In the third episode we will see Europe by the 17th century taking over from the Middle East as the powerhouse of mathematical ideas. Great strides had been made in understanding the geometry of objects fixed in time and space. The race was on to discover the mathematics to describe objects in motion. This programme explores the work of Rene Descartes, Pierre Fermat, Isaac Newton, Leonard Euler and Carl Friedrich Gauss. Du Sautoy proceeds to describes René Descartes realisation that it was possible to describe curved lines as equations and thus link algebra and geometry. He talks with Henk J. M. Bos about Descartes. He shows how one of Pierre de Fermat’s theorems is now the basis for the codes that protect credit card transactions on the internet. He describes Isaac Newton’s development of math and physics crucial to understanding the behaviour of moving objects in engineering. He covers the Leibniz and Newton calculus controversy and the Bernoulli family. He further covers Leonhard Euler, the father of topology, and Gauss' invention of a new way of handling equations, modular arithmetic. The further contribution of Gauss to our understanding of how prime numbers are distributed is covered thus providing the platform for Bernhard Riemann's theories on prime numbers. In addition Riemann worked on the properties of objects, which he saw as manifolds that could exist in multi-dimensional space.
In the fourth episode, Professor 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 sees how mathematics was itself thrown into chaos by the discoveries of Kurt Godel and Paul Cohen, before completing his journey by considering some unsolved problems of maths today, including the Riemann Hypothesis.
Take an express journey to the edge of the universe as the filmmakers use computer-generated animation to build on images captures by the Hubble Telescope. The animation and story telling absolutely wonderful. Beginning on planet Earth, viewers are hurtled into the deepest reaches of space. There are no stops on this flight, and along the way the mysteries of the universe come alive as we examine the history and science of distant celestial.
Author and nuclear physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili looks at what led to the discovery that everything is made of atoms. The programme looks at how the discovery affected the scientific world including the atomic energy theories of Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg and quantum mechanics
Professor Jim Al-Khalili continues his investigation of the atom by looking at radioactivity, the Atom Bomb and the Big Bang, and even why we are here and how we were made. He shows that, in the quest to understand the atom, the mystery of how the entire universe was created became revealed
