Summary
The Dark Ages are often painted as an era of scholarly decline. The Western Roman Empire was on its way out, books were few and far between, and, if you believe the stereotype, mud-splattered peasants ran around in rags.
However, it was far more intellectually vibrant than you might imagine. Out of this era emerged a set of ‘problems to sharpen the young,’ including the famous river crossing puzzle that’s still taught in maths today. The presumed author of these riddles is Alcuin of York – ‘the most learned man in the world.’ And it was this monk and his puzzles that laid the foundations for a branch of mathematics called combinatorics – the thinking behind today’s computer coding and cryptography.
Philip Ball speaks to historian Mary Garrison from the University of York to learn of Alcuin's character and how he encouraged his students to learn for the sake of learning, as opposed to salvation. And University College London mathematician Hannah Fry shows Philip just how much of a role combinatorics plays in today’s world.
Picture: White horned goat chewing a cabbage leaf, Credit: Oxana Medvedeva
Producer: Graihagh Jackson
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello and welcome to Discovery from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:40.0 | I'm Philip Ball and on today's science story the tale of an Englishman who told this puzzle. |
| 0:47.0 | It's the early Middle Ages and you're off to market. |
| 0:55.0 | You're selling a wolf, a goat and a bunch of cabbages. |
| 1:00.0 | The road is rough and dangerous and you've had to keep a constant eye out to make sure the wolf doesn't eat the goat and the goat doesn't gobble the cabbages. |
| 1:10.0 | You're nearly there, but now there's one more obstacle, a river to cross. |
| 1:17.0 | Fortunately, there's a boat, but it's so small that you can only take one thing at a time with you. So how do you get everything |
| 1:26.6 | across the river without anything getting eaten? I'll give you a while to think it over. Of course you might have heard this puzzle before. It's an old one. |
| 1:38.0 | Probably much older than you thought. The first record of it is in a document in the ninth century, yes, back |
| 1:46.6 | before the Norman invasion of Britain in what historians used to call the Dark Ages. And it's the kind of challenge you might have |
| 1:56.3 | been said if you were a young lad of that era come to live a life of religious |
| 2:01.0 | devotion at the French Monastery of San Martin in Tours, back when France was |
| 2:07.1 | still part of the kingdom of the Franks. You never expected that. You thought you were exchanging a precarious subsistence in some God-forsaken |
| 2:18.1 | village for board and lodging provided by the monastery. Sure, you'd have to work the monastic lands and spend long |
| 2:26.2 | dull hours in chilly cloisters in prayer or studying the Bible, but it seemed like a fair exchange for a bit of security. |
| 2:36.2 | You probably didn't expect to be set a test in maths and logic. |
... |
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