Science Museum's maths gallery soars with stunning Zaha Hadid design

New gallery tells stories of how maths underpins the world

In 1818, the Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh sent a letter to all British consuls across the world, asking them to obtain examples of their local standard weights. At that time the UK had no universal conversion table between the many different systems of weights and measures used by foreign cities.

It took two years for all 71 sets of weights to arrive in London, where they were put in two cabinets installed in the Royal Mint. When the measurements were compared with each other, the Mint discovered that almost every previous conversion table was wrong - and that for the previous century these errors had been costing UK traders dosh.