In this 90-minute BBC doc­u­men­tary, Dan­ger­ous Knowl­edge, David Mal­one takes a close look at four math­e­mati­cians — Georg Can­tor, Lud­wig Boltz­mann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Tur­ing – whose think­ing pro­found­ly influ­enced mod­ern math­e­mat­ics but also drove them (or so the pro­gram argues) to insan­i­ty and even­tu­al­ly sui­cide. Can­tor gave us “set the­o­ry.” Boltz­mann made impor­tant con­tri­bu­tions in the fields of sta­tis­ti­cal mechan­ics and sta­tis­ti­cal ther­mo­dy­nam­ics. Gödel is remem­bered for his incom­plete­ness the­o­rems. Tur­ing built on Gödel’s work and laid the foun­da­tion for com­put­er sci­ence. They all spent their dif­fi­cult final years in var­i­ous states of men­tal decline.

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If math went over your head in high school or col­lege, here’s a great way to redis­cov­er what you missed. In late Jan­u­ary, Steven Stro­gatz, a pro­fes­sor of Applied Math­e­mat­ics at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, began blog­ging math­e­mat­ics for The New York Times. And his whole goal is to show you, the read­er, the joy of math. Or, as he describes his mis­sion:

I’ll be writ­ing about the ele­ments of math­e­mat­ics, from pre-school to grad school, for any­one out there who’d like to have a sec­ond chance at the sub­ject — but this time from an adult per­spec­tive. It’s not intend­ed to be reme­di­al. The goal is to give you a bet­ter feel­ing for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

Start­ing this week, this blog will be delv­ing into the great ideas at the heart of cal­cu­lus. You can jump on board right here. Thanks to Gregg for the heads up on this one.

Updat­ed post: It’s rare that we get to cov­er math here. So here it goes: Adri­an Ban­ner, a lec­tur­er at Prince­ton, has put togeth­er a lec­ture series (in video) that will help stu­dents mas­ter cal­cu­lus, a sub­ject that has tra­di­tion­al­ly frus­trat­ed many stu­dents. The 24 lec­tures (get them on iTunes) were orig­i­nal­ly pre­sent­ed as review ses­sions for Prince­ton intro­duc­to­ry cal­cu­lus cours­es offered in 2006, and each runs about two hours. It’s worth not­ing that Ban­ner has used the lec­tures to devel­op a handy book, The Cal­cu­lus Life­saver: All the Tools You Need to Excel at Cal­cu­lus. To find this course (and many oth­ers like it), look in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties. Here you will also find MIT’s course, Sin­gle Vari­able Cal­cu­lus, which now appears on YouTube and iTune­sU.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Math and Sci­ence Tutor­ing on YouTube

Math Mag­ic

Learn­ing Chem­istry on Youtube