Gresham College Lectures

Accounts of occasional celestial spectacular events in past centuries have provided crucial information for modern-day astrophysicists. One such example is the so-called Great Eruption of Eta Carinae which was for a time in the mid 19th century the third brightest object in the night sky. Interpretation of the spectacular structure of this so-called supernova imposter would be hard without informa...

It has been known since antiquity that there are simple "harmonic" relationships between notes that sound appealing together. This lecture introduces the mathematics of pitch, scales, and just temperament. The pitch of a sound is not its only important property. The same note, played on different instruments, can have a very different quality of sound. We will explore the mathematics gov...

THE 2020 PETER NAILOR MEMORIAL LECTURE Drones, or unmanned air systems, are changing the face of war in the 21st century, for combatants and civilians. We are used to a history of the RAF based on a narrative of the 'bravery of the few' with fighter pilot missions in the Battle of Britain seeing a mortality rate of 20% and a staggeringly higher rate for 'the many' of Bomber Com...

How has Covid-19 re-shaped our ideas about what we owe society? The lockdown has had a terrible impact on the economic prospects of young people - and the elderly have suffered from high mortality in care homes. Choices have to be made between the generations. Should people save and pay for their own pensions, care in ill-health and old age as an individual responsibility? Or is it a societal duty...

What is meant by 'love' between human and nonhuman animals? Why is sex with animals such a taboo? It is only in very recent years that some people have begun to undermine the absolute prohibition on zoosexuality. Are their arguments dangerous, perverted, or simply wrongheaded? What does it mean to love nonhuman animals? More pertinently: what does it mean to love? This book launch will l...

Father and son, William and Robert Cecil, not only dominated politics for much of Elizabeth I and James I reign but dominated architectural fashion. Building a series of spectacular houses, they, and not the monarchy, were the great palace builders of their age. Burghley and Hatfield remain, but those that are lost were even more extraordinary in both their form and in how they were used. A lectur...

The story of the deep, biogeophysical planetary connections and how these are intensifying the effects of climate change and economic development, is told through personal research and expeditions to remote locations across the world (including some that were previously unexplored). This will take us on a journey to uncover connections at all levels, including at a molecular clock level, in the bi...

Charles Edward Stuart ('Bonnie Prince Charlie') is one of the most recognisable and romanticised figures of British history. Born in Rome as a Catholic prince on 31 December 1720, he led the Jacobite Rising of 1745, which came closer than anyone expected to changing Great Britain irrevocably. Professor Pittock will ask what kind of man was Charles, what were his ideas and day to day life...

Air pollution, the usefulness of trees, ideas for a green belt are not concerns we associate with the 1600s. But John Evelyn, writer, diarist and gardener, was unusual. His thinking in Fumifugium (1661) about air quality, and Sylva (1664) about trees, seems astonishingly close to our own today. Evelyn's preoccupation with apparently contemporary environmental problems, and his suggested solut...

How does fiction make itself seem like fact? Professor John Mullan begins where novels begin: with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which showed every novel that followed how to make a 'strange surprising' story seem entirely 'probable' (the word that eighteenth-century pioneers of fiction liked to use). He will explore the tradition of factuality in the English novel, ending with...

Well-trained eyes can be remarkably useful for capturing light curves of evolving objects in the cosmos, even contributing to modern research programmes. This lecture will consider how stargazing with imperfect, non-linear human eyes can accomplish such a feat, and the important contributions that this makes to elucidating the phenomena of nova detonations in our galaxy. A lecture by Katherine Blu...

Psychological studies show that humans overweight tangible factors and underweight intangible ones when making decisions. This talk shows how these biases affect the stock market - it focuses excessively on short-term profit, but ignores environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors. As a result, all investors - not just ESG investors - can profit by using intangible factors that are not full...

Caribbean migrants not only came to work in the buses and hospitals. Many - such as the novelists George Lamming and Sam Selvon - came to Britain in search of opportunities to be paid to think and write. Others such as Stuart Hall, Vidia Naipaul and Walter Rodney came as students. London also received a stream of de facto political refugees from the Caribbean and the United States, such C.L.R. Jam...

This lecture examines the centuries long presence of the African diaspora as an integral part of Britain's history since Roman times. Unfortunately, this history is still too often ignored, its promotion limited only to October. Attempts to restrict it only to the period following the arrival of the Windrush in 1948, lead to a distortion of the past which has serious consequences for all of u...

This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies. A lecture by D'Maris Coffman 21 October The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/reserve-currenc...

This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies. A lecture by Andrew Lewis-Pye 21 October The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/cryptocurrencies Gr...

This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies. A lecture by Norman Biggs 21 October The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/ Gresham College has be...

Algorithms, loosely translated, are systems for doing things. Algorithms are thus the link from pre-history to the modern world - without algorithms we would have an inanimate universe without all the mess and complexity of real life. It turns out that the history of algorithms is messy. There are also general theories of algorithms, and those ideas are not messy at all; they are very beautiful, p...

Traditionally a lawyer's own views and political affiliation are irrelevant to the pursuit of the legal process. This lecture will examine - and celebrate - the work of lawyers who have crossed the usual lines and worked for political change. It will look at the life of South African advocate Bram Fischer, who defended Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia trial, and was himself prosecuted for sabota...

The relative role of the State and the individual is a recurring theme of political theory. It is also a practical question in public health - what are the respective responsibilities of government, individuals and healthcare professionals to protect health? This lecture will explore the areas government is widely perceived to be responsible for, ones where government should have no role, and the...

In the face of enslavement, colonialism and cultural suppression, peoples of African descent have fought to maintain cherished cultural practices. Dr Gus Casely-Hayford, the new Director of V&A East, tells the story of how that resistance came to inspire the creation of some of the most dynamic artistic practice of the modern age. A lecture by Guy Casely-Hayford 15 October The transcript and d...

Was Covid-19 the ultimate wake-up call about how we live on planet earth? Looking at the effect on the environment of a near-stoppage of the world's economies, the first lecture explores emerging perspectives and some of the guiding principles about surviving and thriving when we have a greater understanding of nature. These experiences are used to throw light on how some of the traditions of...

Pattern and structure are essential to music, from the permutations in a Bach fugue, to the structure of a round. This lecture will explore the mathematics of musical symmetries, such as the "translational symmetry" of the transposition of keys, and the "rotational symmetry" of the duet "Der Spiegel", attributed to Mozart. It will go on to explore the last century&apo...

Eve was the original Evil Woman. She was tempted by Satan, introducing sin into the world. In turn, she seduced Adam, bringing the wrath of the Creator upon humanity for all eternity. From the 2nd century, Eve has been blamed for evil. The innocence of the Virgin Mary simply magnifies Eve's weakness and this continues to resonate in western texts. The fig-leaf covering Eve's genitals is...

Clinical practice is often seen as the acquisition and application of scientific knowledge to diagnose and treat diseases. Yet every patient is different. This lecture draws on a ten-year collaboration with a Savile Row tailor to explore 'bespoke' as a metaphor for clinical practice. Using this approach, the knowledge and skill of a practitioner must intersect with the needs of the patie...