
The upcoming ban on the use of calculators in most maths exams for 11-year-olds in UK schools reminds me of a persistent concern in education: when do the tools we use to learn become crutches we can’t…
Sweaty-palmed and reciting facts over and over in their heads, the hordes of university and school students sitting down to exams this month will have precious little time to think about how their exam…