Browsing Tag
maths
10 posts
The Art of Uncertainty review: Top statistician David Spiegelhalter on how to deal with uncertainty
You may seek to beat the slots, but that’s down to luck’s complexities Martin Parr/Magnum Photos The Art of…
The mathematics behind pouring a glass of wine
How much liquid is left in this box of white wine? Shutterstock/oleschwander Have you ever found yourself dispensing…
The surprising connections between maths and poetry
Bill Kotsatos/Polaris/eyevine People like to position maths as cold, hard logic, quite distinct from creative pursuits. Actually, maths…
Mathematicians can’t agree what ‘equals’ means, and that’s a problem
More complex than it looks When you see “2 + 2 = 4”, what does “=” mean? It…
The Monty Hall problem shows how tricky judging the odds can be
shutterstock/Jose Luis Stephens Calculating probabilities can be tricky, with subtle changes in context giving quite different results. I…
Why AIs that tackle complex maths could be the next big breakthrough
Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images For Bill Gates, artificial intelligence is the most important invention since the internet or the…
AGI: How machine mathematicians may finally deliver AI with human-level reasoning
In pure mathematics, very occasionally, breakthroughs arrive like bolts from the blue – the result of such inspired…
Try these mathematical magic tricks that are guaranteed to work
LOOK, I’ve got nothing up my sleeves. There are magic tricks that work by sleight of hand, relying…
How the maths behind honeycombs can help you work a jigsaw puzzle
Dariusz Szwangruber/Alamy WHAT do a bathroom wall, a honeycomb and a jigsaw puzzle have in common? Obviously, the…
Is the universe conscious? It seems impossible until you do the maths
THEY call it the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”. Physicist Eugene Wigner coined the phrase in the 1960s to…