Here you will find a collection of the best scientific documentaries available online. Focus here is on quality above quantity. There is an endless heap of documentaries that are "scientific" but in fact are not, instead filled with metaphysical ideas, UFOs, bio energies and other meta-sciences. You will not find those here. Other thing is the quantity of information in every documentary itself, often being very low but instead full of special effects and dramatic monologue. Hopefully you won't find those here either.
What you will find are informative, revealing, interesting, mind-boggling and above all scientific documentaries about the marvels of the world surrounding us, or the marvels of human ingenuity.
A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole. The term fractal was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning "broken" or "fractured". Arthur C. Clarke presents this unusual documentary on the mathematical discovery of the Mandelbrot Set (M-Set) in the visually spectacular world of fractal geometry. This show relates the science of the M-Set to nature in a way that is often called "The fingerprint of God". Dr. Mandelbrot in 1980 discovered the infinitely complex geometrical shape called the Mandelbrot Set using a very simple equation with computers and graphics.
Here is a documentary about mathematical dimensions, or more correctly about spatial dimensions. In our daily lives we are, of course, aware of only 3 dimensions. This film deals in the mathematics of proving and displaying the objects and geometry of higher dimensions.
It starts of very elementary, with the explanation of the 2-dimensional space with meridians and parallels and then gets to more complicated stuff in the 4-dimensional space. There is also a chapter about complex numbers after that and a proof of a theorem of geometry. Usually I post the videos directly on the main page but the number of episodes here would put too much stress on it so please follow the link to watch it.
This is a story about a mathematical breakthrough made by English mathematician Andrew Wiles in the late 20th century.
In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than two. This theorem was first conjectured by Pierre de Fermat in 1637, famously in the margin of a copy of Arithmetica where he claimed he had a proof that was too large to fit in the margin. No successful proof was published until 1995 despite the efforts of many mathematicians. The unsolved problem stimulated the development of algebraic number theory in the 19th century and the proof of the modularity theorem in the 20th. It is among the most famous theorems in the history of mathematics.
Four part series about the history of mathematics, presented by Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy.
In the first episode (1-5), The Language of the Universe, after showing how fundamental mathematics is to our lives, du Sautoy explores the mathematics of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece.
The second episode (6-8), The Genius of the East, sees du Sautoy leaving the ancient world. When ancient Greece fell into decline, mathematical progress stagnated as Europe entered the Dark Ages, but in the East mathematics reached new heights. Du Sautoy visits China and explores how maths helped build imperial China and was at the heart of such amazing feats of engineering as the Great Wall.
The Frontiers of Space, a third episode (9-13). By the 17th century, Europe had taken over from the Middle East as the world’s powerhouse of mathematical ideas. Great strides had been made in understanding the geometry of objects fixed in time and space. The race was now on to discover the mathematics to describe objects in motion. In the third part of the series, Marcus du Sautoy explores the work of René Descartes and Pierre Fermat, whose famous Last Theorem would puzzle mathematicians for more than 350 years.
The fourth episode, To Infinity and Beyond (14-18), concludes the series. After exploring Georg Cantor’s work on infinity and Henri Poincare’s work on chaos theory, he looks at how mathematics was itself thrown into chaos by the discoveries of Kurt Godel, who showed that the unknowable is an integral part of maths, and Paul Cohen, who established that there were several different sorts of mathematics in which conflicting answers to the same question were possible. He concludes his journey by considering the great unsolved problems of mathematics today.
A short presentation explaining the higher dimensions. Mind-boggling at first and even more so at second or third watch. Although the presentation itself is very simple, the concepts it tries to explain is far from that. Recommended if you want to blow your brains.
