The Frontiers of Space

     The third installment of the story of maths talks more about perspective and the discovery of more things about mathematics. This episode focuses on the mathematicians from Europe and how they discovered things like calculus, geometry, imaginary numbers and others.

     

     The introduction starts off interestingly which defines the whole point of this episode which is perspective and space. The professor starts his introduction with a painting which is the Flagellation of Christ by Pierro della Francesca. He explains how brilliant Pierro is just by looking at this painting. Pierro applied mathematics to create a 3D perspective in a 2D canvass. This is just one example to what the professor said that masterpieces of art are also masterpieces of mathematics. With the use of mathematics, a new perspective was made and this explained a lot about mathematics.

    

     The professor said that northern Europe is the powerhouse of mathematical ideas. One of which is Rene Descartes who discovered the link between algebra and geometry. Next is Fermat who discovered the modern number theory. This episode also presented that Isaac Newton did not only contribute to physics but also to mathematics. He discovered calculus. But shortly after his discovery, another mathematician, Gottfried Leibniz, was also able to discover calculus. During this part of the episode, I thought that publishing your discoveries is also important to give credit to him it should have been. In the later part of the episode, there were also other mathematicians that did not publish their discoveries. They were not credited for what they have discovered first. One mathematician even went crazy because of this. So, I thought, publishing discoveries was also important if you want due credit for what you discovered and this will avoid conflicts in the latter part.

     

     This episode named a lot of famous mathematician and their discoveries. I would not name them one by one since it would seem that I only summarized the movie. The important thing we should remember from this episode is that the European mathematicians have contributed a lot to what our world is now today. As what the professor said, “Without this golden age of mathematics from Descartes to Riemann, there will be no calculus, no quantum physics, no relativity, none of the technology used today.”