Symmetry of Sound: Getting the public into musical maths

At the end of the eighteenth century, the courts of Europe thrilled to the demonstrations of a violin bow being dragged across the side of a metal plate. It was not the sound, but the shapes that were appearing in the sand scattered on the metal plate that so excited audiences.
Mathematician Ernst Chladni discovered extraordinary symmetrical patterns hidden inside the strange noise of the vibrating plate.
Inspired by Chladni’s performances, Marcus du Sautoy and his team have developed activities to engage young people, adults and families with sound and symmetry while exploring the mathematics and physics behind the emerging patterns and how it is relevant to instrument design, quantum physics and even the theory of prime numbers.

Social networks and culture in birds

A new paper in Nature by Lucy Aplin and colleagues reports an experimental study in Wytham Woods, in which arbitrary behaviours were introduced and tracked as they spread through social networks of wild great tits. The work shows that social learning can lead to the rapid establishment of stable differences within populations, a form of avian ‘culture’, and implicates conformist learning - where individuals preferentially copy the majority, as they key to this.