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.
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.
This opening lecture of the series, with musical illustrations, will use documents, poetry and images to bring the instrument to life, with a particular focus on the autobiography of the beguiling Tudor musician Thomas Whythorne.
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.
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.
A musical journey into The Orgelbüchlein - the jewel in Bach's organ music - a collection of magnificent miniatures which encompass all the musical emotions and which allow the organist to show all the colours and sonorities of the instrument at his disposal.
We all rely on materials: natural ones like wood and stone - or manufactured ones such as steel, glass and concrete. The mathematics needed to design and study such materials is rich and challenging.