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.
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.
International negotiations concerning our environment such as on climate and biodiversity, often put the scientific case behind economic and political interests, with potentially disastrous consequences. What does that mean for human prosperity and even survival?
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.
Space today is terrifyingly silent. But it wasn’t always thus: the early universe was filled with a hot plasma in which sound waves could travel. The cosmos was quivering with the aftershocks of the Big Bang.
The criminalisation of religious speech before the ordinary courts in England began in 1676. Although the law on blasphemy was finally abolished in 2008, many of the troubling aspects of the old law remain in the form of the offence of incitement to religious hatred.
Lymphoma, leukaemia and myeloma arise from different parts of the white blood cell system. Unlike solid tumours, they can be widely distributed in the body, and this means they need a different approach.
On 17 August 1982, the first commercial CD was released. Digital recording and editing have changed the face of music by making recordings easy to originate and share. But has this affected musical quality, and what are the financial and artistic consequences?
Today's event
Today's event, The Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas, will not be livestreamed. Recordings of all lectures will be published soon!