The Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan

"The Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan" features well-known number theorists from around the world associated with Ramanujan's oeuvre, most notably A. Raghuram and Ken Ono. Shot at various locations in Chennai, Namakkal, Kumbakonam, Erode, and Cambridge, this documentary highlights the trajectory of Ramanujan's seminal work and its relevance today. His scientific legacy continues to grow well beyond anything that previous generations of mathematicians could have ever imagined.

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Hardy, Littlewood, Cartwright and Ramanujan

The Great Math Mystery

NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour - a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the first wireless radio transmissions to the prediction and discovery of the Higgs boson and the successful landing of rovers on Mars. But where does math get its power? Astrophysicist and writer Mario Livio, along with a colorful cast of mathematicians, physicists and engineers, follows math from Pythagoras to Einstein and beyond, all leading to the ultimate riddle: Is math an invention or a discovery? Humankind's clever trick or the language of the universe?

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The Story of Maths

The Music of the Primes

The mystery that has confounded mathematicians for centuries is the riddle that surrounds the distribution of prime numbers. Primes are fundamental to mathematics; they are the basic blocks from which all other numbers can be built. Yet they seem to surface entirely randomly among the number line. But are primes truly random or is there some hidden pattern?

Marcus du Sautoy presents the story of those who have tried to capture one of the greatest unsolved problems of mathematics, the pattern of prime numbers. Filmed on location in America, India, Greece, Germany and England, the film includes interviews with some of the world's leading mathematicians.

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The Story of Maths
The Music of the Primes

A Mathematical Mystery Tour (BBC Horizon)

This is a 1984 BBC documentary looking at the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics including Fermat's Last Theorem (since solved), Goldbach's conjecture, The Riemann hypothesis, and the P=NP Problem. Featuring interviews with many modern mathematicians, this documentary also looks at the history of maths and some of if it's major players from Euclid to Bertrand Russell.

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The Story of Maths

Logic - The Structure of Reason

As a tool for characterizing rational thought, logic cuts across many philosophical disciplines and lies at the core of mathematics and computer science. Drawing on Aristotle's Organon, Russell's Principia Mathematica, and other central works, this program tracks the evolution of logic, beginning with the basic syllogism. A sampling of subsequent topics includes propositional and predicate logic, Bayesian confirmation theory, Boolean logic, Frege's use of variables and quantifiers, Godel's work with meta-mathematics, the Vienna Circle's logical positivism, and the Turing machine. Commentary by Hilary Putnam, of Harvard University; NYU's Kit Fine; and Colin McGinn, of Rutgers University, is featured.

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The Great Philosophers
The Story of Maths

Fractals: The Colors of Infinity

Arthur C. Clarke presents this unusual documentary on the mathematical discovery of the Mandelbrot Set (M-Set) in the visually spectacular world of fractal geometry. This show relates the science of the M-Set to nature in a way that seems to identify the hand of God in the design of the universe itself. Dr. Mandelbrot in 1980 discovered the infinitely complex geometrical shape called the Mandelbrot Set using a very simple equation with computers and graphics.

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Hunting the Hidden Dimension

High Anxieties - The Mathematics of Chaos

This is a BBC documentary which looks at how developments in mathematics over the past 40 years have completely changed our understanding of the fundamental nature of the world we live in. As we approach tipping points in both the economy and the climate, the film examines the mathematics we have been reluctant to face up to and asks if, even now, we would rather bury our heads in the sand rather than face harsh truths.

To Infinity and Beyond

By our third year, most of us will have learned to count. Once we know how, it seems as if there would be nothing to stop us counting forever. But, while infinity might seem like an perfectly innocent idea, keep counting and you enter a paradoxical world where nothing is as it seems. Mathematicians have discovered there are infinitely many infinities, each one infinitely bigger than the last. And if the universe goes on forever, the consequences are even more bizarre. In an infinite universe, there are infinitely many copies of the Earth and infinitely many copies of you. Older than time, bigger than the universe and stranger than fiction. This is the story of infinity. (from bbc.co.uk)

Dangerous Knowledge

Dangerous Knowledge is a BBC documentary presented by David Malone, looking at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide. The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. Cantor believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Godel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death. Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.

Dangerous Knowledge (Part 1/2)

Dangerous Knowledge (Part 2/2)

The Birth of the Calculus

This is a documentary presented by Jeremy Gray, about the birth of the calculus. Two men independently discovered and formulated methods for the Calculus, Newton in England and Leibniz in Paris. Jeremy Gray visits first Cambridge, to trace Newtons lines of thought through his notebooks, then Hanover, where Leibniz’s original notes are stored to trace his very different approach to the same problem.

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The Story of Maths

Hunting the Hidden Dimension

Mysteriously beautiful fractals are shaking up the world of mathematics and deepening our understanding of nature. You may not know it, but fractals, like the air you breathe, are all around you. Their irregular, repeating shapes are found in cloud formations and tree limbs, in stalks of broccoli and craggy mountain ranges, even in the rhythm of the human heart. For centuries, fractal-like irregular shapes were considered beyond the boundaries of mathematical understanding. Now, mathematicians have finally begun mapping this uncharted territory. Their remarkable findings are deepening our understanding of nature and stimulating a new wave of scientific, medical, and artistic innovation stretching from the ecology of the rain forest to fashion design.

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Fractals: The Colors of Infinity