Alles Gute zum Geburtstag! Joyeux Anniversaire! Suk San Wan Keut! Sun Yat Fai Lok! Hartelijk gefeliciteerd! Felichan Naskightagon! And Happy Birthday to Google in the other 93-plus languages it speaks!

As the web search engine Google celebrates its 10th birthday it is hard to imagine life online without it. It has become such an indispensable tool that we don’t just search for something any more, we “google” it, as recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006.

If anyone was ever in doubt that there was money to be made with mathematics, Google, the most successful search engine on the web today with over $4 billion profit last year, is an example of just how lucrative a clever application of maths can be. The secret to Google’s success is the PageRank algorithm, that not only decides which webpages match your search criteria (which all search engines do), but also uses linear algebra to determine which results are more important and returns these first.

Applications of mathematics in the commercial sector, particularly lucrative examples such as Google, are not well-known among the general public. What other examples of money-making mathematics should the public know about?

You can read more on Plus in this article on the topic.