Imagine you have a cutout from a piece of squared paper and a pile of dominoes, each of which can cover exactly two squares of the squared paper. How many different ways are there to cover the entire paper cutout with ...

[also available in German] Billiards, the study of a ball bouncing around on a table, is a rich area of current mathematical research. We discuss questions and results on billiards, and on the related topic of flat surfaces.

What is the most efficient way to fence land when you’ve only got so many metres of fence? Or, to put it differently, what is the largest area bounded by a simple closed planar curve of fixed length? We consider the answer ...

Friezes have occured as architectural ornaments for many centuries. In this snapshot, we consider the mathematical analogue of friezes as introduced in the 1970s by Conway and Coxeter. Recently, infinite versions of such ...

Communication forms the basis of biological interactions. While the use of a single communication mechanism (for example visual communication) by a species is quite well understood, in nature the majority of species ...

In this snapshot we give a glimpse of the interplay of special values of zeta functions and volumes of triangles. Special values of zeta functions and their generalizations arise in the computation of volumes of moduli ...

If you place a drop of ink into a glass of water, the ink will slowly dissipate into the surrounding water until it is perfectly mixed. If you record your experiment with a camera and play the film backwards, you will see ...

This snapshot is about zero-dimensional symmetry. Thanks to recent discoveries we now understand such symmetry better than previously imagined possible. While still far from complete, a picture of zero-dimensional symmetry ...

Very simple mathematical equations can give rise to surprisingly complicated, chaotic dynamics, with behavior that is sensitive to small deviations in the initial conditions. We illustrate this with a single recurrence ...

The study of mathematical biology attempts to use mathematical models to draw useful conclusions about biological systems. Here, we consider the modelling of brain tumour spread with the ultimate goal of improving treatment ...