NOVA: The Great Math Mystery
Airs Wednesday, March 28, 2018 at 9 p.m. on KPBS TV + Sunday, April 1 at 9 p.m. on KPBS 2
Is math invented by humans, or is it the language of the universe?
Underlying civilization’s stunning advancements and the technological wonders of the modern age is something deep and mysteriously powerful: mathematics.
But where does math come from and why does it work so well to explain our physical world? Is it humankind’s clever trick, or the deeply embedded language of the cosmos?
In "The Great Math Mystery," NOVA and a colorful cast of the world’s top mathematicians, physicists, and engineers embark on a mathematical mystery tour — a provocative exploration of math’s astonishing power as it has evolved over the centuries — to ponder a profound question: is math an invention or a discovery?
Whether we think we’re good with numbers or not, we all use math in our daily lives.
NOVA sheds fascinating light on how math works in our brains and why it works so well.
Math is essential in art, architecture, and music. It is evident everywhere in nature and the patterns of our world — from the spiral in the center of a sunflower, to the swirl of a nautilus shell or the whirlpool of a galaxy.
Math reveals the secrets behind the elliptical orbits of the planets and the electromagnetic waves used in the first wireless radio transmissions.
It predicts the discovery of the Higgs boson and the successful landing of rovers on Mars.
NOVA spins through stunning examples of math’s power that permeate history, drawing on Pythagoras , Galileo , Sir Isaac Newton , Albert Einstein , and more — and taps into the world’s top modern-day minds, who continue to puzzle over whether math’s tremendous potency is the hidden language of the universe or all in our heads.
Mario Livio , a notable astrophysicist who helps operate the Hubble Space Telescope from Space Telescope Science Institute , has spent much time wrestling with such questions and sees an uncanny accuracy in the way mathematics can reveal the secrets of the universe, making it seem an inherent part of nature.
Livio shows viewers through his Hubble research how centuries old, simple mathematical equations and groundbreaking insights on falling bodies and gravity by early scientists such as Galileo and Newton still permeate the universe as laws of science that can be applied to distant galaxies.
NOVA also looks at various patterns in nature and whether plants and animals have a fundamental ability to perceive numbers.
The film looks at the intriguing series of numbers known as the Fibonacci sequence.
Statistically, these occur frequently in botany, in the spirals on the bottom of pine cones, in the two sets of spirals in the seeds on sunflower heads, in the number petals on various kinds of daisies (e.g., 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55).
In another segment, Duke University’s Elizabeth Brannon shares the latest research on how well lemurs understand quantity and the abstract essence of numbers using fascinating computer recognition tests.
NOVA also looks at Pi (“π”) as just one example of a vast interconnected web of mathematics that seems to reveal an often hidden and deep order to our world.
Pi doesn’t only have to do with circles, but appears in probability calculations and in many phenomena with wave-like characteristics.
Pi tells us which colors should appear in a rainbow and how middle-C should sound on a Piano; Pi shows up in apples in the way cells grow into spherical shapes or in the brightness of a supernova.
The affinity between music and math is also examined in the film in a sequence featuring acclaimed jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding , who demonstrates on her upright bass the discovery by 6th century Greek scholar Pythagoras related to simple ratios in vibrating strings of varying lengths.
To him, these simple mathematical relationships produced the most beautiful, harmonious musical tones.
To look at what math does to the brain, NOVA studies the MRI images of a teen math prodigy who scored a perfect 800 on the SAT for Math at age 11 and compares the neuron activation in his parietal lobes with that of kids with average performance scores.
To illustrate the amazing predictive power of mathematics, NOVA selects examples that yielded highly tangible and relatable results, which are borne out all around us in the daily devices we use that require invisible waves of energy to communicate: televisions and TV remotes, radios, cell phones, satellites, baby monitors, Wi-Fi, garage door openers and GPS.
All of these are a result of a set of mathematical equations published in the 1860s by a Scottish mathematical physicist, which then inspired the work of Guglielmo Marconi , who later ushered in the era of the wireless telegraph and radio at the turn of the century.
NOVA also travels to CERN , home to the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, located deep underground in Switzerland, to show viewers where the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle, was confirmed — another significant discovery based on mathematical predictions.
Many of the world-class mathematicians and physicists featured in the film acknowledge that math feels more like an inherent truth that they discover, rather than an invention — including British mathematician and Barnard College professor Dusa McDuff ; mathematician and Columbia University professor Maria Chudnovsky ; theoretical physicist and University of Maryland professor Jim Gates ; and Christophe Golé, mathematician and Smith College professor .
