Customer Reviews

Life By the Numbers [VHS]

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Danny Glover hosts this series originally aired by PBS. In each of the hour-long programs, there are a number of related segments, providing a look at mathematics that most high school (and even college!) graduates rarely experience. True, there is some "traditional" material, like statistics and probability, but most of the material is very contemporary, and extremely interesting. Topics include: possible shapes for a closed yet infinite universe, how IMax movies and "virtual" amusement park rides are designed (computational geometry- the basis for all computer graphics), how discrete graphs are used to track shopping habits (part of a HUGE field called data mining), the experience of "seeing" space that has more than three physical dimensions, how GPS works, and the list goes on. This is an excellent learning and teaching tool, as well as being very entertaining. For folks who only think of mathematics in terms of what they learned in school, this series is a very eye-opening and informative experience.