Past lectures
Mathematical techinques lie at the heart of modern forensic methods for investigating crime and bringing the criminal to justice. Across...
Block designs are used in agriculture in connection with the planting of wheat. But earlier they arose in the so-called 'schoolgirls...
Tree diagrams arise in many contexts, from family trees to chemical molecules, electrical networks, the design of canals and the bracing...
We are all familiar with patterned wallpaper, but how many regular patterns are there? Can you tile your bathroom floor with square,...
The development of the calculus brought together two seemingly unrelated problems: how do things change, and how large are they? We...
With the invention of printing, mathematical writings became widely available for the first time. What influence did this have? We...
Arabic mathematicians embraced the mathematics of Ancient Greece and India. What did they do, and how did their achievements influence...
How can we distinguish between 'easy problems' and 'hard problems'? In this lecture I shall explain what is meant by an 'algorithm', and...
Prime numbers form the building blocks of arithmetic. But if we make a list of them, many questions arise. Pairs of primes differing by...
The concept of zero developed in many cultures over thousands of years. Why did such a 'natural' idea take so long? This lecture...
It is often argued that mathematics as we know it today originated in Greece, and names such as Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes are...
Many thousands of surviving mathematical clay tablets provide much information about Mesopotamian mathematics - but what mathematics did...
