Hannah Fry's Magic Numbers

Hannah goes back to the time of the ancient Greeks to find out why they were so fascinated by the connection between beautiful music and math. The patterns our ancestors found in music are all around us, from the way a sunflower stores its seeds to the number of petals in a flower. Even the shapes of some of the smallest structures in nature seem to follow the rules of math.

Hannah travels to Germany on the trail of one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Georg Cantor. He showed that infinity, far from being infinitely big, actually comes in different sizes. This increasingly weird world is feeling more and more like something we've invented, but if that's the case, why is math so uncannily good at predicting the world around us?

Hannah explores a paradox at the heart of modern math, discovered by Bertrand Russell, which undermines the very foundations of logic that all of math is built on. These flaws suggest that math isn't a true part of the universe but might just be a human language, fallible and imprecise. We may just have to accept that the world really is weirder than we thought.