Today, October 14th, 8.59am, Andrew Wiles Building, Oxford Mathematics. It may have been raining for 40 days and 40 nights, but it's our favourite day of the year, the first day of a new academic year. So here are our students arriving for lectures, accompanied by the soundtrack of first year students talking about their first three lectures which they attended this morning.

Mathematics and the natural world don't always see eye to eye; or rather shape to shape. When mathematicians study how tiles fit together, they keep it simple. Triangles, squares, and hexagons along with cubes and other polyhedra are built with sharp corners and flat faces. That works for maths. But it doesn't work for Nature.