Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
Space science is one of HM Government’s ‘eight great technologies’. In this lecture I will explain the mathematics behind satellites, showing how they are controlled, how they are sent to distant planets and how they transmit and receive data over vast distances.
Many of us have been in a medical scanner and benefited from its use in medical diagnostics. But how many of us have considered how it works? The maths behind modern medical imaging (showing how CAT, MRI and Ultrasound scanners work) will be explained.
M.C. Escher’s work often used ingenious tilings of the plane with interlocking figures. We'll look at the mathematics of this diagram and how Escher used it. We’ll also see how Coxeter produced mathematical research based on aspects of Escher's work.
Few people are lucky enough to save lives or change them for the better. Few also experience the horror of losing lives or worsening them. In this lecture I want to share some of the astonishing experiences of a paediatric heart surgeon.
The mystery of an image of a levitating mathematician that won a first prize in a photo science competition in 2013 will be explained to show that such principles can be used beyond special effects.
Mathematics is vital in ensuring that the lights stay on as the planners of the grid need to solve non-linear differential-algebraic equations to work out how much electricity can be generated, distributed and stored. These challenges will increase in the future.
Can we give a purely scientific account of human nature in terms of its physical, chemical and biological components. Richard Dawnkins' 'The Selfish Gene' is considered to see how a scientific narrative about selfish genes might correlate with a theological narrative about sin.