The brain is the most complicated organ of any animal, formed and sculpted over 500 million years of evolution. And the cerebral cortex is a critical component. This folded grey matter forms the outside of the brain, and is the seat of higher cognitive functions such as language, episodic memory and voluntary movement.

Oxford Mathematician Katherine Staden provides a fascinating snapshot of the field of combinatorics, and in particular extremal combinatorics, and the progress that she and her collaborators are making in answering one of its central questions posed by Paul Erdős over sixty years ago.