It Will Never be the Same

The fourth episode of the Story of Maths—The Frontiers and Beyond—went back to the seventeenth century where Europe became the source of mathematical ideas. The episode will help us understand the geometry of objects fixed in space and in time.  The episode started when the host, Du Sautoy, visits Urbino, a town in northern Italy, to know what Pier della Francesca’s masterpieces of art or it could also be called masterpieces of mathematics. Architects and artists of the early Renaissance have brought back the use of Perspective but Pier della Francesca was the only one who fully understood this. The problem of Perspective was how to bring the 3-dimensional world on a 2-dimensional canvass. Francesca’s masterpiece The Flagellation of Christ is where he used mathematics to make an illusion of Perspective. His work made us understand geometry.

Du Sautoy then went to a village in France, Descartes. Descartes is where the pursuit to understand the mathematics of objects in motion was first made. The village was named after the famous mathematician Rene Descartes. He had an explanation that it is possible to describe curved lines with equations. This merged geometry to algebra.

The host also showed the properties of prime numbers discovered by Pierre Fermat. Today, Fermat’s theorem is now the basis for the codes for protection when you buy things on the internet using a credit card. It’s amazing how these numbers could be beneficial for us today.

Du Sautoy then went to England. He describes how Isaac Newton’s development of math and physics (calculus) which is vital to knowing the behavior of moving objects to engineers. He shows the controversy of Newton and Leibniz. The father of topology, Leonhard Euler, was then introduced. It is then followed by the one who invented the modular arithmetic or a new way of handling equations who is Gauss. He further elucidated the contribution of Gauss in how to understand prime numbers. What Gauss did led to the formation of Bernhard Riemann’s theories on prime numbers. This is where Riemman wanted to study the properties of objects in which he saw these as manifolds that could exist in multi-dimensional space.

For me, these mathematicians were really that eager to obtain that knowledge. That’s why when they fully understood it relativity occurred. Now, we can fully understand the multi-dimensional space and interpret it.

The video was a little dry for me unlike in the past videos. Maybe because am not really a fan of angles and dimensions. What I appreciated the most is the never-ending enthusiasm of the host. It made the program more interesting by just looking at his face. Overall, the video was full of facts but it wasn’t that knowledgably fun for me.