Run for your life, it’s Hannah the manic mathematician!
Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry’s Mysterious World Of Maths HHHII The Bisexual HIIII
MY FRIENDS george and irene, who run the Sunshine Vista cafe in Weston-Super-Mare aren’t happy. The place was done over by a load of mathematicians yesterday afternoon.
Bikers they don’t mind. Somerset’s ageing Hell’s angels community is well behaved, parking their Harleys tidily in the High Street and coming in to order bacon baps with mugs of tea. They look scary, but bikers are polite.
But mathematicians make a right mess. They scatter the sugar cubes, and pull petals off the plastic geraniums while gibbering about Fibonacci sequences. Worst of all, they scrawl equations across the windows. Cleaning up takes hours.
Dr Hannah Fry of University College london ran amok in a seaside cafe on Magic Numbers (BBC4), the first of her three-part series of programmes about the philosophy and history of maths.
grabbing a blue marker pen, she started calculating the mathematical ratios in the patterns of a whorled seashell, writing across the plate glass.
Her equations proved that the mollusc, a distant cousin of the squid called a nautilus, grew at an exponential rate: exactly 3.24 times bigger with every spiral.
a very elegant equation, no doubt — but those windows aren’t going to wash themselves. Her vandalism didn’t abate outdoors. Mauling an eight-petalled daisy, she pointed out that it didn’t look so pretty after she’d shredded it.
apparently, and this was a new one on me, flowers follow a fixed mathematical pattern: three petals (like a clover), five (buttercups), eight (clematis), 13 (marigolds), and 21 (asters).
This sequence gets number fiends excited, because three plus five is eight, five plus eight is 13, and eight plus 13 is 21. a brainy bloke called Fibonacci worked it out.
Dr Hannah’s theory was this — if flowers and shellfish can do mathematics, then numbers must be a universal concept. Maths isn’t something invented by humans.
Only a scientist, of course, could be so self-centred as to imagine the whole universe was in chaos until our brains made sense of it.
luckily, Dr Hannah has an endearingly short attention span, and it wasn’t long before she dashed off to discover whether numbers still work while you’re upside-down on a roller-coaster.
it was all good fun, but it does leave you wondering why clever people get stuck on such simple puzzles.
For ultimate navel-gazing, plus self- centred stupidity, we had The Bisexual (C4), billed as a comedy drama — a dishonest description, since it was unfunny and painfully dull. Desiree akhavan played an obnoxious new yorker in london, running a tiny fashion house with her girlfriend (Maxine Peake).
They were maudlin, pretentious, unpleasant, unfaithful, snide, selfish and shallow; it’s a while since i disliked two characters so much in the first episode. akhavan’s character, Leila, had some excruciating bedroom scenes. i felt sorry for the actress, until i realised she wrote and directed the series.
Leila is the ‘ bisexual’ of the title — though, as she’s in her 30s and has never slept with a man, she’s probably not as ambidextrous as she wants us to think.
not that anyone could possibly care. There’s nothing less interesting than to hear someone drone on about their ‘sexuality’ — even other people’s dreams are less boring.
no one is bothered what you get up to, as long as you keep the noise down. and don’t talk about it afterwards. it’s enough to put a Hell’s angel right off his bacon bap.