The Story of 1
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YEAR: 2005 | LENGTH: 1 part (60 minutes) | SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA
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The Story of 1 is a BBC documentary about the history of numbers, and in particular, the number 1. It was presented by ex-Monty Python member Terry Jones. It was released in 2005.
Terry Jones first journeys to Africa, where bones have been discovered with notches in them. However, there is no actual way of knowing if they were used for counting. Jones then discusses the Ishango Bone, which must have been used for counting, because there are 60 scratches on each side of the bone. Jones declares this “the birth of one”; a defining moment in history of mathematics. He then journeys to Sumer.
Shortly after farming had been invented and humans were starting to build houses, they started to represent 1 with a token. With this, it was possible for the first time in history to do arithmetic. The Sumarians would enclose a certain number of tokens in a clay envelope and imprint the number of tokens on the outside. However, it was realized that you could simply write the number on a clay tablet. To explore why the development of numbers occurred here and not some other place, Jones travels to Australia and meets a tribe called the Warlpiri. In their language, there are no words for numbers. When an individual is asked how many grandchildren he has, he simply replies he has “many”, while
To explore why the development of numbers occurred here and not some other place, Jones travels to Australia and meets a tribe called the Warlpiri. In their language, there are no words for numbers. When an individual is asked how many grandchildren he has, he simply replies he has “many”, while he in fact has four. In Egypt, the numeral system provides a fascinating glimpse of Egyptian society, as larger numbers seem more applicable to higher strata of society. It went something like this: One was a line, ten was a rope, a hundred a coil of rope (three symbols for smaller numbers, probably applicable to the average Egyptian), a thousand a lotus (a symbol of pleasure), ten thousand was a commanding finger, and a million – a number the Sumerians would never have dreamed of – was the symbol of a prisoner begging for forgiveness. The Egyptians had a standard unit, the cubit, which was instrumental
The Egyptians had a standard unit, the cubit, which was instrumental for building wonders such as the pyramids. Terry Jones then journeys to Greece to cover the time of Pythagoras. Jones discusses with mathematician Marcus de Sautoy Pythagoras’ obsession with numbers, his secret society, his dedication to numbers, the Pythagorean theorem, and his flawed belief that all things could be measured in units (brought down by the attempt to measure the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle, in units relative to the two legs). Archimedes was also in love with numbers. He tried to see what would happen if you took a sphere and turned it into a cylinder. This concept would later be applied to map making. Archimedes lived in Syracuse which at the time was at war with Rome. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier while working on a mathematical problem. The Romans were not interested in maths, and as a result mathematics declined. The Roman numeral system was clumsy and inefficient. One reason that Terry Jones theorizes might be the
This concept would later be applied to map making. Archimedes lived in Syracuse which at the time was at war with Rome. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier while working on a mathematical problem. The Romans were not interested in maths, and as a result mathematics declined. The Roman numeral system was clumsy and inefficient. One reason that Terry Jones theorizes might be the reason, was the fact that the numerals that the Romans used were basically the old-fashioned lines of the Ishango bone. Jones discusses India’s invention of a more efficient numeral system, including the invention of the concept of zero. He explains how the concept traveled West to the Caliphate. Then it arrived in Italy where it met fierce resistance. The reason for this was because most people were familiar only with the Roman numerals and not the superior Indian numerals. Eventually, the Hindu-Arabic numerals displaced the Roman ones. Jones discusses finally how Gottfried Leibniz invented the binary system, which is the foundation for modern digital computers. He planned on building a mechanical computer to use this system, but never followed through with the plan. Leibniz was convinced that 1 and 0 were the only numbers anyone really needed. In 1944, a computer called Colossus was used to crack enemy codes during World War II. Computers like Colossus evolved into modern computers, which are used for every type of number calculation.
