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If you’ve been reading my Women in Science column here and there over the last decade, you’ll have been subjected to my intermittent...

In a small but soon-to-be-revered town in Southern Italy, 2,500 years ago, a group of men and women gathered, united by the proposition...

Before Elizebeth and William Friedman, American cryptanalysis did not exist. The best thing we had were the puzzle-bestrewn musings of...

Of all the realms of mathematics, there are few where more people feel more at home than in the safe harbours of algebra. From the age of...

There’s a lot to like about plain old, everyday space. No matter where you are, there’s always a way to get to where you need to go, and...

‘Momentum is always conserved, except when it isn’t.’ In secondary school physics, we learn all manner of conservation laws, one at a...

By attempting everything, Dorothy Wrinch ended up accomplishing nothing. For half a century, this was the standard final verdict on the...

If you have been reading this series over the years, you’re used to a particular narrative sequence: (1) Brilliant woman researcher...

Our concept of living in a universe with a knowable and predictable future has taken two stunning blows in the last century, first from...

Whereas few European scientists escaped the politico-intellectual gnash of the 1930s unscathed, arguably none faced quite the looming...

When you first walk into secondary school your first year and plop yourself nervously into a desk in the back of your geometry class...

Before NASA, there was NACA, an oddball collection of aeronautics nerds using black box data and wind tunnel analysis to figure out as...

Beholding a bar of metal, it seems an object almost primal in its simplicity. Solid, reliable, the stuff of which cities are made. Peek...

When Grace Chisholm, at age 28, married the mathematician William Henry Young, she had every prospect of a brilliant career before her....

The IBM 650 was a marvellous beast. The world’s first mass-produced (and first profitable) computer, it was the mainstay machine of the...

Water is that great, terrible thing. Its chemical properties make it a magnificent solvent and coolant, which is wonderful if you’re...

An arrow hits a target as a fifteen year old girl on a horse goes galloping victoriously by. It is not an entirely unusual sight in late...

When Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) rewrote our conception of how heavenly bodies move by replacing the ideal and eternal circles of...

In 1885, when you heard the term ‘mathematical epicentre’ one of the last places that would have been brought to mind was the United...