In The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity, mathematician Steven Strogatz provides an entertaining refresher course in math, starting with the most elementary ideas, such as counting, and finishing with mind-bending theories of infinity—including the idea that some infinities can be bigger than others.
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/05/162372203/steven-strogatz-the-joy-of-x
Robot traders are dominating stock markets using high speed computer algorithms. Human traders and government regulators canât keep up, and markets could be one programming glitch away from the next big crash. Stan Correy investigates.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/2012-09-09/4242538
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss random and pseudorandom numbers. Randomness will be familiar to anybody who’s bought a lottery ticket or shuffled a pack of cards. But there’s also a phenomenon known as pseudo-randomness –numbers which look random but aren’t. So why are these numbers useful and how can they be generated? Melvyn is joined by Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford; Colva Roney-Dougal, Senior Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews; and Timothy Gowers, Royal Society Research Professor in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
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Today, Charles Babbage writes a letter to Alfred Lord Tennyson. The University of Houston’s College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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The man who calculated as other men breathe. Professor Marcus du Sautoy on the mathematical omnivore without whom no history of mathematics is complete.
The battle over the calculus. Professor Marcus du Sautoy reveals how the great hero of British science is rather less gentlemanly than his German rival. An astronaut and investment analyst pay homage to the enormous power of the calculus.
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In part two Dr Jackie Stedall and Professor Ian Stewart tell us the story of Al-Khwarismi, the mathematician who introduced the world to the radical system of Hindu numerals - the numbers zero to nine - and how the word algebra comes from the Arabic title of one of his books.
In his book he revolutionised maths by focussing on the relationships between numbers rather than simply using maths to find the answer to particular problems. For mathematicians today, this was a vital development in our understanding. Another legacy was his name which gives us the modern word algorithm, a process that lies at the heart of how all computers work.
Professor Nader el-Bizri tells also of the great Ibn al-Haytham, who first realised how it is that vision works.
His work with light and optics was so revolutionary that he could be seen as the father of physics, rivaling Isaac Newton for the title.
Perhaps more importantly, he was also the instigator of what we now call the scientific method. Some people have thought that such a precise approach to scientific study began in Europe, hundreds of years later.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2009/04/090421_secretscience2.shtml
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Everything we buy, from books to baked beans, has a product code printed on it. More sophisticated check-digit codes exist on official documents, bank notes and air tickets. What are they for and what do they mean? We take a look at the mathematical structure of these codes and explain their purposes. And in this age of boundless surveillance, are there enough numbers for each of us to have a serial number of our own?
Talk given by Professor John D Barrow FRS
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An ancient Egyptian papyrus from around 1550 BC, used to train scribes. It contains 84 different calculations to help with various aspects of Egyptian life, from pyramid building to working out how much grain it takes to fatten a goose. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, looks at man’s early experiments with numbers and discovers how the Egyptians’ understanding of mathematics enabled them to build a state machine, which could manage food supplies and even compute the flood levels of the Nile.
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Former child prodigy Terence Tao has become one of the world’s greatest living mathematicians. At 24 he became the youngest person ever appointed full professor at UCLA, and at the tender age of 31 he was awarded mathematics’ highest honour, the Fields Medal.
Back in his childhood home of Australia, he visited the ANU to deliver this fascinating talk about one of his favourite subjects, prime numbers.
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