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 live in an information age, with vast amounts of data constantly sent around the world. This lecture will introduce you to the mathematics of information.
Since Newton, we are used to science making confident predictions about the future. For example, the motion of the planets and the times of the tides. However, some things seem very hard to predict, such as the stock market, or the weather in six months' time.
We all eat and have an interest in food! The many existing, and potential, applications of mathematics in agricultural-science and food technology will be described, explaining many of the fundamental processes that see us fed and watered.
From Leonardo da Vinci to the Brothers Grimm our fascination with hair has endured in art and science. This talk will cover the mathematics involved, focusing on the important historical developments of elasticity theory due to Euler and Bernoulli.
Spinning things are strange. Why does a spinning top stand up? Why doesn't a rolling wheel fall over? How does a falling cat always manage to land on its feet? How can the Hubble Space Telescope turn around in space? How do ice-skaters spin so fast? Taking a look at gyroscopes, this lecture explores the common threads that link all spinning things. The law of Conservation of Angular Momentum is far more subtle than we may think and there are many counter-intuitive observations.
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?
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