NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour -- a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the first wireless radio transmissions to the prediction and discovery of the Higgs boson and the successful landing of rovers on Mars. But where does math get its power? Astrophysicist and writer Mario Livio, along with a colorful cast of mathematicians, physicists and engineers, follows math from Pythagoras to Einstein and beyond, all leading to the ultimate riddle: Is math an invention or a discovery? Humankind's clever trick or the language of the universe?
Growing up poor in Madras, India, Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar earns admittance to Cambridge Universi...
In April 1969 Ilya (Eliyahu) Rips, then a young student of mathematics, tried to burn himself in a p...
A sharp, witty, mind-expanding and exuberant foray into the world of logic with Computer Scientist D...
Four mathematicians are gathered and meet with a top official of the United States Department of Def...
Exploring the murky and fast-paced world of the hackers out to steal money and identities and wreak ...
A portrait of the visionary Dutch artist M. C. Escher (1898-1972), according to his own words, taken...
Hard Problems is about the extraordinary gifted students who represented the United States in 2006 a...
How to have a happier life and a better world all thanks to maths, in this witty, mind-expanding gui...
A group of strangers find themselves trapped in a maze-like prison. It soon becomes clear that each ...
Eight strangers awaken with no memory, in a puzzling cube-shaped room where the laws of physics do n...
A young programmer whose job is to watch over the reality-warping Cube defies orders to rescue an in...
A mathematical genius discovers a link between numbers and reality, and thus believes he can predict...
During the 1995 Summer Institute at The Geometry Center, a team of undergraduates, middle and high s...
The computer animation Outside In explains the amazing discovery, made by Steve Smale in 1957, that ...
Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem features a heroine driven by the quest to solve one of th...
The story of how, in 1914, the self-taught Indian mathematical genius SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN came to En...
Four mathematicians are imprisoned in a shrinking room; with the walls closing in, they must try any...
A video puzzle using mathematical principles and prime numbers, daring the audience to decode it's j...
Professor David Spiegelhalter tries to pin down what chance truly is and how it works in the real wo...
Symmetry is one of five shorts featured in the film "Mathematical Peep Shows." The collection was ma...