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In Our Time
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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. |
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| "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 ..." |
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RENAISSANCE MATHS
Read audience reactions to this edition of In Our Time.
Use our research page to find out more about this subject.
As with so many areas of European thought, mathematics in the Renaissance was a question of recovering and, if you were very lucky, improving upon Greek ideas. The geometry of Euclid, Appollonius and Ptolemy ruled the day. Yet within two hundred years, European mathematics went from being an art that would unmask the eternal shapes of geometry to a science that could track the manifold movements and changes of the real world. The Arabic tradition of Algebra was assimilated and both Newton and Leibniz developed the calculus - the maths by which we can still put men on the moon.
But how did this profound change come about? What were the ideas that drove it and is this the period in which mathematics became truly modern?
Contributors
Robert Kaplan, co-founder of the Maths Circle at Harvard University
Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of Science and Fellow of Linacre College at the University of Oxford
Jackie Stedall, Research Fellow in the History of Mathematics at The Queen's College, Oxford
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