Pierre-Simon Laplace
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Laplace (1749-1827) who was a giant in the world of mathematics both before and after the French Revolution. He addressed one of the great questions of his age, raised but side-stepped by Newton: was the Solar System stable, or would the planets crash into the Sun, as it appeared Jupiter might, or even spin away like Saturn threatened to do? He advanced ideas on probability, long the preserve of card players, and expanded them out across science; he hypothesised why the planets rotate in the same direction; and he asked if the Universe was deterministic, so that if you knew everything about all the particles then you could predict the future. He also devised the metric system and reputedly came up with the name 'metre'. With
Marcus du Sautoy Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford
Timothy Gowers Professor of Mathematics at the College de France
And
Colva Roney-Dougal Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Available Results
Generated results are saved to the knowledge database for reuse and search.
Extract Knowledge
Pick what you want extracted first. Model, scope, and chapter options appear after a template is selected.