Numbers That Made The World
Listen to 3 BBC podcast episodes dealing with the enduring power of numbers
Episode 1
World-renowned building designer and engineer, Cecil Balmond, has long been fascinated with the enduring power of numbers. He sets off on a journey to explore their global story through symbols, patterns and designs. In Episode 1, he focuses on numbers as symbols. He explores their sacred and superstitious power, from Buddhism to Judaism; learns about the traditional north-African belief in the power of 5, and the Chinese ‘Book of Change’. He meets Professor Charles Burnett to discuss how the numbers we use today originated in India, before migrating to the Arabic world and then onto Europe.
Episode 2
In the second part of Numbers that Made the World, designer and engineer, Cecil Balmond, explores numbers as patterns. He unravels the human instinct to find numerical nuances in the universe, beginning with a visit to Boston in the US to talk to Dr Mario Livio, author of ‘Is God a Mathematician?’. He meets Professor Mandelbrot, the man who discovered the psychedelic beauty of fractals in the 1970s, and former-hostage, John McCarthy, reveals how he turned to calculations in desperate moments during his captivity.
Episode 3
In the last of his series, world-renowned building designer and engineer, Cecil Balmond, draws on his breadth of professional expertise to focus on numbers in creation and design. He takes a walk to St Paul’s Cathedral in London to speculate on the forces which hold the famous dome in place; unpicks the numerical harmonies first discovered by the Greeks, and the rhythms that drive the Argentinean Tango; and Keith Devlin from Stanford on the west coast of America – the birthplace of Google – discusses the future of numbers for this century and beyond.
Via: swen.antville.org
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