To Infinity and Beyond

Synopsis

Marcus du Sautoy concludes his investigation into the history of mathematics with a look at some of the great unsolved problems that confronted mathematicians in the 20th century.

After exploring Georg Cantor's work on infinity and Henri Poincare's work on chaos theory, he looks at how mathematics was itself thrown into chaos by the discoveries of Kurt Godel, who showed that the unknowable is an integral part of maths, and Paul Cohen, who established that there were several different sorts of mathematics in which conflicting answers to the same question were possible.

He concludes his journey by considering the great unsolved problems of mathematics today, including the Riemann Hypothesis, a conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers. A million dollar prize and a place in the history books await anyone who can prove Riemann's theorem.

Credits

Presenter

Marcus du Sautoy

Producer

David Berry

Broadcasts

1. Mon 27 Oct 2008
   21:00
   BBC Four
2. Tue 28 Oct 2008
   00:30
   BBC Four
3. Tue 28 Oct 2008
   03:30
   BBC Four
4. Sun 2 Nov 2008
   19:00
   BBC Four
5. Mon 3 Nov 2008
   03:40
   BBC Four
6. Sat 15 Aug 2009
   19:30
   BBC Four
7. Sun 16 Aug 2009
   03:05
   BBC Four