Episode five of Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.
Given the old maxim about an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters, one can assume that said simian digits will type up the following line from Hamlet an infinite number of times.
Episode four of Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.
The imaginary number takes mathematics to another dimension. It was discovered in sixteenth century Italy at a time when being a mathematician was akin to being a modern day rock star, when there was ‘nuff respect’ to be had from solving a particularly ‘wicked’ equation. And the wicked equation of the day went like this: "If the square root of +1 is both +1 and -1, then what is the square root of -1?"
Episode three of Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.
Divide any number in the Fibonacci sequence by the one before it, for example 55/34, or 21/13, and the answer is always close to 1.61803. This is known as the Golden Ratio, and hence Fibonacci’s Sequence is also called the Golden Sequence. Unlikely though it might seem, this series of numbers is the common factor linking rabbits, cauliflowers and snails.
Episode two of Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.
Most people’s first slice of Pi is at school where it is generally made palatable as either 3.14 or the fraction 3 1/7. The memory of this number may be fuzzy for those propelled through their Maths GCSE by the power of Casio (where Pi was reduced to a button on the bottom row of the calculator), but the likelihood is they still recall that romanticised notion of a number whose decimal places randomly go on forever. At its simplest, Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. At its most complex, it is an irrational number that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers and has an apparently random decimal string of infinite length.
Episode one of Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.
What’s 2 minus 2? The answer is obvious, right? But not if you wore a tunic, no socks and lived in Ancient Greece. For strange as it sounds, ‘nothing’ had to be invented, and then it took thousands of years to catch on.