Others, like physicist and MIT professor Max Tegmark , go a step further, arguing that mathematics is our physical reality.
Max perceives a real world that doesn’t just have some mathematical properties, but only mathematical properties.
As a dynamic and clever visual to demonstrate show viewers how Max might perceive the real physical world and the essence of reality to be purely mathematical, NOVA creates a special animation version of Max, “shrinking” him down and “inserting” him into a computer video game.
Several others fall more into the Einstein camp — who thought math to be a product of human thought, even though he wondered how it did so well in explaining the universe as we see it.
The late Eugene Wigner, Nobel laureate in physics , spoke of “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in describing the physics of the universe, calling it “a wonderful gift…we neither understand nor deserve.”
It is an opinion shared by particle physicist and Stanford University professor Savas Dimopoulos who calls mathematics “a servant far more capable than [we] are” , one that if you "ask nicely...will carry you all the way to the truth.”
Adam Steltzner , the lead landing engineer of NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover Project , demonstrates that “unreasonable effectiveness” using hydraulic boom lifts and custom-built ramps to show viewers how the mathematical expression of Galileo’s Renaissance discovery about the law of falling bodies is the same relationship used hundreds of years later by him and his team to land the “Curiosity” rover on the surface of Mars.
But there are also some experts — such as computer scientist/physicist Stephen Wolfram and physicist/engineer Derek Abbott —who point out the limitations of mathematics in explaining complex areas for which the models and prediction methods are “reasonably ineffective” — including meteorology and weather forecasting beyond a few days, human psychology, parts of biology, such as the interaction of neurons on the brain, and financial systems like the stock market.
Even Adam Steltzner admits that while engineers see math as a powerful tool, they are also keenly aware of its shortcomings.
When the elegance of math meets the messiness of reality, engineers shift into the domain of approximation rather than absolutes.
Precision may be sacrificed for practicality if it garners results, making mathematics appear a very human invention.
For many, the answer may be that there are elements of both discovery and invention.
In the end, the puzzle may never be completely resolved and the question remains a great math mystery.
This episode premiered April 2015 on PBS.
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A NOVA production for WGBH Boston . Senior Executive Producer is Paula S. Apsell .
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- Documentaries
The Great Math Mystery
NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour — a provocative exploration of math’s astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math’s signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the first wireless radio transmissions to the prediction and discovery of the Higgs boson and the successful landing of rovers on Mars. But where does math get its power? Astrophysicist and writer Mario Livio, along with a colorful cast of mathematicians, physicists and engineers, follows math from Pythagoras to Einstein and beyond, all leading to the ultimate riddle: Is math an invention or a discovery? Humankind’s clever trick or the language of the universe?
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The Great Math Mystery
Join NOVA on a mathematical mystery tour—a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy, and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. It all leads to the ultimate riddle: Is math a human invention or the discovery of the language of the universe?
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The Great Math Mystery Summary
Join NOVA on a mathematical mystery tour-a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy, and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the first wireless radio transmissions to the prediction and discovery of the Higgs boson and the successful landing of rovers on Mars. Astrophysicist and writer Mario Livio, along with a colorful cast of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers, follow math from Pythagoras to Einstein and beyond. It all leads to the ultimate riddle: Is math a human invention or the discovery of the language of the universe?.
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Seen in more than 100 countries, NOVA is the most watched science based television series in the world and the most watched documentary series on PBS. It is also one of television's most acclaimed series, having won many major television awards, most of them many times over.
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Great Math Mystery, The 1x53
2016 CINE Golden Eagle Award – Nonfiction Content
NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour—a provocative exploration of math’s astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math’s signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy, and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the first wireless radio transmissions to the successful landing of rovers on Mars.
But where does math get its power? Astrophysicist and writer Mario Livio, along with a colorful cast of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers, follow math from Pythagoras to Einstein and beyond, all leading to the ultimate riddle: Is math an invention or a discovery? Humankind’s clever trick, or the language of the universe? Whether we think we’re good with numbers or not, we all use math in our daily lives. The Great Math Mystery sheds fascinating light on how math works in our brains and ponders the ultimate mystery of why it works so well when decoding the universe.
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The great mystery of mathematics is its lack of mystery
KimManleyOrt/Flickr
by Scott Aaronson + BIO
In one sense, there’s less mystery in mathematics than there is in any other human endeavour. In math, we can really understand things, in a deeper way than we ever understand anything else. (When I was younger, I used to reassure myself during suspense movies by silently reciting the proof of some theorem: here, at least, was a certainty that the movie couldn’t touch.) So how is it that many people, notably including mathematicians, feel that there’s something ‘mysterious’ about this least mysterious of subjects? What do they mean?
