Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Movie Review—Frontiers of space


            The third episode of mathematics talked about the mathematical ideas during the 19th and 20th century. It brought us to Europe where a lot of mathematical concepts were introduced. In this episode, another side of mathematics was shown. It showed a development of mathematics which gave us new outlook about mathematics.
            In the first part, Piero was introduced. Piero Della Francesca was an Italian painted. It was said that he truly understood mathematics since he was also a mathematician. He was amazing because even in the arts, he was able to incorporate mathematics in it. He was able to apply mathematics in every stroke of the brush he makes to generate a 3D perspective in a 2D space—very impressive.
            Rene Descartes was also mentioned in the movie. He was very famous because of his Cartesian coordinate plane. He was able to make a connection between algebra and geometry by formulating equations used in curved lines. Pierre Fermat was also in the movie where he looked at the properties of prime numbers which are surprising.

            Pierre de Fermat was also discussed and his famous the last theorem where its proof puzzled mathematicians for over 350 years. His theory on prime numbers states that if you have a prime number which you divided by four leaves remainder one then you can rewrite this as two square numbers added together provided it has remainder one if divided by four. It was also weird to hear that there really are people who has math as their hobby. Also, I agree on the part where Marcus said that in mathematics, you don’t need a laboratory or a library. You just have to look at the world around you. Every little bit of it has mathematics involved.

            The very famous Isaac Newton was next, I was a bit confused as first because just like the people interviewed, I could only remember Newton’s contributions in physics. But he made a very remarkable discovery in mathematics—calculus. Even though it has calculus made students’ life harder, calculus allowed us to determine the exact speed and precise distance at any moment in time. But he did not publish his work because of this, calculus was heard from another person—Gottfried Leibnitz.

            This episode made me realize how smart humans are. To be able to establish these relationships is not easy. I was thinking that I won’t be able to discover something today and get a street named after me since almost all have been discovered by these intelligent minds. But I think there are still things and ideas which are to be discovered because discovery and knowledge has no limit or boundary.

No comments:

Post a Comment