NOVA: The Great Math Mystery

Apr 15, 2015

0h 54m

★ 7.8

Overview

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?

Genres

Documentary

History

Mystery

Production Companies

GBH

NOVA: The Great Math Mystery Trailers

No Trailers found.

Cast

Narrator (voice)

Jay O. Sanders

Actor

Glenn Kalison

Self

Max Tegmark

Self

Esperanza Spalding

Self

Sylvester James Gates

Self

Adam Steltzner

Self

Janna Levin

Self

Simon Schaffer

Self

Savas Dimopoulos

Self

Roger Penrose

Self

Stephen Wolfram

A documentary about the life and works of the artist M. C. Escher. Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) usually referred to as M. C. Escher, was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations.

6.3

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Catherine is a woman in her late twenties who is strongly devoted to her father, Robert, a brilliant and well-known mathematician whose grip on reality is beginning to slip away. As Robert descends into madness, Catherine begins to wonder if she may have inherited her father's mental illness along with his mathematical genius.

7.5

Magic Money: The Bitcoin Revolution

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6.6

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7.7

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6.8

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5.5

Cube 2: Hypercube

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Eight strangers awaken with no memory, in a puzzling cube-shaped room where the laws of physics do not always apply.

5.7

Cube Zero

Oct 10, 2004

A young programmer whose job is to watch over the reality-warping Cube defies orders to rescue an innocent mother trapped in one of its rooms.

7.1

Pi

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A mathematical genius discovers a link between numbers and reality, and thus believes he can predict the future.

6.5

Terror by Night

Feb 1, 1946

Holmes and Watson board a passenger train bound from London to Edinburgh, to guard the Star of Rhodesia, an enormous diamond worth a fortune belonging to an elderly woman of wealth; but within the first hour of the trip, the woman's son is murdered and the diamond stolen and any of the passengers in their car could be the killer thief.

7.6

The Story of 1

Sep 28, 2005

A humor-inflected history of the of the number one, covering military applications in ancient Rome, the measurement of distances in India, and the decimal system created by Leibnitz.

No Image Available

0.0

Letters from an Indian Clerk

Oct 29, 1987

The story of how, in 1914, the self-taught Indian mathematical genius SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN came to England and Trinity College, Cambridge, to work with the great British pure mathematician GH Hardy.

6.9

M. C. Escher: Journey to Infinity

Apr 12, 2018

A portrait of the visionary Dutch artist M. C. Escher (1898-1972), according to his own words, taken from his diary, his correspondence and the texts of his lectures.

No Image Available

8.0

The Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan

Mar 14, 2013

A documentary about the life and work of seminal mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.

0.0

Not Knot

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Not Knot is a guided tour into computer-animated hyperbolic space. It proceeds from the world of knots to their complementary spaces -- what's not a knot. Profound theorems of recent mathematics show that most known complements carry the structure of hyperbolic geometry, a geometry in which the sum of three angles of a triangle always is less than 180 degrees.

6.0

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