the story of maths- historical documentary

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This is a BBC documentary about the history of mathematics. I am not a math student but I found it fascinating. In particular I thought of one poster who answered my stats thread. He said he was a historian (with a PHD and all) who had to take an intro to stats course soon. I thought it might be worthwhile for that poster to see this documentary as it traces the development of important mathematical concepts back to ancient Mesopotamia all the way up to the modern day. It also explains some basic math concepts, in a way that a non-mathematician could understand, along the way. This might be helpful to someone returning to maths after being away from it for a long time. It is also fascinating in terms of the ancient history it discusses alone.

I know this should probably be posted in another forum, but I wanted people who are interested in history as well as math to see this post.

Many of you may have already seen this, including the poster I was speaking of before. I only came across it recently, and I'm not sure how long it has been around. For those of you who have already seen the documentary, what did you think of it?

If you copy and paste this link it and scroll to the bottom of the page you can watch the whole thing for free.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-story-of-maths/

That's pretty cool, thanks for sharing.

No problem.....hope you enjoy it! =)

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. (Although it appears to be missing a few chunks of the video, especially in the second episode. I'll have to search for those later.)

For anyone else who is interested, here is the BBC's website for the series
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00dxjls
(I can not determine if the BBC will add the video is to their iPlayer.)

The Open University's website for the programme
http://www.open2.net/storyofmaths/

A set of related audio programmes:

"A Brief History of Mathematics"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/maths
"Professor Marcus du Sautoy argues that mathematics is the driving force behind modern science. Ten fifteen minute podcasts that reveal the personalities behind the calculations from Newton to the present day. How do these masters of abstraction find a role in the real world?"