The story of mathematical proof – with John Stillwell

If you liked this video, check out our mathematics playlist here: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbnrZHfNEDZyDfeVsNBMNDU… Edited to say - we hear you (no pun intended) and acknowledge your complaints about the problems we've been having with our sound. We do now have a full AV team in place, but we're still working through the backlog of videos from when this was an issue. Despite our fancy name, we're an independent charity and don't receive any government funding, so we're often working with a tiny team and a shoestring budget to bring you these incredible lecturers. We promise that we are working very hard to fix the sound issues and you'll hear the difference soon.

For someone who never got access to this level of math education, I am really enjoying this kind of video presentation. Thank you to everyone involved.

Please give your guest speakers a guide on how to record better audio or provide them with the resources to do so. The content of this talk is good but the audio quality is like nails on a blackboard.

After having studied calculus for the sake of applying it to problems i.e. with very little attention paid to much pure maths involving proofs; This video has answered lots of questions I didn't know I had.

Thank you! For years I've never rid myself of never having been able to understand why dx was sometimes 1 and sometimes 0. I thought it was me inventing a confusion out of nothing and accepting that I simply didn't have a maths brain. My sticking plaster solution was that sometimes the dx is a "grammar" thing, reminding me that the equation is in reference to a changing x, and sometimes it is a measurement inside the equation which tends to zero and might as well count as zero. A fascinating talk, and what a terrific subject!

I would have been able to understand high school math, if my teacher had used visuals like this. For a kid, the pictures are very helpful, even if they seem superfluous to seasoned math people.

Thank you for uploading this.

Algebra was a nonsense to me at school. I liked geometry because I was a visually oriented person although I didn't know it then. Nobody showed me that x squared was actually a square I could draw and understand.😕 I shut down and the idea that mathematics had a connectedness was never apparent to me, I made do without it.

Stillwells math history book is incredible and I love it. ❤

Yes, these are really great, first time and for review. I'd seen the first proof of Pythagorean's Theorem but not the second. It is great to have a tie in between geometry and algebra. The video is packed with extensions to the handful of examples I've picked up. Thank you

What a great video! I really enjoyed it. Very well presented by John Stillwell.

I have recently been looking for someone to explain the history or story of proofs! What a coincidence!

Thanks for this illuminating presentation. It helps me understand Godel’s incompleteness theorem, I think. Must check out the Q&A!

This is the most exciting video I have come across in a few. Yes. I will try to buy the book.

Very interesting and well presented. The significance of the square root of two in Pythagorean theorem really popped for me. Thank you for allowing my mind to expand just a little bit more today. Good stuff!!

Errors occur in proofs in practice, likely in rough proportion to how often bugs occur in software. But usually nobody checks closely enough.

Great teacher.

I know that this lecture was about mathematical proofs and not practical applications of mathematics. Still, I gotta defend Boole—his eponymous logic (or algebra) is the foundation for digital electronics, digital control systems, computer science and all modern digital computers.

Excellent!

Thanks