Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry's Mysterious World of Maths

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Documentary series exploring the mystery of maths.

Documentary series in which Dr Hannah Fry explores the mystery of maths. Is it invented like a language or is it discovered and part of the fabric of the universe?

Series 1

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Hannah Fry

Graeme Thomson

Dan Kendall

Kate Bullen

Windfall Films Ltd

Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry's Mysterious World of Maths: Series 1: Episode 2: Expanded Horizons

Expanded Horizons

Episode 2

Episode 2: Expanded Horizons

BBC Four - Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry's Mysterious World of Maths, Series 1, Expanded Horizons

Hannah travels down the fastest zip wire in the world to learn more about Newton's ideas.

Documentary series. Dr Hannah Fry travels down the fastest zip wire in the world to learn more about Newton's ideas on gravity.

In this new series, mathematician Dr Hannah Fry explores the mystery of maths. It underpins so much of our modern world that its hard to imagine life without its technological advances, but where exactly does maths come from? Is it invented like a language or is it something discovered, part of the fabric of the universe? As we increasingly come to rely on maths, this question becomes more important to answer.

In this episode, Hannah travels down the fastest zip wire in the world to learn more about Newton's ideas on gravity. His discoveries revealed the movement of the planets was regular and predictable. James Clerk Maxwell unified the ideas of electricity and magnetism, and explained what light was. As if that wasn't enough, he also predicted the existence of radio waves. His tools of the trade were nothing more than pure mathematics. All strong evidence for maths being discovered.

But in the 19th century, maths is turned on its head when new types of geometry are invented. No longer is the kind of geometry we learned in school the final say on the subject. If maths is more like a game, albeit a complicated one, where we can change the rules, surely this points to maths being something we invent - a product of the human mind. To try and answer this question, Hannah travels to Halle in Germany on the trail of perhaps one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Georg Cantor. He showed that infinity, far from being infinitely big, actually comes in different sizes, some bigger than others. This increasingly weird world is feeling more and more like something we've invented. But if that's the case, why is maths so uncannily good at predicting the world around us? Invented or discovered, this question just got a lot harder to answer.

Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry's Mysterious World of Maths: Series 1

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Documentary series exploring the mystery of maths. Is it invented like a language, or is it discovered and part of the fabric of the universe?

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Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry's Mysterious World of Maths

Series 1

Episode 2: Expanded Horizons

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