- Friday 22 December 2006
- Lecturers: Prof Marcus du Sautoy
Fifth lecture in the 2006 Christmas Lecture series 'The num8er my5steries'.
Mathematics is the ultimate fortune teller. It can predict if a new design for a plane will make it off the ground. It can plan the path of a space craft so that it passes by all the planets on its way through the solar system. It can help explain how to bend a ball like Beckham. But some of Nature's equations are harder to solve. How can we tell whether the Earth will be hit by a meteor? Why is the weather so hard to forecast? Why can't we predict the stock market? How will populations across the world evolve over time? Is climate change a reality? The mathematics of chaos theory lies behind why we find some of Nature's problems too hard to solve.
