Review of The Code and comparison with the GOAT...

This week’s episodes was called Shapes (or as we used to call it before the national curriculum – geometry) The programme once again featured ghostly voiceovers, moody shots and bags of computer generated graphics. Again, like last week, my disclaimer is that the programme is not aimed at me. Having said that I liked this more than the last one though I didn’t see anything I could steal for my teaching. Marcus kicked off the programme at the Devil’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, the natural rock formation that made of hexagonal stones. From this it was off to see some bees use hexagons in their hives and the only number fact was that the angle involved was 120 degrees. Was this the only number mentioned this week? After that we had bubbles, Platonic solids in Neolithic Scotland, soap films and the Munich Olympic Stadium, a stunning cave in Germany made of cubic crystals, non-symmetric snowflakes (they’re not all six sided!), Mandelbrot and fractals, and in particular the guy at Pixar who used fractals to generate mountain scenery. There was also a bit about Jackson Pollock and fractals. I’ve always found the claims of fractal dimension in his paintings to be a bit dubious but I have never had time to investigate them. Comparison with GOAT (GOAT is a sports abbreviation for Greatest Of All Time.) The Code’s blog has a large number of disparaging comments. “Marcus du Sautoy’s first programme in the series “The Code” has tarnished his reputation.”, “Nothing new here except the labelling of this knowledge as The Code.” I can’t find some worse ones that I spotted last week (maybe they were deleted!). Of course comments sections are always full of bile and don’t reflect the majority position — those with...