There are certainly mysteries that exist within math. For starters, there are the thousands of unsolved problems, assertions that no one can prove or disprove, sometimes despite decades or centuries of effort. Although many of these problems are deep and important, a small example will do for now: no one has proved that, as you go further out in the decimal digits of π=3.141592653589…, the digits 0 through 9 occur with equal frequency.
Yet, for reasons that apply to many other unsolved mathematical problems, it’s debatable whether to call this a ‘mystery’. What would really be mysterious, one wants to say, would be if the digits didn’t occur with equal frequency! The whole challenge is to give airtight proof that what does happen is what anyone with common sense, after thinking the matter over for a bit, would conclude almost certainly must happen. As Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, wrote , a dirty secret in mathematics is that many unsolved problems have a similar flavour: they’re less about mysterious coincidences than about the lack of them.
Take, for example, the Twin Primes Conjecture, which holds that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers separated by 2 (such as 3 and 5, or 11 and 13). Ellenberg explains that, for this conjecture to be true, there doesn’t need to be any mysterious ‘force’ pulling primes together; there just needs not to be a mysterious force pushing them apart. Or take the Riemann Hypothesis, which states that the infinitely many non-trivial roots of a certain complex function all lie on a single line. When it’s stated that way, the hypothesis does sound like a mystery. Why should infinitely many numbers all happen to line up like that?
The mystery lessens once you realise that each zero of this function encodes global information about the distribution of prime numbers – and a single zero off the line would represent infinitely many prime numbers clumping together in astronomically improbable-seeming ways. So, if you like, one mysterious pattern has to be there to prevent a second pattern that would be even more mysterious.
Granted, not all mathematical mysteries have the character of rigorously proving what common sense would predict. In 1978, John McKay of Concordia University in Montreal noticed that the number 196,883 showed up in two completely unrelated-seeming parts of math. Surely it was just a coincidence? In 1998, Richard Borcherds – now at the University of California, Berkeley – won the Fields Medal largely for proving that, no, it wasn’t (following an inspired guess by the British mathematicians John Conway and Simon Norton, which they called the ‘monstrous moonshine’ conjecture).
Math, you might say, is a conspiracy theorist’s dream: it’s the one part of life where, when you see things match up, the odds are excellent that it’s not just a coincidence, that there is a deep explanation waiting to be unearthed. On the other hand, precisely because the entire subject is shot through with non-coincidental patterns, once you’ve spent enough time doing math, you might stop being so surprised by them. You might come to see them as just part of the terrain.
So maybe the right question is: after a mathematical pattern has been explained – not only proved but, let’s say, proved in 20 different ways, really exhaustively understood, like the Pythagorean Theorem – is there still a residual mystery about it? I would say that there is, but it takes some effort to put our finger on it.
Two years ago, the Czech string theorist and notorious conservative blogger Luboš Motl accused theoretical computer scientists such as me of believing the ‘P≠NP’ conjecture – a central unproved hypothesis about the limits of efficient computation – as a matter of groupthink and ideology, of having no rational grounds for our prejudice. By itself, that accusation isn’t so remarkable; Motl certainly isn’t alone in his opinion. But he went further. Although he conceded that, in continuous math close to physics, there can be reasons why statements are true, Motl claimed that as you get further away from physics, math becomes just a disorganised mess of propositions.
There are statements that happen to have been proved and that we can therefore agree are true, as we might agree with our accountant that 532+193=725. But if a statement hasn’t yet been proved or disproved then, in Motl’s view, there’s no way even to guess, better than chance, which way it will turn out. There are no valid analogies to any previously proven statements, no broad patterns, just one damn lemma after another.
To put it mildly, this hasn’t been my experience, or the experience of anyone else I know who works in any part of math. Yes, sometimes people are surprised; surprises are part of the thrill of what we do. But the surprises are surprises only because of their rarity, because of all the other times when things worked out pretty much the way the experts expected them to. And yet the rarity of surprises is itself a surprise, a genuine mystery. A priori, math could have been like Motl said it was, with the statements we care about lacking any humanly comprehensible reasons for being true or false. By and large, though, it isn’t that way. Why?
