TTC Video – Queen of the Sciences: A History of Mathematics

Description
In the 17th century, the great scientist and mathematician Galileo Galilei noted that the book of nature “cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is not humanly possible to understand a single word of it.”

For at least 4,000 years of recorded history, humans have engaged in the study of mathematics. Our progress in this field is a gripping narrative, a never-ending search for hidden patterns in numbers, a philosopher’s quest for the ultimate meaning of mathematical relationships, a chronicle of amazing progress in practical fields like engineering and economics, a tale of astonishing scientific discoveries, a fantastic voyage into realms of abstract beauty, and a series of fascinating personal profiles of individuals such as:

Archimedes, the greatest of all Greek mathematicians, who met his death in 212 B.C. at the hands of a Roman soldier while he was engrossed in a problem
Evariste Galois, whose stormy life in 19th-century radical French politics was cut short by a duel at age 20—but not before he laid the foundations for a new branch of modern algebra called Galois theory
Srinivasa Ramanujan, an impoverished college dropout in India who sent his extraordinary equations to the famous English mathematician G. H. Hardy in 1913 and was subsequently recognized as a genius
An inquiring mind is all you need to embark on this supreme intellectual adventure in The Queen of the Sciences: A History of Mathematics, which contains 24 illuminating lectures taught by award-winning Professor of Mathematics David M. Bressoud.

The “Queen of the Sciences”

The history of mathematics concerns one of the most magnificent, surprising, and powerful of all human achievements. In the early 19th century, the noted German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss called mathematics the “queen of the sciences” because it was so successful at uncovering the nature of physical reality. Gauss’s observation is even more accurate in today’s age of quantum physics, string theory, chaos theory, information technology, and other mathematics-intensive disciplines that have transformed the way we understand and deal with the world.