The Story of Maths bumbles on.

I'm glad that Mathematics is being mentioned on the television, but there is little else to be said in favour of the series on BBC4 (Monday nights, 9-10).

As I watched last night's programme I was struck by the irrelevance of the pictures. There were fountains and lakes with swans though the subject matter was neither fluid dynamics, nor the aerodynamics of bird flight. A reference to the growth of mathematics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was accompanied by a film of a red double decker bus in a traffic jam.

Much of the programme was superficial name dropping. The train of thought was something like this:

Cantor investigated the infinite, many mathematicians were sceptical but not Poincare, whose brother was Prime Minister of France, and who stumbled on chaos and invented topology.

There were frequent references to Riemann's Hypothesis, without any indication what it is. As the hypothesis concerns zeros of the Riemann Zeta function, which in turn involves the concept of the analytic extension of a function of a complex variable, it would be hard to explain it in a couple of pithy sentences, or to illustrate it with a picture of a seagull sitting on a bus; perhaps it would have been better not to mention it at all.