W e can put the point even more sharply. The Austrian-born mathematician Kurt Gödel taught that, given any mathematical question that hasn’t been answered yet (except for questions that boil down to a finite calculation, such as whether White has a winning move in a chess game), it’s possible that the answer is unprovable from the usual axioms of mathematics. And yet, 85 years after Gödel uncovered this gremlin at the centre of mathematics, the fact is that it’s remained mostly dormant. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem rears its head only in specialised situations: for questions about axiom systems that you would run into only if you were looking for unprovable truths; or questions in transfinite set theory that one could argue never needed to have definite answers anyway; or questions that ask whether a particular string of 0s and 1s is pattern-less (but which, for that very reason, have no general interest, unless we care for some reason about this pattern-less string); or questions that involve super-rapidly growing functions.
It didn’t need to be that way (or, maybe it did, but it’s not obvious why). A priori, Fermat’s Last Theorem, the Poincaré Conjecture, and pretty much every other statement of mathematical interest could have been neither provable nor disprovable: if true, then totally disconnected from all the other interesting truths, an island unto itself, with the only question (a question of taste!) being whether we should add it on as a new axiom. But it didn’t turn out like that. Instead of millions of islands, mathematicians discovered a supercontinent, with just a few islands here and there off the coast – and many of the islands, when explored further, ended up being connected to the mainland after all.
So again: why? One possible answer is a selection effect. Sure, there are plenty of pattern-less parts of math, but for precisely that reason, those parts aren’t interesting to humans. The parts that we teach students, put in textbooks, pontificate about in essays such as this one, etc, are the parts that ended up being interconnected and elegant. Likewise, no one wonders why the subjects of biopics so often turn out to have lived riveting lives; if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be biopics about them.
This strikes me as clearly part of the answer. But it can’t be the whole answer, because it doesn’t account for something all mathematicians have experienced: namely, the frequency with which there turn out to be striking patterns and connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, even when no one had thought to expect them beforehand, even when no one had charted out the territory and assured the latecomers that such patterns were there to be found.
A second possible answer is that even the parts of math that look far removed from physics are indirectly inspired by our experience with the physical world – and that they are coherent because the physical world is. This answer would push the mystery of math’s comprehensibility and elegance back to a different kind of mystery, what the Hungarian-born mathematician Eugene Wigner called the ‘ unreasonable effectiveness ’ of math in the physical sciences. A third sort of answer might focus on the peculiarities of the human brain, on its ability (which begs yet another ‘why?’) to zero in on mathematical questions that will turn out to be answerable and concepts that will turn out to be interestingly interrelated, even when the brain has no idea that it’s doing so.
I don’t know which of these answers is closest to the truth, or whether it’s something else entirely. Still, I feel confident in saying that, yes, there is something mysterious about math – but the main thing that’s mysterious is why there isn’t even more mystery than there is.
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Nova: the great math mystery.
2015 Directed by Dan McCabe , Richard Reisz
NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour -- a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the first wireless radio transmissions to the prediction and discovery of the Higgs boson and the successful landing of rovers on Mars. But where does math get its power? Astrophysicist and writer Mario Livio, along with a colorful cast of mathematicians, physicists and engineers, follows math from Pythagoras to Einstein and beyond, all leading to the ultimate riddle: Is math an invention or a discovery? Humankind's clever trick or the language of the universe?
Jay O. Sanders Glenn Kalison Max Tegmark Esperanza Spalding Sylvester James Gates Adam Steltzner Janna Levin Simon Schaffer Savas Dimopoulos Roger Penrose Stephen Wolfram
Directors Directors
Dan McCabe Richard Reisz
Additional Directing Add. Directing
Ekin Akalin
Producers Producers
Dan McCabe Richard Reisz Cara Feinberg Karinna Sjo-Gaber
Executive Producer Exec. Producer
Chris Schmidt
Writer Writer
Editors editors.
Dan McCabe Guy Tetzner Brian Truglio
Camera Operators Camera Operators
Colin Clarke Stephen McCarthy Gary Henoch Thomas Danielczik
Art Direction Art Direction
Leanne Dare
Composer Composer
Matt Norman
Sound Sound
David Keene Glenn Berkovitz Steve Bores Mike Duffield Peter Eason Caleb Mose Ben Turney
Alternative Titles
数学大迷思, The Great Math Mystery, Das Geheimnis der Mathematik: Die Sprache des Universums, El gran misterio de las matemáticas, Le Grand Mystère des mathématiques, A matematika csodája
Mystery History Documentary
Releases by Date
15 apr 2015, 15 jan 2016, releases by country.
54 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page
Popular reviews
Review by ejay
[Watched for class.]
Colour me intrigued. Perhaps, Mathematics is intrinsic to nature that thinking humans just decided to make even more complicated and difficult (lol).
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Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society
The Bulletin publishes expository articles on contemporary mathematical research, written in a way that gives insight to mathematicians who may not be experts in the particular topic. The Bulletin also publishes reviews of selected books in mathematics and short articles in the Mathematical Perspectives section, both by invitation only.
