The Story of Maths: a convergence of knowledge

by: Kissel Cablayda

The 2008 BBC documentary film, Story of Maths, focused not only on how mathematics developed alone. The film tackles how it sprouted and flourished with the emerging society, culture and science forming a fundamental trunk of knowledge we know today.

            Professor Marcus du Sautoy’s quest on why and how math developed brought him to the old societies of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and even into the great minds of Pythagoras, Plato, Archimedes, Hypatia and Euclid. He discovered the fundamental yet unstable way of calculating land areas of Nile, the witty yet surprising division of bread, the challenging yet complicated game of backgammon, the reasonable yet extensive way of measuring the shapes and spaces, and even the fascinating stories of the pioneering mathematicians on their quest for knowledge.

The language of the universe, his first among the four episodes, plays a very important role to open the minds of the viewers and to drag their interest into the realm of mathematics without intimidating them with the grandiose technicalities of it. Hence, the story provides points worth to be appreciated and be argued as well.

The episode is indeed a true refresher of mathematical terms and language. Having presented the technical terms in logical order, from the basic counting and computations to more complicated mathematical formulas, is a good way to restore the audience knowledge of mathematical terms learned in the early days of education.

 In general, it provides a good perspective of understanding mathematics in terms of linking it to other fields of discipline during the early development of civilization. From the most adjacent ones, like the development science and economy, to the less adjacent ones like music and arts and even religion, math achieved to explain its relative importance to these other areas of knowledge.

Good examples of these are the stories of the life of the mathematicians. These side stories are interesting not only because it humanizes the immense and astounding image of these genius celebrities but because these also give us a peek or a hint of how the views of people towards religion and science starts to diverge. The controversial “sect” formation of Pythagoras and Hypatia’s brutal death roughly marks the sign of a bigger change of societal views. Archimedes’ death, trying to explain the importance of his work to a soldier, is just a fairly analogy of a battle between ignorance and knowledge.

Pythagoras’ interesting discovery of musical tones and its relationship to whole number ratios and decimals is just a beautiful sample of an easy way to understand math, posing that it is just a distant relative of art. Unlike any other independent and isolated presentation of math history, it is beautiful to see how different faculties of knowledge synchronized as one to present it to the viewers like strings attached into one another, converging into one big beautiful body of knowledge.

However, there are some points that could further improve the episode. Its way of presenting the story is boring in general. It is merely inserting some good visuals trying to elude the topic to a dragging episode. From a very technical perspective, it seems that there are some parts used wrong and/or left unused. These things could somehow grasp the viewers’ attention, thus enhances their recall to the episode’s message. Although the pictures are fair enough to assist du Sautoy’s narration of the context, some parts are still difficult to be understood. One reason is that some pictures do not directly associate the message the narrator is trying to present. Although a montage of a place where the history happened is a good angle to present the story, it would be more helpful if the pictures used were directly connected to the words mentioned by du Sautoy.

The episode could also use texts to associate formulas and technical terms mentioned and explained by du Sautoy. It would be easier for the viewers to understand the concepts as some technical terms are difficult to comprehend when the audiences are only dependent to hearing. Such concepts of “Gin/Jin and Mana”, Pythagoras theorem and some formulas he mentioned but cannot be easily imagined unless shown in text can be enhanced.

            Amidst his ways to present and explain early mathematical ideas as simple as possible, such as the slicing of bread for fractions, pebbles for the radius of a circle, chips for multiplications, and even the knuckles of the fingers for Babylonian counting, there is one part that was left unexplained and thus questionable. Du Sautoy did not explain well the three strokes (III) of Babylonian number symbol that are associated with the numerical value 3,661. This part of the episode left ideas hanging and skipping it started the ambiguity of the story. 

            Another thing that could also be helpful in presenting the whole idea is to make a quick wrap up before the episode ends. This is to highlight important angles and points of the episode so as not to produce an “information overload effect” to the audience.

            But amidst its small technical flaws, the story of math has produced an intellectually healthy episode worth watched. Content-wise, it is very informative and selfless in presenting not only the history of math but also in some fields of arts and sciences.