A Content Analysis of Marcus de Sautoy's BBC program: The Code

Topic
Prime Numbers Ratios The number Pi
Duration

Description
How cicada population dynamics exploit prime numbers. How ratios determined pleasant and unpleasant noises. Circles, diameters and curves - beautiful imagery of natural curves. "Pi is the essence of circleness". Pi in unexpected places: predicting statistical variation in fish catches. Animated exploration of pi as an irrational number view.

Episode

Start End Teaching Notes

06:00 15:00 Follow with the Sieve of Erathosthenes. Visit the music room - measure the 15:00 24:00 xylophones. Use some frequency analysing software. 24:30 34:30 Students love seeing deSautoy pull out his iPhone digital poster of Pi to Exploreto do the calculation. 400,000

13 min 9 min 10 min

1 1 1

29:30 33:30

Complex Numbers

Golden Ratio Projectile Motion

Shapes & Angles

Negative numbers don't really correspond to anything at all! Imaginary numbers : "The mathematical equivalent of believing in fairies" Use of complex numbers in radar air traffic control "this is very real!" 5 min Live footage of nautilus. 3 min Time lapse study of a trebuchet . Motion is revealled by using numbers to view distance over time. Why do we see regular shapes in the Giant's Causeway? 19 min (Intro to Episode 2: Shapes) Bees & Honeycomb Hexagons (intro) - six walls meeting at 120 degrees. Tessellations: triangles, squares or hexagons. Hexagons use least amount of wax. Bubble art with Tom Noddy - why do we see spheres? (5 min) Dodecahedron in a bubble!

7 min

places. See http://unihedron.com/projects/pi/ Excellent for students at both ends of the 34:30 41:00 high school spectrum!

1 1

41:00 45:30 Make a good closer or opener for a lesson. 52:00 55:00

00:00 18:20

If time is limited, skip the first five mins go straight to the bees.

10:30 15:30

To explore: Could we replicate the soap

Platonic Solids

Bubble art : three walls of a bubble meet at 120 degrees link to Giant's Causeway Neolithic stone balls to Greek Geometry : obsession with 12 min shape and symmetry Platonic solids - more commonly known as dice! Crystal cave in East Germany; X-ray diffraction patterns Protein and virus shapes - geometry in our bodies - the Greeks were right after all. 21 min Recap of Platonic solids - but is there more? Snowflakes - all perfectly symmetrical - or are they??? Limits of simple geometry Jackson Pollock - strangely compelling apparent random squiggles. Richard Taylor's "Kicked Pendulum" - chaotic motion - fractal symmetry; Mandlebrot Fractal geometry applied to animation : Boeing & Pixar scenes from Up! Recap : simple and complex geometry - the atomic and real world scale deSautoy puts his life at risk : sitting under a cannon ball Starlings in Denmark - complex patterns in bird flocks reproduced with simple rules. 15 min Crowd movements at Central Station Rock, Paper, Scissors - predictable? Tracking serial killers (Jack the Ripper) through geographic profiling 13 min Randomness : a (contingent) sequence of cause and effect Lemmings - a tale of confusion and deception! Unstable equations 9 min

bubble blowing onto an overhead projector? 2 22:40 24:15 24:15 27:00 27:00 31:40 31:40 34:15 2 34:30 35:30 35:30 40:30 41:00 43:10 43:10 50:00 50:00 55:40 55:40 58:00 3 06:30 09:30 Don't do this at home. 09:30 14:15 3 14:15 18:50 18:50 22:30 22:30 30:30 3 30:30 33:30 33:30 39:15 Visit the Art classroom - try making some.

Chaos and Fractals

Patterns in Nature

Patterns & People

Chaos and Randomness

Wisdom of the Crowd

Stable versus unstable equations (repriese of deSoto and the cannon ball) Weather predictions Statistical averages: guessing the number of jelly beans in a 14 min jar - wisdom of the crowd Google weightings : wisdom of the crowd Dynamics of human lives in cities : Geoffrey West - 1.15 is the "cities number". Life also follows a pattern: Events only appear random

39:15 40:20 40:20 43:00 3 44:45 49:00 49:00 52:30 52:30 56:00 56:00 58:00

The Code is copyright BBC 2011. Region 1 DVD available from the BBC. Some extracts on YouTube. This list from exzuberant.blogspot.com