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.
An exploration of the concept of the 'good' doctor, and how we can ensure that our doctors are 'good'. This question is crucial at time when morale in the health services appears low and inquiries reveal poor practice by some health care professionals.
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.
Personal information is understood as the property of individuals, but this way of thinking about information raises questions about the ethics of information sharing, particularly in relation to medical research and the management of risk in healthcare.
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.