Giants of Math

            In Marcus du Sautoy third episode, entitled ‘The Story of Maths- The Frontiers of Space’ he has come to different places to share his experiences of exploring the fascinating tale of mathematics and unravels the great strides of mathematics as time goes by. The episode focuses on the development of mathematical ideas in Europe, especially around the 16^th-19^th centuries.

            Beginning the 17^th century, Egypt replaced the Middle East as the house of supremacy of mathematical ideas. He started his trail on the town of northern Italy in Urbino where Piero della Francesca, Renaissance artist was introduce by his perspectives as a mathematician as well as an artist in his masterpiece The Flagellation of Christ.  Piero was the first major painter to fully understand perspective. The problem of perspective is how to represent the 3D world on a 2D canvass, but Piero has made a way to solve this problem. And amazingly, the power of perspective unleashed a new way to see the world, a perspective that would cause a mathematical revolution- the beginning of a new way to understand geometry.

            In France, Germany, Holland and Britain, the race was to understand the mathematics of objects in motion and the pursuit of the new mathematics in a village found in the center of France. He looks at the efforts of René Descartes, an exceptional mathematician and theoretical physicist as well as one of the great philosophers, who realized that it was possible to bond algebra and geometry. Descartes slips in to a dream and in the dream he understood that the key was to build philosophy on the unquestionable facts of mathematics. Numbers he realized could sweep away the cobwebs of uncertainty. His fundamental insight - that it was possible for curved lines to be explained as equations - would change the route of the discipline forever. 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.

                The amazing properties of prime numbers discovered by Pierre Fermat, whose famous last theorem would enigma mathematicians for more than 350 years was also scrutinize by Marcus. He gives an idea about how one of Fermat’s theorems is now the foundation for the codes that shield credit card transactions on the internet.

            Isaac Newton’s progress of calculus in England is an enormous breakthrough which is critical to understanding the behavior of moving objects and used today by every engineer. He also goes in hunting mathematical giants such as Leonard Euler, the father of topology or ‘bendy geometry’ and Carl Friedrich Gauss, who at the age of 24 was accountable for inventing modular arithmetic (a new way of handling equations).

            And Marcus also looks at Gauss’ major breakthroughs in our understanding of how prime numbers are distributed. This made an essential contribution to the work of Bernhard Riemann, who developed significant theories on prime numbers and had important insights into the properties of objects, which he saw as diverse that could exist in multi-dimensional space.

            Truly mathematics never really fails to astonish me. In all the new tidbits of knowledge I had absorb, the different giants of math greatly contributes in our modern times today, beginning from the development of geometry up to the complex calculus learned to day that was developed by over great people such us Riemann. In spite and despite of the mathematician’s standing in life, of all there hardworks, the problems they encountered, the passion and dedication in doing this such, and having the feeling like the it’s the end of the world, this people not only touched literally the hearts and minds of the mathematicians and scientists but also the lay men which becomes an eye opener in exploring, learning, understanding the changing world and developing things that would make our globe a better place to live in.