Course summary

Every subject, from physics to philosophy and from computing to criminology, has been influenced by the great mathematical ideas of the past. Explore mind-boggling ideas through the colourful personalities that invented them, and see how these ideas have come to permeate every part of our modern lives.

Course organisation

Time: Mondays, 6:30pm - 8:30pm (10 classes) from 26 September 2012
Note: There will be no class on 31st October.
Place: Napier Room, 9 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh
Cost: £85.00/£56.00 concessions (book here)

Course content

  1. Inventing numbers: Why do we need negative numbers, irrational numbers and imaginary numbers? Are there some numbers which simply don't exist?
  2. Calculus: Was it Newton or Leibniz who invented the calculus first? Zeno’s paradoxes: how can we sum up infinitely many things and get a finite answer?
  3. Bayesian statistics: Sometimes our intuition about probability and statistics just isn’t up to the challenge.
  4. Symmetry: How can mathematics capture the symmetries of the world around us? (Evariste Galois)
  5. Graphs and networks: How did a question about crossing bridges lead to today’s dominance of Google? And what has this all got to do with postmen?

    6. NOTE: There will be no lecture on 31st October.

  6. Chaos and fractals: Can a butterfly make a hurricane? How long is the coast of Britain? And how can a snowflake live in dimension 1.26?
  7. Non-Euclidean geometry: Can parallel lines ever meet? How can our universe be finite but have no boundary?
  8. Game theory: Does it ever pay to be nice? And what was that mathematics on the windows in A Beautiful Mind?
  9. An infinity of infinities: Learn about the different sizes of infinity and how mathematics may not be as perfect as it seems. (Georg Cantor and Kurt Gödel)
  10. Prime numbers and concluding discussion: Why are prime numbers so important in modern technology, and what is the puzzle that could win you a million dollars?

About Julia

Julia

Julia Collins is a mathematician who recently finished her PhD in Knot Theory at the University of Edinburgh.