Nobel Prizewinning Physicist Professor Gerardus 't Hooft has always been fascinated by the mathematical mysteries of nature. He tells Plus about his early life, and what our Universe might really be like.

Infinite series occupy a central and important place in mathematics. C. J. Sangwin shows us how eighteenth-century mathematician Leonhard Euler solved one of the foremost infinite series problems of his day.

Backgammon is said to be one of the oldest games in the world. In this article, Jochen Blath and Peter Mörters discuss one particularly interesting aspect of the game - the doubling cube. They show how a model using Brownian motion can help a player to decide when to double or accept a double.

Knots crop up all over the place, from tying a shoelace to molecular structure, but they are also elegant mathematical objects. Colin Adams asks when is a molecule knot a molecule? and what happens if you try to build a knot out of sticks?