Listen to the Event
John D Barrow, University of Cambridge
What is mathematics and why does it work? In this talk, John Barrow will look at some of the ways in which mathematics can tell you things about the world that you cannot learn in any other way: how computers have extended the reach of human mathematicians, the simple nature of many hard problems that no computer can solve, how to win at dice, coach Olympic sports champions, and even discover whether the Premier Football League is just a random process.
He will explain the modern concepts of chaos and complexity, showing how we can use them to shed light on Abstract Expressionist art, detect art fraud, and discover why it is possible to send spacecraft to the Moon with pin-point precision and yet fail to predict tomorrow's weather.