"The Beauty of Mathematics" Lecture by Sir Michael Atiyah

A capacity crowd of 350 staff and students filled the Swann Lecture Theatre on 6th November, 2014 to attend a lecture by Sir Michael Atiyah on "The Beauty of Mathematics". Sir Michael has long been fascinated by the topic and published a paper in March about mathematical beauty and neurology, based on experiments of the brain activity of mathematicians seeing various mathematical formulae. His wide-reaching lecture touched on this and many other aspects of mathematical beauty, leading to an intense Q&A session at the end of the lecture!

A video of the lecture is now available online. Thanks to Julia Collins for camerawork and Carmen Rovi for postproduction. The introductory music is from Ligeti's Six Bagatelles For Wind Quintet.