Unlock the mysteries and inner workings of the world through one of the most imaginative art forms ever — mathematics — with Roger Antonsen, as he explains how a slight change in perspective can reveal patterns, numbers and formulas as the gateways to empathy and understanding.
Physicists, air traffic controllers, and video game creators all have at least one thing in common: vectors. But what exactly are they, and why do they matter? David Huynh explains how vectors are a prime example of the elegance, beauty, and fundamental usefulness of mathematics.
You’d have a hard time finding the medieval city Königsberg on any modern maps, but one particular quirk in its geography has made it one of the most famous cities in mathematics. Dan Van der Vieren explains how grappling with Königsberg’s puzzling seven bridges led famous mathematician Leonhard Euler to invent a new field of …
David Kaplan explains how the law of increasing entropy could drive random bits of matter into the stable, orderly structures of life. David Kaplan is a theoretical particle physicist at Johns Hopkins University and a producer of the award-winning documentary Particle Fever.
Is zero really a number? How did it come about? Hannah Fry tells the story of how zero went from nothing to something. Once upon a time, zero wasn’t really a number. Its journey to the fully fledged number we know and love today was a meandering one. Today, zero is both a placeholder, and …
What is something? On the most fundamental level thinkable, what are things? Why are things? And why do things behave the way they do?
General Relativity! Spacetime! And… Curved Lines? On this week’s episode of Spacetime, Gabe talks about what it actually means for a line to be straight so we can better understand what we mean by the idea of “curved Spacetime”. This is Part One of our series on General relativity, so be sure to check it …
From cryptanalysis and the cracking of the German Enigma Code during the Second World War to his work on artificial intelligence, Alan Turing was without doubt one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. An extraordinarily gifted mathematician, he is rightly regarded as the father of computer science having set in place the formal …
Our universe isn’t just described by mathematics, but it is mathematics. Specifically, it’s a mathematical structure. Our world doesn’t just have some mathematical properties: it fundamentally has only mathematical properties. Why is mathematics so spectacularly successful at describing the cosmos? In this Ri talk, MIT physics professor Max Tegmark proposes a radical idea: that our …
Web cartoonist Randall Munroe answers simple what-if questions (“what if you hit a baseball moving at the speed of light?”) using math, physics, logic and deadpan humor. In this charming talk, a reader’s question about Google’s data warehouse leads Munroe down a circuitous path to a hilariously over-detailed answer.
Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, talks at TED about his quest to make all knowledge computational — able to be searched, processed and manipulated. His new search engine, Wolfram Alpha, has no lesser goal than to model and explain the physics underlying the universe. Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything [KGVID width=”720″ height=”400″]http://www.ourprg.com/Video/StephenWolfram_2010-480p-en.mp4[/KGVID]
Using the fundamentals of set theory, explore the mind-bending concept of the “infinity of infinities” — and how it led mathematicians to conclude that math itself contains unanswerable questions.
TED presents Hannah Fry who in this accessible talk shows how complex social behavior can be analyzed and perhaps predicted through apt analogies to natural phenomena, like the patterns of a leopard’s spots or the distribution of predators and prey in the wild. Hannah Fry trained as a mathematician, and completed her PhD in fluid dynamics …
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