When you say space, I say Math

'Good old days of the east has gone. The spotlight now belongs to Europe'

            Starting the 17^th century, mathematics began to drift away from the east and found its way westward to Europe.  The starting of the movie was quite interesting. A man named Pierre della Francesca from Northern Italy was introduced.  He was famous for his painting called ‘The Flagellation of Christ’. (Yes, a painting, and it has something to do with Math). He was famous for making 3-dimensional painting in a two-dimensional paper. Perhaps, for us, who are living in the computer age and undeniably bombarded with tons of entertainment motion pictures, we tend to just ignore these things, but for them it’s some sort of a miracle. In relation with Math, certainly math is applied even in paintings. The estimation of the strokes of the paintbrush, the shapes, the distances, angles, it’s geometry – and so it is math. The Egyptians were also mentioned in the movie and their precise pyramids where even correlated to their mathematical knowledge. I wonder why they don’t acknowledge the Banaue Rice Terraces of the Ifugaos? (So here goes the patriotic side of me).

The next advancement in relation to math was followed only after two centuries. It was Rene Descartes, who was famous for linking algebra and geometry. He realized that curved lines can be translated into equations. As a mediocre human being, I can’t help but wonder how they could possibly think of those things. Truly, compared to these people, I really suck at math. Haha. It was supposed to be a nice movie marathon, it’s just that I had a bad copy of the movie and the British accent, in a way, seems hard to comprehend.  Oh well. I tried to cope up, so please bear with me. Some mathematicians were also introduced but they weren’t so familiar until the introduction of Isaac Newton from London. He was really famous in their place that even shopping centers are named after him. Duh, he is indeed popular in the whole world. Anyway, he was the one who discovered the gravity. Apart from it, he was also one of the pioneering discoverers of Calculus and Physics which is now broadly in lots of fields such as engineering, researches and etc. My favorite part of the movie maybe was when the place where Newton stayed centuries ago was visited. It’s like I’ve been transported back in time while he is still brainstorming about the theories he is formulating. I was also intrigued by that ‘mathematical-pinball-like’ machine, I wasn’t so sure where that part is. One thing, I like about watching ‘The Story of Maths’ was it is very informative. It doesn’t just feed you additional trivias nonetheless they give you a history of what was going on at that time. Just take for example, the little rivalry between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton over Calculus. From the movie, it was said that initially, Newton doesn’t have any plans of publishing his work until Leibniz came into the picture and discovered the same genius theory. The latter part of this controversy was never really that cleared on me because of the low-quality of my copy of the movie. I think they both end up getting the credits for it. Anyhow, let’s proceed. Have you heard of the Bernoulli’s equation? He was next in the picture. But to be honest, I forgot what he contributed in Math. Leonhard Euler, the father of topology, as well as, Gauss’ invention of modular arithmetic was also covered. Gauss also contributed in our knowledge about prime numbers. Janos Bolyai was also mentioned. Lastly, Bernhard Riemann, was famous for his theories about prime numbers. He also worked on the properties of objects, which he saw that could exist in multi-dimensional space.

To be honest, I slept in the middle of this movie. I don’t know if I was just boring or I am just tired. But I guess it is a good educational movie, though. This film for me got 6 out of 10 score. It might be better if I got a high-quality copy of the movie. Oh well, so long and until the next movie installment.