The number of patrol cars that chased an Austrian handbag snatcher, along with police with sniffer dogs. The 17-year-old grabbed a pensioner's bag outside a field where police were staging a road safety day. A bus driver raised the alarm, and minutes later all the police at the event at Traun in Austria were in pursuit. The thief was caught in a multi-storey car park.

15

The age of a Peruvian chess player who failed to return from a tournament in Argentina and has been found living with a nightclub dancer. Emilio Cordova won the South American Chess Championship, but instead of returning home to Lima, he went to Brazil and kept asking his family to send him money, saying he was ill.

He was found living with dancer Adriana Oliveira, 29. "I play chess, study chess, but this doesn't mean I can't enjoy myself, " he said. "I'm young and I want to do this. I have to live. To be locked up in my room all the time depresses me." His father responded by bringing him home to Peru.

120

The number of years for which a famous maths problem has puzzled boffins. A team of US experts has finally cracked it, with a solution so complex that, handwritten, it would cover Manhattan, and in compressed form on a computer hard drive it takes up as much space as 45 days of continuous music in MP3 format. An international team of 18 mathematicians and computer scientists was assembled to map a theoretical object known as the 'Lie group E8'. Lie groups were invented by 19th century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie in his study of symmetrical objects. The team's work took four years of research and involved about 60 times as much data as the Human Genome Project.