The Story of Math

This 2008 BBC series, compiling four hour-long episodes hosted by Oxford Professor Marcus du Sautoy, celebrates mathematics as a means of understanding the relationships that exist in the universe, presenting the history of numbers in such a way that even those who have trouble balancing their checkbooks will—for the most part—be able to understand. Du Sautoy, an articulate, enthusiastic, and personable host, travels the world to visit sites associated with famous mathematicians from ancient Greece to the present, describing their lives and contributions to the discipline. The journey begins in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece and then continues to China, India, and the Muslim caliphate before winding up in Europe, along the way incorporating interviews, graphics, and illustrative examples to explain everything from Pythagorean harmonics and the Fibonacci sequence to imaginary numbers and chaos theory. As a bonus, a third disc contains the three half-hour episodes of another mathematically oriented series, The Music of the Primes, in which du Sautoy entertainingly presents a history of prime numbers, beginning with Euclid, with special emphasis on the Riemann hypothesis—the proof for which could reasonably be called the Holy Grail of modern mathematicians. In The Story of Math, which is accompanied by a useful viewer's guide, du Sautoy manages to make comprehensible a subject that many of us find daunting. Highly recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (F. Swietek)