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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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.
Tagged with bbc in our time science mathematics randomness chance numbers
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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Episode three of Another Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.
Think of a number. Any number. Chances are you haven’t plumped for 2 to the power of 13,466,917 -1. To get this, you would need to keep multiplying 2 by itself 13,466,917 times, and then subtract 1 from the result. When written down it’s 4,053,900 digits long and fills 2 telephone directories. So, as you can imagine, it’s not the kind of number you’re likely to stumble over often. Unless you’re Bill Gates checking your bank statement at the end of the month.
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