Another piece of Mathematics

         Mathematics, never fail to amaze me regardless of the fact that we’re really not in good terms with mathematics, it’s not that I am not good at it, but it’s just that I tend not to understand the need for studying complicated mathematics. I mean, what’s the fuss for studying such? I think, or is it most likely, that I can still live my life without knowing too much information about the world of mathematics. Hmm, I am confident that I could still get to live my life happily if I only know the basics of mathematics. It’s not like that I still have to derive a complicated equations full of letters of the alphabet and a stampede of operations to buy an apple or whatever in a store, right? . . . well, this is me talking about mathematics back then. Now, I understand why we have to learn so much things which for other people is not necessary. I go with the belief to never stop learning, it is good that you know something but its better if you’ve learned so much more. I’ve learned so many things about mathematics already, but wait, there’s more. From the past movies we’ve watched, we could say that mathematics really came a long way, and what’s truly fascinating is that the venture for studying mathematics or whatever you call it seems to don’t have boundaries. Mathematics can really be everything, it really is limitless.

         In the third instalment of the movie, Story of Maths, it started with the artist Piero della Francesca who made masterpieces of arts, and also masterpieces of mathematics. Piero was the first major painter to fully understand perspective because he was a mathematician but also a painter. The problem of perspective is how to represent the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas. To give a sense of depth, a sense of the third dimension, Piero used mathematics. The power of perspective unleashed a new way to see the world, a perspective that would cause a mathematical revolution. His work was the beginning of a new way to understand geometry. By the 17th century, Europe had taken over from the Middle East as the world's powerhouse of mathematical ideas. Great strides had been made in the geometry of objects fixed in time and space. In France, Germany, Holland and Britain, they wanted to understand the mathematics of objects in motion. Descartes understood that the key was to build philosophy on the indisputable facts of mathematics. Descartes had unlocked the possibility of navigating geometries of higher dimensions, worlds our eyes will never see but are central to modern technology and physics. Truly, Descartes was one of the giants of mathematics. In the 17th century, there was a Parisian monk who went to the same school as Descartes, Marin Mersenne. He publicised some new findings on the properties of numbers. Pierre de Fermat virtually invent modern number theory. Fermat managed to find several new patterns in numbers that had defeated mathematicians for centuries. Isaac Newton worked on the laws of physics hich make sense with the use of Calculus. Gottfried Leibniz, Newton’s rival, also discovered the miracle of calculus. He developed differential calculus and integral calculus. Moreover, without the Bernoullis, it would have taken much longer for calculus to become what it is today. Bernoullis’ calculus of variation has become one of the most powerful aspects of the calculus. Euler created notations, which we are seldomly using nowadays. Carl Friedrich Gauss was so much ahead in his time; he was the first to explain how imaginary numbers worked. Actually, these people stated here are not the only ones who were given credit in the movie, there are still more but I just highlighted some of them in which for me were really necessary.

        Even these people are all dead, they are still so close to be called immortal. Since, their findings, discoveries or whatever you call it is still alive and truthfully we are using a lot of it especially in this technology-based world we live in nowadays. From everything that was discovered I began to question myself what more can mathematics offer, what can mathematics influence our world for the nth time and the like, these questions in my head really bugs me making me excited for what our future will be. I really not pretty sure how I will end this review. Hmm, I don’t know. I got so many things in my head that I want to express however, I have the difficulty to do so and also I am shy that the feelings I am going to express will be redundant from the past reviews we’ve done. Honestly, the movie is not that amazing, heart-filling and whatever but at least from watching such movies we get to learn something new.