As you settle into your seat for a flight to a holiday destination or as part of yet another business trip, it is very easy to become absorbed by the glossy magazines or the novel you've been waiting forever to start reading. Understandably, the phrase "safety features on board this aircraft" triggers a rather unenthusiastic response. But you may be surprised by some of the incredible technology just a few feet away that is there to make sure everything goes smoothly.

 

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s are devastating conditions with poorly understood mechanisms and no known cure. Yet a striking feature of these conditions is the characteristic pattern of invasion throughout the brain, leading to well-codified disease stages visible to neuropathology and associated with various cognitive deficits and pathologies.

Free suspended liquid films or sheets are often formed during industrial production of sprays as well as in natural processes such as sea spray. Early experimental and theoretical investigations of them were done by French physicist Felix Savart, who observed liquid sheets forming by a jet impact on a solid surface, or by two jets impacting each other (1833), and British physicist Arthur Mason Worthington, a pioneer in investigation of the crown splash forming after impact of a drop onto a liquid surface.

Over the last few years, the study of the physiological mechanisms governing the movement of fluids in the brain (referred to as the brain waterscape) has gained prominence. The reason? Anomalies in the brain fluid dynamics are related to diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, other forms of dementia and hydrocephalus. Understanding how the brain waterscape works can help discover how these diseases develop. Unfortunately, experimenting with the human brain in vivo is extremely difficult and the subject is still poorly understood.

Oxford Mathematician Kristian Kiradjiev has won the Graham Hoare Prize (awarded by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications) for his article "Connecting the Dots with Pick's Theorem". The Graham Hoare Prize is awarded annually to Early Career Mathematicians for a brilliant Mathematics Today article. Kristian also won the award in 2017. Here he talks about his work.

In many natural systems, such as the climate, the flow of fluids, but also in the motion of certain celestial objects, we observe complicated, irregular, seemingly random behaviours. These are often created by simple deterministic rules, and not by some vast complexity of the system or its inherent randomness. A typical feature of such chaotic systems is the high sensitivity of trajectories to the initial condition, which is also known in popular culture as the butterfly effect.

Have you ever forgotten to replace the lid of the blender before beginning to puree your mango and passion-fruit smoothie? If you have, you'll have witnessed the catastrophic explosion of fruit and yoghurt flung haphazardly around the kitchen in an unpredictable manner. This is a consequence of the complicated and turbulent fluid dynamics present within the machine, the exact behaviour of which is unknown.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, some minor algebraic investigations grabbed the interest of a small group of American mathematicians.  The problems they worked on had little impact at the time, but they may nevertheless have had a subtle effect on the way in which mathematics has been taught over the past century.