BBC4 - The Story of Maths
06th - 27th October 2008
The Story of Maths ep01 The Language of the Universe - WnA.avi [549.99 Mb] 
The Story of Maths ep02 The Genius of the East - WnA.avi [549.72 Mb]
The Story of Maths ep03 The Frontiers of Space - WnA.avi [549.69 Mb]
The Story of Maths ep04 To Infinity and Beyond - WnA.avi [549.68 Mb]
Information
1 - The Language of the Universe
Series about the history of mathematics, presented by Professor Marcus du Sautoy. In Egypt, he uncovers use of a decimal system based on ten fingers of the hand and discovers that the way we tell the time 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, Archimedes and Pythagoras, who is credited with beginning the transformation of mathematics from a counting tool into the analytical subject of today.
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 the new language of algebra and the spread of Eastern knowledge to the West through mathematicians such as Leonardo Fibonacci, creator of the Fibonacci Sequence.
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.
In this programme, Marcus du Sautoy explores the work of Ren+ 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, the father of topology or 'bendy geometry' and Carl Friedrich Gauss, who, at the age of 24, was responsible for inventing a new way of handling equations:
modular arithmetic.
4 - To Infinity and Beyond
Marcus du Sautoy concludes his investigation into the history of mathematics with a look at some of the great unsolved problems that confronted mathematicians in the 20th century.
After exploring Georg Cantor's work on infinity and Henri Poincare's work on chaos theory, he looks at how mathematics was itself thrown into chaos by the discoveries of Kurt Godel, who showed that the unknowable is an integral part of maths, and Paul Cohen, who established that there were several different sorts of mathematics in which conflicting answers to the same question were possible.
He concludes his journey by considering the great unsolved problems of mathematics today, including the Riemann Hypothesis, a conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers. A million dollar prize and a place in the history books await anyone who can prove Riemann's theorem.
Screenshots
TechSpecs
(From Part 1)
File Name: The Story of Maths ep01 The Language of the Universe - WnA.avi
Video Codec: XVID
Video Bitrate: 1178 kb/s
Video Resolution: 656x368
Video Aspect Ratio: 1.783:1
Frames Per Second 25.000
Audio Codec: MP3
Audio BitRate: 129 kb/s VBR
Audio Sample Rate 48000 Hz
Audio Codec 0x0055 MPEG-1 Layer 3
Audio Channels: 2
RunTime: 57:55.440
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