ISSN 1088-9485 (online) ISSN 0273-0979 (print)
The 2020 MCQ for Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society is 0.84 . What is MCQ? The Mathematical Citation Quotient (MCQ) measures journal impact by looking at citations over a five-year period. Subscribers to MathSciNet may click through for more detailed information.
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The Great Math Mystery Is math invented by humans, or is it the language of the universe? Airing April 15, 2015 at 9 pm on PBS Aired April 15, 2015 on PBS Program Description Join NOVA on a mathematical mystery tour²a provocative exploration of math¶s astonishing
The Great Math Mystery The documentary basically insists that math is everywhere. According to the internet, MATH really don't have definition. It is a quantity, a structure, patterns, etc. The documentary essentially sorts out examples and consistencies on the planet by the methods for it exist in all that our eyes see. Our reality won't be framed with the assistance of math as the ...
Airs Wednesday, March 28, 2018 at 9 p.m. on KPBS TV + Sunday, April 1 at 9 p.m. on KPBS 2. Is math invented by humans, or is it the language of the universe? Underlying civilization's stunning ...
The Great Math Mystery is a fascinating documentary that explored the nature of. mathematics and its connection to the universe or the world we live in. This uncovered the role. played by math in understanding the world we live in, via interviews with mathematicians, physicists and others. One of the main takeaways from the documentary is the ...
Reflection Paper (The great math mystery) - Free download as Word Doc (.doc / .docx), PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. The document discusses the author's reflections on the documentary "The Great Math Mystery - Nova". 1) It discusses Gottlob Frege's work on the levels of concepts needed to understand how numbers define and describe the world.
Watch Now. NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour — a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the first wireless radio ...
The Great Math Mystery. Season 42 Episode 7 | 53m 10s. Join NOVA on a mathematical mystery tour—a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy, and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. It all leads to the ultimate riddle ...
NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in...
NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour — a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature ...
Help Center. less. Download Free PDF. Download Free PDF. The Great Math Mystery. The Great Math Mystery. Ash Ma. See Full PDFDownload PDF. See Full PDFDownload PDF.
The Great Math Mystery. Join NOVA on a mathematical mystery tour—a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy, and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. It all leads to the ultimate riddle: Is math a human invention or ...
The Universe. Horizon. TV Calendar. NOVA Season 42 Episode 17: The Great Math Mystery Summary: Join NOVA on a mathematical mystery tour-a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy, and the spiral in the center of a sunflower.
Decoding The Universe - The Great Math Mystery - BBC Science Documentary. Documentary - Decoding The Universe: The Great Math Mystery Documental . NOVA leads...
View PDF. Author. Jibri L Kea. Last Updated. 8 years ago. License. Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. Abstract. Summary in LaTex for Great Math Mystery.
Great Math Mystery, The. 2016 CINE Golden Eagle Award - Nonfiction Content. NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour—a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy, and the spiral in the center of a sunflower.
The great mystery of mathematics is its lack of mystery. ... a genuine mystery. A priori, math could have been like Motl said it was, with the statements we care about lacking any humanly comprehensible reasons for being true or false. ... pontificate about in essays such as this one, etc, are the parts that ended up being interconnected and ...
There are lots of great books and papers on this, but in the spirit of this subreddit, I would recommend watching an incredible BBC documentary on Godel, Turing, ... Why this all ties in to "The Great Math Mystery" is that the documentary deals with the (now mostly outdated) idea that our brains (and hence the universe, because we perceive the ...
Guest Essay. Math Is the Great Secret. Sept. 18, 2022 ... The second mystery is that of prime numbers, those numbers such as 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and 13 that can be divided cleanly only by one or by ...
NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour -- a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the first wireless radio transmissions to the prediction and discovery of the Higgs boson and ...
April 8, 2024, 6:00 a.m. ET. Share full article. +. Hosted by Michael Barbaro. Produced by Alex Stern and Sydney Harper. With Will Reid and Jessica Cheung. Edited by Devon Taylor. Original music ...
Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify. Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt ...
Featuring Mara Hvistendahl. Produced by Rikki Novetsky and Mooj Zadie. With Rachelle Bonja. Edited by Lisa Chow and Alexandra Leigh Young. Original music by Marion Lozano , Diane Wong , Elisheba ...
Advancing research. Creating connections. CURRENT ISSUE: Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. The Bulletin publishes expository articles on contemporary mathematical research, written in a way that gives insight to mathematicians who may not be experts in the particular topic.