This week’s review of The Code has been delayed a day as I was at the cinema on Wednesday night. Saw Super 8, the new film from JJ Abrams. Like others films he has directed it’s a good film. I always hope that one day he might do a great film – this isn’t it. Back to the TV review. In this week’s programme we saw Marcus du Sautoy risk his life to show his belief in “The Code” when he calculated where a 30kg ball would land and sat just beyond the landing spot. Given that the series has used special graphics effects (this week was full of “tilt shift” effects where the focus has been monkeyed around with to achieve a miniaturization look) one may doubt the event. Particularly as later in the programme effects were used on the ball to make it fall short and go into orbit. However, it did look like he really did the stunt! Quite brave for a man who says he can’t do arithmetic. Anyhow, leaving aside the distractions, what was the show about? Prediction mainly. When can we use mathematics to predict what will happen? Quite often is of course the answer. Du Sautoy brought in Christopher Columbus, starling flocks, ants, rock-paper-scissors, serial killers, chaos, lemmings, weather prediction, the butterfly effect, the wisdom of crowds, forecasting flu with Google (the number of web searches for flu symptoms and remedies follows the incidence of flu in the population – fancy that!) and looking for patterns in cities. The latter featured an interview with Geoffrey West who recently gave a TED talk. (I think the talk will feature in my new course on making presentations as an example of what not to do!) Most of the uses...

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...

In reviewing The Code I should note that this is a TV programme not aimed at me. Nonetheless as a mathematician I do like to see the portrayal of my subject in the number one mass medium. Actually, I’m unsure who the target audience is. At one point pi is introduced slowly over a number of minutes which would indicate that the producers thought that even the most basic ideas could not be assumed. Leaving that minor criticism aside (after all it’s a problem with TV output rather than a specific fault of this programme), what was the programme like? What’s it about? Well, the intro said that it was about answering the question Why is the world the way it is? The precise definition of ‘The Code’ was a bit obscure but we all know they’re talking about maths. The programme began with Marcus du Sautoy pacing around a cathedral at night with an echoing voiceover from a girl. We had fancy graphics, moody lighting, long shadows, strange camera angles and occasional uses of black and white. Hidden in the cathedral was a code, said du Sautoy, and then showed how mathematics showed up in its design. In particular the relation with harmonious combinations of notes. For example the altar divides the nave into a ratio of 8 to 5 which is a minor sixth in music. This episode was about numbers, so primes, pi, i, acceleration due to gravity and a constant associated with a nautilus shell were explored. See the video below for a clip about this last constant. To exemplify the appearance of pi the normal distribution was used. Unfortunately, the idea was to get the daily catch from a fisherman and weigh the fishes. From the mean and variance...