Story of Maths Episode Guide

Episode Guide

• Season 1 Episode 4: To Infinity and Beyond

  Marcus du Sautoy investigates the great problems of mathematics which remain unsolved, including Georg Cantor's work on infinity, and conjecture about chaos theory from Henri Poincare. He also examines Bernhard Riemann's theorem on prime numbers, the most significant and abiding mystery of maths, which carries with it a $1million prize to whoever can crack it. Last in the series

• Season 1 Episode 3: The Frontiers of Space

  Marcus du Sautoy examines the mathematics of geometry central to the 17th-century work of Descartes and Newton and the understanding of how objects move. This led to the development of calculus and modular arithmetic, still at the heart of mathematics to this day, as well as Fermat's Last Theorem, which has puzzled mathematicians for more than 350 years

• Season 1 Episode 2: The Genius of the East

  Marcus du Sautoy discovers how, as Europe fell into the Dark Ages, the development of maths was taken up with vigour in the East. He learns how numeracy made possible great feats of engineering, and India came up with symbols for zero and negative numbers, as well as concepts of infinity. The academic then examines the propagation of the knowledge to the West through luminaries such as Fibonacci

• Season 1 Episode 1: The Language of the Universe

  New series in which Marcus du Sautoy examines the history of mathematics from the ancient world to its modern uses in explaining the construction of the universe. He finds the start of the decimal system in Egypt, the Babylonian beginnings for the Base 60 system, which covers time, and the Greek origins of mathematical analysis