HASHTAG - A

(A Movie Review on "The Story of Maths" Second Installment)

            While I was looking for details that are interesting in the second installment of the documentary “The Story of Maths”, I was overwhelmed when I couldn’t even count the things I acknowledged as interesting. With this, I’ll present three points that hopefully would get good reads and would encourage people to watch this documentary because I believe I haven’t oversold it on my first review and hey, I gave this all my best to give you a good review on the documentary J.

          First point: THIS EAST IT!

          Well, aside from the point being a nonsense pun, what I am referring to is the ingenuity of the people from the east. The main revolving point of the second installment was of the geniuses of the east and boy! They are amazing! It’s saddening that eastern people aren’t literally credited for great advancements in the realization of the whole mathematics as a language. As a matter of fact, according to the documentary (Yes people, I am giving away spoilers, but I promise only a few), the idea of the numbers we use today first emerged from the eastern part of the globe. Not to be dividing-the-world-into-two-cist but I am from the east and I could’ve never been proud to know that a lot of contributions were from the great eastern minds. And as much as I don’t want to stretch this topic to the point of “hey, touché” but seriously! I am so psyched with this information which I would not even have the shadow of interest if not for this documentary. So with that, I’d say, hooray for this part of the quad-ology!

          Second point: SCIENCE AND MAGIC.

          Actually, the legendary affinity of mathematics to science is thoroughly discussed on the third and fourth installments (and mind you that magic is just a simile there). However, this part of the 4-part series is starting to hone up our imaginations on how vast the effect of mathematics is in terms of applications and explanations on how the universe work. By science, I mean how the early eastern people managed to explain activities of the heavenly bodies with the help of math. In the era where intuition is an asset, people have been very questioning of everything that is happening (SPOILER ALERT!) just like when the Indian mathematicians flourished trigonometry to explain distance of the moon and sun from earth. Thus, science began to partner up with mathematics to give answers and additional questions. Now if for some unknown reason you are asking why I even included magic in my point, then I’d like to stress that magic for me are the things that mathematics disprove and proves to be provable. The defining of succession series and power of arithmetic pattern by the early Chinese mathematicians really did a leap on the understanding of certain “magics” in the society and that I guess is one detail that shouldn’t be missed in this episode.

          Third point: ZERO’S HERO

          Have I told you I would really love to migrate to India right now aside from the fact that I’d add up to their great population. It must be wonderful to be a citizen of the city where a lot of historical events happened (oh, and have I mentioned Bollywood movies are soooo great too :D). And one of the many promising events from India in terms of mathematics except for their help with the HINDU-arabic (self-explanatory) is the realization of the value 0 which they coherently got from the concept of nothingness. I just don’t get how their early mathematicians were thinking for coming up with the value zero for literally nothing and devising its properties and that is a must see in the documentary. I can’t stress much on this anymore because by then I’d be spoiling one of the most important stops on the episode but I am pretty sure you’ll be astonished with the awesomeness as I was.

          Having to end this review, I’d suggest you’d want to have earphones or headsets while watching the documentary (and some popcorn or bagels would do) because this episode is kind of whimsical and words just keep spurting out of the speaker (the google famous guy) and you would not want to miss on the important facts! Again, arrangement of the facts were neat and anti-boring so it’s a good waste of time. Lastly, I’d suggest you start losing those unresolved issues with mathematics ‘cause I know you’ll re-marry math by the end of this series installment. And I am really pressured on leaving very catchy words but hey, I’d guess “Trust me when I say it’s good!” is enough.