mathematics Archives

Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry’s Mysterious World of Maths episode 3

Science / 3 minutes of reading / September 12, 2020 / By HDclump

Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry’s Mysterious World of Maths episode 3: Hannah explores a paradox at the heart of modern maths, discovered by Bertrand Russell, which undermines the very foundations of logic that all of maths is built on. These flaws suggest that maths isn’t a true part of the universe but might just be a human language – fallible and imprecise. However, Hannah argues that Einstein’s theoretical equations, such as E=mc2 and his theory of general relativity, are so good at predicting the universe that they must be reflecting some basic structure in it. This idea is supported […]

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Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry’s Mysterious World of Maths episode 2

Science / 5 minutes of reading / September 11, 2020 / By HDclump

Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry’s Mysterious World of Maths episode 2: In this episode, Hannah travels down the fastest zip wire in the world to learn more about Newton’s ideas on gravity. His discoveries revealed the movement of the planets was regular and predictable. James Clerk Maxwell unified the ideas of electricity and magnetism, and explained what light was. As if that wasn’t enough, he also predicted the existence of radio waves. His tools of the trade were nothing more than pure mathematics. All strong evidence for maths being discovered. But in the 19th century, maths is turned on

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Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry’s Mysterious World of Maths episode 1

Science / 3 minutes of reading / September 10, 2020 / By HDclump

Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry’s Mysterious World of Maths episode 1: In this new series, mathematician Dr Hannah Fry explores the mystery of maths. It underpins so much of our modern world that it’s hard to imagine life without its technological advances, but where exactly does maths come from? Is it invented like a language or is it something discovered and part of the fabric of the universe? It’s a question that some of the most eminent mathematical minds have been wrestling with. Dr Eleanor Knox from King’s College London believes it’s discovered, Prof Hiranya Peiris from University College London believes

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The Story of Maths episode 3 – The Frontiers of Space

Science / 4 minutes of reading / April 12, 2020 / By HDclump

The Story of Maths episode 3 – The Frontiers of Space: By the 17th century, Europe had taken over from the Middle East as the world’s powerhouse of mathematical ideas. Great strides had been made in understanding the geometry of objects fixed in time and space. The race was now on to discover the mathematics to describe objects in motion. Marcus explores the work of Rene Descartes and Pierre Fermat, whose famous Last Theorem would puzzle mathematicians for more than 350 years. He also examines Isaac Newton’s development of the calculus, and goes in search of Leonard Euler,

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The Story of Maths episode 2 – The Genius of the East

Science / 3 minutes of reading / April 10, 2020 / By HDclump

The Story of Maths episode 2 – The Genius of the East: When ancient Greece fell into decline, mathematical progress stagnated as Europe entered the Dark Ages, but in the east mathematics reached new heights. Du Sautoy visits China and explores how maths helped build imperial China and was at the heart of such amazing feats of engineering as the Great Wall. In India, he discovers how the symbol for the number zero was invented and Indian mathematicians’ understanding of the new concepts of infinity and negative numbers. In the Middle East, he looks at the invention of

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The Story of Maths episode 1 – The Language of the Universe

Science / 3 minutes of reading / April 9, 2020 / By HDclump

The Story of Maths episode 1 – The Language of the Universe: After showing how fundamental mathematics is to our lives, Marcus du Sautoy explores the mathematics of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece. In Egypt, he uncovers use of a decimal system based on ten fingers of the hand, while in former Mesopotamia he discovers that the way we tell the time today is based on the Babylonian Base 60 number system. In Greece, he looks at the contributions of some of the giants of mathematics including Plato, Euclid, Archimedes and Pythagoras, who is credited with beginning the

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The Joy of Stats

Science / 2 minutes of reading / January 17, 2020 / By HDclump

The Joy of Stats: Documentary which takes viewers on a roller-coaster ride through the wonderful world of statistics to explore the remarkable power they have to change our understanding of the world, presented by superstar boffin Professor Hans Rosling, whose eye-opening, mind-expanding and funny online lectures have made him an international internet legend. Rosling is a man who revels in the glorious nerdiness of statistics, and here he entertainingly explores their history, how they work mathematically and how they can be used in today’s computer age to see the world as it really is, not just as we

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The Joy of Winning

Science / 2 minutes of reading / January 16, 2020 / By HDclump

The Joy of Winning: How to have a happier life and a better world all thanks to maths, in this witty, mind-expanding guide to the science of success with Hannah Fry. Following in the footsteps of BBC Four’s award-winning maths films The Joy of Stats and The Joy of Data, this latest gleefully nerdy adventure sees mathematician Dr Hannah Fry unlock the essential strategies you’ll need to get what you want – to win – more of the time. From how to bag a bargain dinner to how best to stop the kids arguing on a long car

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Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimension

Science / 2 minutes of reading / December 9, 2017 / By HDclump

A look at fractal geometry, and how it is found just about everywhere in everything, and how the mathematics of fractals can be used to model and measure such things as mountains, coastlines, telephone line noise and heart rhythm.

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East to West – The Renaissance and islam ep.4

History / 3 minutes of reading / November 28, 2017 / By HDclump

In this episode we reveal how a golden age of invention and scholarship thrived in the Islamic World at a time when Europe lingered in the dark age. We see how Muslim scholars brought together for the first time the ideas of the Greeks and Romans with Persian and Indian mathematics and astronomy, and developed them into the beginnings of modern Science. We reveal the first contacts by which European scholars discovered this treasury of knowledge and how it was developed by generations of Arab-admirers (including Galileo & Copernicus) into modern science. This episode focuses on the House

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