The cosmologist modelling the Universe with maths By Charis Goodyear Dr Tobias Baldauf likes nothing better than seeing an equation ‘cross reality’. His work is helping us to answer some of the remaining questions about the Universe. My research is concerned with the history and composition of the Universe. But I study just one tiny piece of this complex puzzle. Through the use of mathematics and computational modelling, I describe how stuff – that is matter and galaxies – is distributed throughout the Universe. This distribution is called the Large-Scale Structure (LSS). The maps we produce of the LSS look a bit like a sponge, with holes of nothingness within the matter. The map is really a pattern of threads that connect denser dots where you have accumulations of galaxies.