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.
In the first of two lectures with the theme ‘Merchants, Money and Megalomania’, Simon Thurley will unearth the lost mercantile buildings of medieval London and show how influential they were.
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.
We will carefully outline the categories of savings held by households and link that to the operation of financial intermediaries in providing loanable funds.
Driverless cars will affect us all profoundly. They will save many lives, destroy many livelihoods and change our behaviour in unexpected ways. What are the barriers to achieving the benefits of this new technology and how can they be overcome?
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.
Productivity growth in the UK economy has lagged behind that of our major trading partners. We will examine a number of possible explanations ranging from the role of finance to the employment of physical and human capital.
Alan Turing famously proposed a test of artificial intelligence. What has been achieved? Stephen Hawking has said that real artificial intelligence will mean the end of mankind. Is that a real threat? Are there limits to what a silicon brain might do?
We need to think of economic policy as some path co-ordinating monetary, financial and fiscal policy. The economic landscape that has been outlined implies some new cyclical and structural economic policy options facing the UK. These concepts will be discussed in this final lecture of the year.
For most of the period since we have had records, the UK has held a positive net international investment positions versus the rest of the world. But the UK is now a net debtor. What are the reasons for this extraordinary reversal and what does it mean for the exchange rate?