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.
We hear too often about sudden death in adults following prolonged and often unnecessary police restraint. What do people know about the dangers of restraint and how widespread is our understanding of such deaths?
Is there is a level playing field between participants at inquests? What does ‘equality of arms’ mean? Is such a concept appropriate when looking at inquests? Are inquiries better? How have they developed since the IRA Death on The Rock case?
Niklaus Wirth said Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. But programs are more than that. They are ubiquitous in modern life, but only a tiny minority of the population know how to program.
Humans use computers to do gigantic calculations which would be impossible to do by hand – for example, weather prediction. But could an AI go beyond that and come up with a proof of a theorem which has stumped humankind?
Amelia Dyer was one of the most prolific murderers in Victorian Britain. She made a living as a “baby farmer”, or someone paid to care for unwanted or abandoned infants – except she killed around 400 of them. How could a mother and nurse murder so many defenceless babies?
Is the jury system the bulwark of individual liberty? This lecture will look at the role of the so-called “perverse jury” in acquitting defendants where the law, or the charge itself, is deemed unjust.
This lecture will look at change ringing, which is ringing a series of tuned bells (as you might find in the bell tower of a church) in a particular sequence, and this has exciting mathematical properties. We will also ask: why are bells bell-shaped?