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Mathematicians have created a new model - of a variety commonly found in the world of finance - to show how to harvest a species at an optimal rate, while making sure that the animals do not get wiped out by chance. According to the theoretical study, hunting thresholds can be calculated for individual populations and species. The key to this is how quickly a population grows naturally, and how much it competes for resources.

A fifth of parents with children aged 6-16 avoid their child's maths homework as working with numbers scares them, a survey has found. When they do give maths homework a go, 52 per cent of parents admit they get it wrong, while 17 per cent tell their children to ask their maths teacher for more help and do not get involved. Adding and subtracting without a calculator is a skill one-in-four parents say they would not be able to pass on.

One of the world's most renowned mathematicians showed how he solved the 160-year-old Riemann hypothesis at a lecture earlier this week. Sir Michael Atiyah, who has already won the two biggest prizes in mathematics - the Fields Medal and Abel Prize - took the stage at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany to present his work. To solve the hypothesis you need to find a way to predict the occurrence of every prime number, even though primes have historically been regarded as randomly distributed.

A mobile app that guides pedestrians along the safest instead of quickest route to their destination is being developed by researchers at Cardiff University. "Our next aim is translate this research into a product that the public can use. We envisage something very similar to Google Maps in which a user can input their destination and then choose a route that utilises our algorithm and gives them the safest possible journey instead of the quickest. This could definitely save lives and would go some way to reducing the high levels of causalities both here in the UK and across the world.

Jonathan Pace, an electrical engineer from Tennessee who has been searching for big primes for 14 years, has discovered the new largest known prime, at over 23 million digits long. Euclid proved that there is no largest prime number, and many mathematicians and hobbyists continue to search for large prime numbers. Some important cryptographic algorithms such as RSA critically depend on the fact that prime factorization of large numbers takes a long time. That's one of the reasons for finding larger prime numbers which can be used as cryptographic keys.