MST_3: The Story of Maths: The Universal language_by Denzelle Freya A. Del Puerto

Name: Denzelle Freya A. Del Puerto                                                 December  2013

MST-3

The Story of Maths: The Universal language

The Story of Maths: The Universal language is a documentary video, written and was narrated by Marcus du Sautoy.  The film is offered with important mathematical ideas and history. Parts of the film are packed with appealing tales, biological details and crucial episodes defining mathematics as the Universal language of the Universe.

Sautoy actually visited historical math sites. In Egypt, he uncovers use of a decimal system based on ten fingers of the hand and discovers that the way we tell the time is based on the Babylonian Base 60 number system. In Greece, he looks at the contributions of some of the giants of mathematics including Plato, Archimedes and Pythagoras, who is credited with beginning the transformation of mathematics from a counting tool into the analytical subject of today.

            The film enthralls viewers to get to know more about mathematics. His explanations are sometimes vague, and I don’t know if it’s because of his accent or what but there were some parts I couldn’t understand. The flow of the story of math follows distinct order from what happened in ancient times with math and connected it with present-day mathematical applications. The film is very handy for introductory mathematics since it tackles on those times before severe computations were invented in the late 19^th century.

“Mathematics is the Empress of the Sciences”. Without her, there would be no physics, nor chemistry. Any field of study depending on statistics, geometry, or any kind of calculation would not exist. And then, there are the matter-of-fact applications: without math there’s no architecture. No food technology and engineering. No fun in life.