Matthematics Televised

I was surprised and pleased to find that BBC4 was to devote a whole hour to Mathematics (Monday 13th October 9-10 pm), though I realised it would be reckless to hope for too much.

The program did hold my attention, but missed opportunities were too many to list.

The treatment was frustratingly superficial, with bald statements that someone discovered something without any indication of how they did it. I was particularly intrigued to learn that a fifteenth century Indian mathematician discovered the series:

pi = 4/1 - 4/3 + 4/5 -...

The standard way to obtain that uses integration, which, so far as I know was not available then, so I wonder how he did it.

The moving visual display of a television picture could be a very powerful tool for illustrating mathematical ideas, yet it was so used for only a small fraction of the time. For most of the time it displayed either the geometrically uninteresting face of the presenter, or scenes of contemporary everyday life in the countries whose (non-contemporary) mathematicians were being discussed.

There were several glaring errors. Infinity was introduced as the result of dividing by zero; that was not the idea that stimulated the theory of the infinite, but a dead end from which the idea had to be rescued.

It was also claimed that the number of petals in any flower is a Fibonacci number, ignoring the numerous flowers such as the cruciferae with four petals. It could of course be correctly claimed that many flowers have Fibonacci numbers of petals, but as 4 is the only natural number less than 6 that is not a Fibonacci number, that claim doesn't amount to much.

The entire programme was distorted by a false dichotomy between 'Eastern' and 'Western' mathematics.

There was indeed a time when the rudiments of different parts of Mathematics were developed in different cultures, but the subject came into its own only when the various strands were united in a body of knowledge that transcended those separate traditions. That union happened in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the result was not 'Western Mathematics' but Mathematics.

The most important question about the origin of any mathematical idea is not which secretive scholar first thought of it but shared it only with a few close disciples, but who first contributed it to the pool of common mathematical knowledge that provided the basis for future developments both in Mathematics and in theoretical science.