That which has no part: Euclid’s definitions

Archimedes’s emblematic death makes sense psychologically and embodies a rich historical picture in a single scene. Transcript Archimedes died mouthing back at an enemy soldier: “Don’t disturb my circles.” Or that’s how the story goes. Is this fact or fiction? We have third-hand ...  Show more

Copernicus’s planetary models contain elements also found in the works of late medieval Islamic astronomers associated with the Maragha School, including the Tusi couple and Ibn al-Shatir’s models for the Moon and Mercury. On this basis many historians have concluded that Coperni ...  Show more

If anyone has taken some basic mathematics, you are probably familiar with Euclidian Geometry. Euclidean geometry is what most people just call geometry.  It is the study of shapes like triangles and circles in a simple plane. This type of geometry was developed over 2000 years a ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss an iconic piece of 20th century maths - Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. In 1900, in Paris, the International Congress of Mathematicians gathered in a mood of hope and fear. The edifice of maths was grand and ornate but its foundations, called axio ...  Show more

Covering Part 8 of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event on “Theory of the Subject,” Alex and Andrew discuss the theory of subject and the event, and Badiou’s wider work. Guest Andrei Rodin contextualizes Badiou’s project through its relation to the wider philosophy of mathematics. Rodi ...  Show more

The nature of proof and mathematics as a creative enterprise. Not all that is true can be proved as such, the high hopes of David Hilbert for placing the entirety of mathematics on a "firm foundation", the mathematical world-shattering results of Kurt Gödel which frustrated that ...  Show more