Jones discusses India’s invention of a more efficient numeral system, including the invention of the concept of zero. He explains how the concept traveled West to the Caliphate. Then it arrived in Italy where it met fierce resistance. The reason for this was because most people were familiar only with the Roman numerals and not the superior Indian numerals. Eventually, the Hindu-Arabic numerals displaced the Roman ones. Jones discusses finally how Gottfried Leibniz invented the binary system, which is the foundation for modern digital computers. He planned on building a mechanical computer to use this system, but never followed through with the plan. Leibniz was convinced that 1 and 0 were the only numbers anyone really needed. In 1944, a computer called Colossus was used to crack enemy codes during World War II. Computers like Colossus evolved into modern computers, which are used for every type of number calculation.
SIMILAR TITLES:
Infinite Secrets of Archimedes
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Infinite Secrets of Archimedes
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YEAR: 2003 | LENGTH: 1 part (50 minutes) | SOURCE: BBCdescription:
This is the story of a book that could have changed the history of the World. To the untrained eye, it is nothing more than a small and unassuming Byzantine prayer book, yet it sold at Christies for over $2m. For faintly visible beneath the prayers on its pages are other, unique, writings – words that have been lost for nearly two thousand years.
A turbulent history
The text is the only record of work by one of the world’s greatest minds – the ancient Greek, Archimedes – a mathematical genius centuries ahead of his time. Hidden for a millennium in a middle eastern library, it has been written over, broken up, painted on, cut up and re-glued. But in the nick of time scientists have saved the precious, fragile document, and for the first time it is revealing just how revolutionary Archimedes’ ideas were. If it had been available to scholars during the Renaissance, we might have reached the Moon over a hundred years ago.
Nearly destroyed
The trail begins in the tenth century, when a scribe made a unique copy of the most important mathematics that Archimedes ever developed. For 200 years the document survived, but the mathematics in it was so complex that no one paid it any attention. So when one day a monk was looking for some new parchment – an expensive commodity at the time – to write a new prayer book, the answer seemed obvious. He used the Archimedes manuscript. He washed the Greek text off the pages, cut them in half, rebound them, and turned the Archimedes manuscript into an everyday prayer book. As he piously wrote out his prayers, he had no idea of the genius he was obliterating.
Rediscovering Archimedes’ ideas
Several hundred years later, the Renaissance was under way. Scientists were beginning to grapple with new concepts, working out how mathematics could be used to explain the World around them. Little did they know that many of the problems they were just encountering Archimedes had already solved more than a thousand years before. So, tragically, they had to do that research all over again, setting back the development of science and technology immeasurably.
Then in 1906, in Constantinople, the document mysteriously turned up in a monastic library. An opportunistic scholar called Johan Ludwig Heiberg identified the text as Archimedes’ writings. Although the Greek text was very faint, Heiberg was able to decipher some of it. What he found astonished him, and made the front page of the New York Times. He revealed that Archimedes’ manuscript contained something called ‘The Method’, which showed not only Archimedes’ final proofs, but for the first time revealed the process of how he went about making his discoveries.
Lost again
But then disaster struck again. World War One broke out and in its aftermath the Archimedes manuscript disappeared.
Scholars had given up any hope of seeing the manuscript again, but in the 1960s odd rumours began to surface that it was to be found in Paris. It took 30 more years, but in 1991 an expert from Christies found it in the hands of a French family. When it reached auction, it was sold to an anonymous millionaire, who has now loaned it to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for conservation.
Decoding the manuscript
Although the text is incredibly difficult to read, with state-of-the-art imaging equipment, they are gradually piecing together all of the writing for the very first time. And as the team in Baltimore peel back the glue, leather and centuries of dirt, dissolve the blue-tack and unfold the lines of Greek that are buried in the spine of the book, they are building up a picture of a man who was thousands of years ahead of his time. Not only was Archimedes coming to terms with the profound subject of infinity, he had taken the first crucial steps towards calculus, a branch of mathematics that had to be reinvented after the Renaissance, and which is today used to describe every physical phenomenon from the movement of the planets to the construction of a skyscraper. Who knows what human minds could have achieved if they had only known what Archimedes already knew?SIMILAR TITLES:
The Story of 1
Newton’s Dark Secrets
Isaac Newton: The Last Magician
Ancient Computer
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The Story of Maths
Favorite trailer magnet YEAR: 2008 | LENGTH: 4 parts (60 minutes each) | SOURCE: BBC description: Series about the history …VideoNeat
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