Another Reason to Pay My Licence Fee October 28, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , trackbackThe BBC should get rid of Russell Brand and Johnathan Ross, and spend more money on programmes such as the wonderful series of maths documentaries they’ve been running on BBC4. That’s right, maths.
If you’re in the UK, pop over to iplayer and pick up ‘The Story of Maths‘ for a 4 episode trip through the history of maths from the Greeks, via the middle east to eighteenth century Europe and beyond. They’re presented by Marcus du Sautoy, who has apparently just been appointed to Richard Dawkins’ Chair for the Public Understanding of Science*, and a very interesting geek he is too.
But it’s not just this series. A couple of weeks ago, we had ‘High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos’, introducing chaos theory and its implications. Its easy to think of science presenting a definite, mechanistic view of the world, but chaos theory suggests that not only are some things unknown, but perhaps unknowable. In a sufficiently complex system such as the weather a very small change in initial conditions can send the system into unpredictable territory where it may be impossible to predict the outcome. Is that what’s happening to the climate? Or to financial markets? James Lovelock thinks the greenhouse effect is already irreversible and we watch the stock market gyrate wildly. Who needs gods and demons when this is around?
*hat-tip to Ben Goldacre on his del.icio.us feed
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Unfortunately we can’t pick up “The Story of Maths’ here in the Antipodes. This week a friend who’s an English teacher told me she’s bought a set of wonderful dvd’s called ‘The Story of English’ which I presume is a related BBC series.