Documentary Screening: The Story of Maths
The Story of Maths is a BBC documentary series outlining intriguing aspects of the history of mathematics, written and presented by University of Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy.
The series comprised four programmes titled:
- The Language of the Universe
- The Genius of the East
- The Frontiers of Space and
- To Infinity and Beyond
In the last programme in the series, Marcus du Sautoy looks at some of the great unsolved problems that confronts mathematics in the twentieth century and tells the stories of the mathematicians who would try to crack them.
Mathematicians like David Hilbert who gave a historic talk at the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris and posed twenty-three then unsolved problems in mathematics which he believed were of the most immediate importance. And Georg Cantor, who investigated a subject that many of the finest mathematical minds had avoided – infinity. Cantor discovered that there were different kinds of infinity – and that some were bigger than others. And Henri Poincaré who was trying to solve one mathematical problem when he accidentally stumbled on chaos theory, which has led to a range of smart technologies, including machines which control the regularity of heart beats.
But in the middle of the twentieth century, mathematics was itself thrown into chaos by the startling discoveries of Kurt Gödel and Paul Cohen who established that there were several different sorts of mathematics in which conflicting answers to the same question were possible.
The documentary briefly explores the lives (and works) of Hilbert (23 Problems), Cantor (Infinite Set Theory), Poincaré (3 Body Problem), Euler (Seven Bridges Problem), Perelman (Poincare’s Conjecture/Topology), Gödel (Incompleteness Theorems), Cohen (Continuum Hypothesis’ proofs), Noether (Abstract Algebra), Robinson, Matiyasevich (Hilbert’s 10th Problem), Galois (Group Theory), Weil, Grothendieck (Algebraic Geometry) etc. It concludes with the Riemann Hypothesis, a millennium prize problem about the distribution of prime numbers.
The documentary screening will be followed by a discussion and Q&A session with Dr. Naqeeb ur Rehman, a mathematician with a PhD earned through the prestigious DAAD research program in Germany. His teaching expertise extends to the university level in the areas of algebra, knot theory, cellular automata, and mathematical philosophy. He has conducted math circles, seminars, and talks across various educational institutions. Besides, he runs the “OpenMathCircle” YouTube channel and Facebook page, where he has also shared his short Story of Algebra and a vlog on Cantor’s Math on Plaque in Halle, Germany.
This session is free and open to all. Just visit the venue to attend it.
The Black Hole
Plot 5H, Street 100, G-11/3, Islamabad.
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