Learning The Story of Maths

摘要

In 2008 BBC 4 presented four one-hour docu-mentary television programmes entitled The Story of Maths, filmed on location around the world and featuring Marcus du Sautoy. These documentaries, aimed at the general interested viewer, were joint productions of the BBC and the Open University and demon-strated how mathematics developed from earli-est times to the present day. Their titles were:1. The language of the universe(on the mathematics of Egypt, Mesopota-mia and Greece)2. The genius of the east(on the mathematics of China, India, Islam and early Europe) 3. The frontiers of space(from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and featuring perspective, number theory, cal-culus, gravitation, and non-Euclidean geometry)4. To infinity and beyond(featuring some of Cantor's work on infinite sets, the Hilbert problems, the work of Godel and Julia Robinson, and Perelman's solution of the Poincare conjecture)