Great courses (DVD)

Producer, Nelson J. Ginebra ; academic content supervisor, Nancy Eskridge ; editor, Dan Shine. ; consultants, Zachary H. Rhoades, Marcy McDonald

Twenty-four thirty minute lectures by Dr. David M. Bressoud, Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Macalester College

In the 17th century, scientist and mathematician Galileo Galilei noted that the book of nature "cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics ... without which it is not humanly possible to understand a single word of it." The same feeling prompted German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss to call mathematics the "queen of the sciences" because of this success in uncovering the nature of physical reality. For at least 4,000 years of recorded history, humans have engaged in the study of mathematics, and this examination begins in ancient Mesopotamia and leads directly to the Human Genome Project, which uses sophisticated mathematical techniques to decipher the 3 billion letters of the human genetic code. Today quantum physics, string theory, chaos theory, information technology, and other mathematics-intensive disciplines that have transformed the way we understand and deal with the world

DVD

Part 1: Disc 1. Lecture 1. What is mathematics? ;

Lecture 2.

Babylonian and Egyptian mathematics ;

Lecture 3.

Greek mathematics: Thales to Euclid ;

Lecture 4.

Greek mathematics: Archimedes to Hypatia ;

Lecture 5.

Astronomy and the origins of trigonometry ;

Lecture 6.

Indian mathematics: Trigonometry blossoms --

Disc 2. Lecture 7.

Chinese mathematics: Advances in computation ;

Lecture 8.

Islamic mathematics: The creation of algebra ;

Lecture 9.

Italian algebraists solve the cube ;

Lecture 10.

Napier and the natural logarithm ;

Lecture 11.

Galileo and the mathematics of motion ;

Lecture 12.

Fermat, Descartes, and analytic geometry

Part 2. Disc 3. Lecture 13.

Newton: Modeling the universe ;

Lecture 14.

Leibniz and the emergence of calculus ;

Lecture 15.

Euler: Calculus proves its promise ;

Lecture 16.

Geometry: From Alhambra to Escher ;

Lecture 17.

Gauss: Invention of differential geometry ;

Lecture 18.

Algebra becomes the science of symmetry --

Disc 4. Lecture 19.

Modern analysis: Fourier to Carleson ;

Lecture 20.

Riemann sets new directions for analysis ;

Lecture 21.

Sylvester and Ramanujan: Different worlds ;

Lecture 22.

Fermat's last theorem: The final triumph ;

Lecture 23.

Mathematics: The ultimate physical reality ;

Lecture 24.

Problems and prospects for the 21st century