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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Renaissance Mathematics. As with so
many areas of European thought, mathematics in the Renaissance was a
question of recovering and, if you were very lucky, improving upon Greek
ideas. The geometry of Euclid, Appollonius and Ptolemy ruled the day.
Yet within two hundred years, European mathematics went from being an
art that would unmask the eternal shapes of geometry to a science that
could track the manifold movements and changes of the real world. The
Arabic tradition of Algebra was also assimilated. In its course it changed
the way people understood numbers, movement, time, even nature itself
and culminated in the calculus of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.
But how did this profound change come about? What were the ideas that
drove it and is this the period in which mathematics became truly
modern?With Robert Kaplan, co-founder of the Maths Circle at Harvard
University; Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of Science and Fellow of
Linacre College, University of Oxford; Jackie Stedall, Research Fellow in
the History of Mathematics, The Queen's College, Oxford.