Today I found myself sitting in Blackwells bookshop looking at a differential equation and very concerned to realise that it meant almost nothing to me. You may well ask why I didn’t just find another book, and that’s a good question. I’ve enrolled in a course about wind power, at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, and they say the absolute minimum prerequisite is A level maths and physics, which I blithely told them that would be fine.

This is one of my regular forays into finding a better way of earning a living than corporate IT project management, and my idea of how to save the planet from impending climate doom.  I suspect its going to be a long, dark winter.  I bought the book.  I refuse to get a bicycle.

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