Maths: Alex Bellos, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Serafina Cuomo, Vicky Neale
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2016
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anne McElvoy meets David Rooney curator of the Winton Mathematics gallery at the Science Museum which has been redesigned by Zaha Hadid architects and explores the way maths skills are increasingly needed for jobs. She discusses the changing attitudes to mathematics in history and the present day with Alex Bellos, writer on maths puzzles, maths historian Serafina Cuomo and maths lecturer Vicky Neale. They are joined by astro-physicist Neil de Grasse Tyson who is director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.
Alex Bellos is the author of Alex Through The Looking Glass and his latest book called Can You Solve My Problems. Neil de Grasse Tyson is the author of many books including Welcome to the Universe co-written with J Richard Gott and Michael A Strauss. Vicky Neale is Whitehead Lecturer at the Mathematical Institute and Balliol College at Oxford University. Serafina Cuomo is Reader in Roman History at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Producer: Harry Parker.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds. Welcome to the |
| 0:32.8 | Arts and Ideas download from the free-thinking team at the BBC. This week, $25 million worth of prizes was on offer to researchers at the Breakthrough Awards |
| 0:42.7 | at NASA's Ames Research Centre in California's Silicon Valley. |
| 0:47.3 | Among the winners was the mathematician Jean Borgain, for in part his work on extending |
| 0:52.2 | Trudinger's equation as if it needed an extension. |
| 0:55.6 | The ceremony was funded by cyber billionaires and hosted by Morgan Freeman, |
| 1:00.5 | and it featured a performance from Alicia Keys, |
| 1:03.3 | a sign that maths is shaking off its dusty image and attracting stardust. |
| 1:08.0 | Here in Britain tomorrow, the Science Museum opens the Winton Gallery, dedicated to |
| 1:12.7 | stories of mathematicians, their tools and ideas, and the wider world their work has underpinned |
| 1:18.6 | from the late 16th century to today. Long the least favourite subject of schoolchildren the world over |
| 1:25.0 | is mathematics undergoing a renaissance of enthusiasm and interest, |
| 1:29.3 | are sums finally sexy and algorithms alluring? |
| 1:32.3 | The gallery covers 400 years' history of mathematical practice. |
| 1:36.3 | And it's been shaped by everything we care about, you know, war and peace and life and death and money and trade. |
| 1:42.3 | So we're telling stories in this gallery about how mathematics |
| 1:45.2 | has shaped our world in some really profound ways. Tonight I'll be talking to Alex Belos, |
| 1:51.1 | Serafina Cuomo and Vicky Neal, three maths professionals about the increasing popularity of their |
| 1:56.5 | subject. Not a million miles from maths, but dealing in billions of miles from Earth, is the world of astrophysicists. |
| 2:03.6 | Another winner of a breakthrough prize was Joe Polchinski. |
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