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.
Mathematics has been used as a tool to understand and control infectious disease for over a century, but Covid-19 brought along a whole epidemic of new challenges.
Cynicism, Stoicism and Epicureanism, emerged shortly after Platonism and Aristotelianism in Ancient Greece. Each of these new schools of philosophy offered a moral programme advocating the best way to live and a more abstract physical, scientific model of the workings of the universe.
It is now easier to breach the security of people’s personal and business lives than perhaps at any time in recent human history. Technology has brought unimaginable speed, scale and reach to hackers.
Could AI replace stand-up comedians and scriptwriters? This may not be an impossible dream if you accept that nothing we do is forever beyond the scope of computer modelling.
Has the time come for some form of political appointment of Supreme Court judges? Should there be parliamentary scrutiny of judicial appointments? This lecture contrasts the position of British and American Supreme Court judges.
This talk relates true stories of life-changing events in which the use (or abuse) of mathematics has played a critical role. You will meet innocent victims of miscarriages of justice and the unwitting victims of mathematical bugs.
Where do we get our mathematical symbols from? Why is the set of integers called ℤ ? When was the equals sign first used? How about zero? Good notation tends to catch on quickly, whereas bad notation can obscure beautiful theory.
Food-related conditions – cancer, heart disease, and strokes – are the leading causes of preventable deaths in the UK. Common wisdom is that health reflects personal choices and will power.
In the wake of the decision in the parliamentary prorogation case Miller (No.2), the question of the politics of the judiciary has been thrust into the public eye. Was it “a constitutional coup” as some have claimed?