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.
England’s Catholic Reformation is the reformation that sixteenth-century England nearly had: a reformed and renewed English Catholic Church, its new schools and revived parishes matched with a firm smack of discipline.
The story of the Mayflower is usually presented as a tale of persecuted Pilgrims crossing the Atlantic in circumstances of grave adversity to inhabit a desolate wilderness.
This lecture addresses the potential links between AI and religious belief, which include the question of whether an artificial “superintelligence”, were one to arise, would be well-disposed towards us.
This final lecture will ask why it suits each age to select, reinvent and suppress different parts of the history of religious atrocity, and why some victims, such as Anabaptist radicals, remain neglected down to the present.
This final lecture will celebrate some of the great mathematical equations, and related algorithms, which have both changed the world as we know it and which are likely to change it in the future.
Nowhere in Europe have the wars of religion lasted longer than in Ireland. At the heart of this are two rival sets of memories of atrocities: above all, Protestants recall the massacres of the 1641 rebellion, and Catholics recall the massacres perpetrated by Oliver Cromwell in 1649.
In the age of exploration, Catholic missionaries fanned out across the world, meeting with extraordinary success but also extraordinary opposition: nowhere more so than in Japan, where the fast-growing Catholic community was brutally suppressed in the early seventeenth century.
Mathematics and art are more similar than is commonly thought. Each is concerned with the process of being highly creative with abstract objects and of producing everlasting work of great aesthetic beauty.
I will start by looking at the mythology that has gathered around the Golden Ratio, and also consider the fairness of cake-cutting, and changing choices in the Monty Hall problem.