b'THE INTERNETBlessing or curse?The internet is the most amazing researchwould we have survived during Covid tool with research papers from the mostrestrictions without the ability to contact prestigious universities readily availablefamily and friends remotely?online. It does, however, easily facilitateThe curse is that anyone can be famous for plagiarism in the form of cut and paste15 minutes by posting intimate details of essays, and it also means that any idiot cantheir private lives, which by definition should post any idiotic ideas online. The blessingstay private.is that the internet facilitates easy checking of plagiarised essays and so-called facts.So the jury is out.Another blessing is that the internet enabledMs Gerrardthe development of social mediahow The most significant invention in the last 160 yearswhere to start! Id say that the internet has been one of the most striking inventions, which I have personally seen change the world. Acting as a body of free-flowing information (most of the time), connecting parts of the world previously unknown to each other, it has changed the way in which we think and behave. It has affected people on an individual and mass scale. I remember days before the internet with nostalgia! Then came noisy dial-up connections and groups of lads would excitedly crowd around the only computer with an internet connection in my school; watching and waiting with eager anticipation for new information to pour out from the search engines!Mr BansalMathsFrom snowflakes to hurricanesthese are justI would say thatsome of the amazing applications of the workthe most significant moment in the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrotmathematics was at the beginning of contributed to in his career. His work onthe 20th century when the German fractal geometry and chaos has helpedmathematician David Hilbert delivered shape the way scientists view thesea lecture in which he set out what fields due to the difficulties aroundhe saw as the 23 greatest unsolved trying to replicate perfect conditionsmathematical problems. These in controlled laboratories. problems, known as Hilberts Problems, effectively became the agenda for 20th-It may seem easy to make snow:century mathematics. Of the original freeze some water, I hear you say?23 problems, eight have now been However, replicating Mother Nature issolved, ten are partially solved, and three not as easy as it seems. Mandlebrots(including the Riemann Hypothesis) are work in the 1980s, during his careerstill open. The remaining problems are at IBM, established the notion thatconsidered to be too loosely formulated things in nature are not always asto be stated as solved or not.organised as they may seem.Mr Bansal Mr DhillowI recall my seven-year-old son making snow angels in the garden one crisp winters afternoon a few years ago. He asked; Why doesntAndrew Wiles, a British mathematician it snow more often? to which Iborn in the 1950s, solved a problem chuckled Its not as easy as youin maths which had escaped the most think! I hope one day he is enlightenedfamous mathematicians since the 17th by the work of this gentleman. century, namely proving Fermats Last Mr Sangar Theorem.Mr Dhillow61'