Marcus du Sautoy's "Brief History of Mathematics" (10 MP3 episodes) | Hacker News Reader

Marcus du Sautoy's "Brief History of Mathematics" (10 MP3 episodes)

bbc.co.uk

60 pointspetercooper9 comments

I can recommend BBC Radio 4's "Museum of Curiosity"

Its a humorous discussion programme where guests who range from comedians to eminent scientists donate hypothetical exhibits to a virtual museum. It's both amusing and informative, and it's great to see people with such honest passion and excitement about matters intellectual and aesthetic.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/museumofcuriosity.shtml

You can download the episodes at all the usual places. The same goes for most of the BBC's radio output.

When you guys get the international iPlayer you're all really going to like radio 4 :)

Listened to this a while ago and thought it was pretty interesting. The Bourbaki story was particularly cool.

Any recommendations for similar podcasts? I know of Radiolab, what else?

Just sticking to the BBC because it's what I know best, In Our Time is another great radio show (and podcast) - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/

It's essentially a 40 minute discussion between the host and 3 leading academics related to a particular scientific, historical or cultural topic. A recent one was Pseudorandom and Random Numbers, for example (also featuring du Sautoy): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00x9xjb .. others like Imaginary Numbers, Logic, Logical Positivism, and The Physics of Time were also illuminating.

I'm not sure how much of the BBC's stuff people outside of the UK can listen to, but there are torrents of the back catalog floating about and I don't believe they're being commercially sold anyway. They just go out on the radio each week.

+1 for In Our Time: The host Melvyn Bragg is a great radio host. He is from a literary background and REALLY struggles with any maths topics but he throws himself in and his struggles makes the listener feel at ease. This show draws real experts to the studio as well so you get really interesting discussion.

Another lighter but still interesting podcast is The Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox and Robin Ince [1]. It's part comedy and part science, thought provoking and a little lighter on the brain.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/timc

All of the radio output is freely available world wide - either for 7days after broadcast in their iPlayer app or for some programs - like 'in our time' - the entire archive is available as MP3s

A History of the World in 100 Objects:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/programme

I love Marcus du Sautoy's programmes - he also did some BBC Horizons ones that were particularly interesting - The Secret You was fun and Alan & Marcus Go Forth and Multiply is pretty entertaining and insightful as well.

He also writes on mathematics, and presented a TV series on mathematics which occasionally appears on BBC Four.

Currently I have, and am enjoying, his book The Music of The Primes.

Useful links in these discussions, by the way, including the link in the original post. Thank you.

I recommend this series, nice short introductions to math topics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com