Maths is Fun

Ella Al-Shamahi talks to two women in Pakistan and America who use numbers to help others understand and take control of their pregnancies - by unpacking the data.Emily Oster is a bestselling author and leading expert on pregnancy, championing a data-based approach and unpacking ...  Show more

Datshiane Navanayagam talks to two women in France and Canada about why single-sex living spaces appeal to older women.Pat Dunn is 75 and started a Facebook group for senior women wanting to share a living space, after her husband died six years ago. There she found two housemate ...  Show more

Nothing annoys Eugenia Cheng more than the suggestion that there is no creativity in mathematics. Doing mathematics is not about being a human calculator, she says. She doesn't spend her time multiplying big numbers in her head. She sits in hotel bars drawing (mainly arrows) with ...  Show more

Faced with one cake and eight hungry people, it’s pretty obvious how maths underpins reality. But as mathematics gets further from common sense and into seemingly abstract territory, nature still seems to obey its rules - whether in the orbit of a planet, the number of petals ...

What’s the importance of zero, and how was it discovered? How do scientists calculate Pi’s infinite digits? Why do so many people find maths difficult – and what’s the most difficult thing in maths?

CrowdScience takes on a whole bunch of questions sent in by high school ...

Mathematics as a subject is distinctive in its symbolic abstraction and its potential for logical and computational rigor. But mathematicians tend to impute other qualities to our subject that set it apart, such as impartiality, universality, and elegance. Far from incidental, th ...  Show more