 | | | | | | | | |
|
| |
| In Our Time
|  | |  | MISSED A PROGRAMME?
Go to the Listen Again page | |
|
| | | | PROGRAMME INFO | | | |
| | | The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. | | | | | LISTEN AGAIN | | | |
|
|
| | PRESENTER | | | |
|  | | | | BIOGRAPHY
| | | | | "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
| |
| | |
| PROGRAMME DETAILS | | | |
|  | | INFINITY
Read audience comments on this programme
Jonathan Swift encapsulated the counter-intuitive character of infinity with insouciant style:
“So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas on him that prey
And these hath smaller fleas to bite ‘em
And so proceed ad infinitum.”
Alas, the developing utility mathematicians put to the idea of infinity did not find the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes quite so relaxed. When confronted with a diagram depicting an infinite solid whose volume was finite, he wrote, “To understand this for sense, it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or logician, but that he should be mad”. Yet philosophers and mathematicians have continued to grapple with the unending, and it is a core concept in modern maths.
So, what is mathematical infinity? Are some infinities bigger than others? And does infinity exist in nature?
Contributors
Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick
Robert Kaplan, co-founder of The Math Circle at Harvard University and author of a new book, The Art of the Infinite: Our Lost Language of Numbers (written with Ellen Kaplan, Allen Lane, 2003)
Sarah Rees, Reader in Pure Mathematics at the University of Newcastle
Further reading
A Brief History of Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable by Brian Clegg (Robinson, 2003)
| | |
RELATED LINKS
| |
| |
|
| | | | |
|
