Gresham College Lectures

The death of the Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, in September 2022 sparked the largest protests in Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The protests threaten the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic as a political system. Beyond Iran, the protests have highlighted that Iranians reject gender-based, race-based, and religion-based violence. In addition to addressing the compl...

Antisemitism has existed and continues to exist on many levels, from unthinking prejudice to highly developed theories. Common to all levels is an explicit, or more often, implicit belief that all Jews, usually defined in racial terms, are conspiring secretly to undermine civilisation, order, or social and cultural stability. This lecture considers the evolution of this conspiracy theory since the...

On the eve of COP28 in Dubai, is the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C still alive? What does this mean and is it even possible? Given warming has reached 1.25°C, increasing at around ¼°C per decade, what happens if we miss our target? While every tenth of a degree matters, passing 1.5°C does not mean an inexorable slide into climate chaos, but every year’s delay increases the clean-up bill...

Is Artificial Intelligence fundamentally different from previous technological advancements? This lecture will examine the opportunities and threats of the impending AI revolution, asking if AI differs from past technology waves and exploring measures to ensure AI safety. It will introduce 'Human-led AI', a paradigm which emphasises human control and supervision over AI, to mitigate pote...

Millions of us regularly solve Sudoku puzzles. In this lecture, we discuss the mathematics behind them, and the links to other kinds of number grids, like magic squares and so-called Latin squares, which have been studied for centuries. Latin squares have many applications in areas as diverse as experiment design, algebra and coding theory. This lecture was recorded by Professor Sarah Hart on 21 N...

An annual talk delivered by the President of Gresham College, The Rt Hon the Lord Mayor of the City of London. Cities are networked networks of connectivity and information sharing. They create, often indirectly, communication, transportation, commercial, and intellectual networks.  For the City of London, expanding and changing networks develop its strengths. Over 40 learned societies, 70 univers...

Natural selection acts to ensure the ‘survival of the fittest’. But random chance has also played a huge role in the history of life on Earth, from meteorite strikes to massive earthquakes. Randomness also lies at the core of evolutionary processes; the impact of a chance mutation, or the ‘lottery’ of sexual selection. In this lecture, we’ll look at some remarkable examples of evolutionary chance...

Why did the Iranian Revolution catch so many in US and UK Governments by surprise in 1978-79? Why were so many enthusiastic about the fall of the Shah? Why did so many Western observers - including Michel Foucault, Fred Halliday, and Edward Said, misread Ayatollah Khomeini? This lecture examines readings and mis-readings of the Iranian Revolution in Europe and the United States from the perspectiv...

Firms hope to get money for their investment decisions from investors. The latest have to decide how to maximize the returns they get while simultaneously minimizing their risk. This lecture will introduce two key concepts of financial management: Portfolio Theory and Capital Asset Pricing Model and will discuss how the CAPM gives us one of the inputs for NPV, the discount rate. This lecture was r...

Music is a temporal art, unfolding like a ribbon and transforming our experience of time itself. This lecture demonstrates how music harnesses our unique and intricate listening faculties creating a complex interplay between sounding events and our internal predictions. This forms a predictive tapestry whereby the listener - usually unconsciously - ‘explains’ temporal events in reference to multi ...

During the late 19th century, individuals and organizations planned for years in advance to observe a total solar eclipse. These high-stakes astronomical expeditions involved many scientific practitioners whose collective eclipse experience helped to grow and sustain 19th-century mathematical communities.   Especially in the United States, connections forged beneath the sun’s shadow sustained netw...

Extant manuscripts, early library catalogues, lists of loans and wills are key witnesses for better understanding the mathematical practices and innovations in different milieux at the end of the Middle Ages. A systematic exploration of those sources unravels intellectual exchanges, scientific practices and methods. They also allow to delineate ‘communities of learning’, composed of scholars verse...

In the late 19th-century, astronomical research could be practical, using telescopes and spectroscopes, or be based on mathematical reasoning. Astronomers could be professionals or amateurs, and explored the heavens in observatories, on field trips to exotic countries, in their own backyards, or aboard hot air balloons. Although this diversity of research practices enabled historically marginalise...

Between us and the medieval men and women who went on pilgrimage there stand many impediments to understanding: the Reformation, the Enlightenment, secularisation. This lecture will explore how tracing ancient routes on foot, and experiencing travel as people did in an age before trains and cars, can offer insights into the past. But is the sense of being accompanied by ghosts a delusion? Tom Holl...

This considers a set of superhuman female figures found in medieval and early modern European cultures- Mother Nature, the roving nocturnal lady often called Herodias, the British fairy queen, and the Gaelic Cailleach. None seem to be surviving ancient deities, and yet there is nothing Christian about any of them either. It is suggested that they force us to reconsider our own existing terminology...

Different models of economic modernity competed during the Cold War. Washington feared that the transition from colonial peasant societies would provide an opening for Marxists, as in Vietnam. But by 1989, the Soviet economic model was in crisis and attempts to create a market economy led to Putin’s kleptocracy. In China, the disaster of Mao’s Great Leap Forward was followed by successful transfor...

Uncompromising control of her career and pursuit of a bold vision have made Barbra Streisand a sometimes controversial figure since her debut in Funny Girl, despite her popularity and many awards. She has been stigmatised for being a powerful woman in the entertainment industry: her work as a producer and director have shattered the glass ceiling but not without personal cost. This lecture explore...

Our exploration of the Solar System has revealed a remarkable diversity of landscapes, from the frozen deserts of Mars, which billions of years ago ran with water, to the hellish surface of Venus and the strange hydrocarbon seas of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. In our voyages to these places we have discovered what may be the most common home for life in the Universe - the ice-covered oceans...

Our brains are computers. What if we could enhance their processing power? Medical technology now allows for brain signals to be read and translated to reverse paralysis. Deep brain stimulation is also used to treat diseases such as Parkinson’s. Neural interfaces are already improving lives. How do they work? What’s next for our physical connection to digital technology? And what are the implicati...

Is politics merely a gaslighting of the oppressed, a cloak for the rulers to exploit the ruled? Plato’s Republic confronted the challenges of political office (archē). By working through the ideas of this dialogue and comparing them to the present day, the lecture offers a new way of understanding the role of officeholders and the ethical demands placed on them. It argues that Plato took the risk...

Iran’s first revolution in 1906 provided the country with a constitution and parliament, laying the foundations for its political development over the next century. Although overshadowed by the later Islamic Revolution of 1979, it was the Constitutional Revolution - modelled on the British constitution and British political ideas - that gave birth to the modern state and shaped future political de...

The theory of evolution is often described as the biggest idea in the history of humanity. But evolutionary theory itself has evolved over time, often via landmark contributions from some very unusual characters. This lecture investigates some of the biggest ideas about evolution, as well as some of the most ill-conceived. We’ll meet aristocrats and criminals, clergymen and dictators and consider...

Literature has always played a key role in social and political life in Africa, even when it is not deliberately or obviously activist in its aims or form. African writers like Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe, Obi Wali and poets Christopher Okigbo and Stella Nyanzi have long been seen as key thinkers and engaged intellectuals. Tracing this history, this lecture shows how creative work change...

Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI are changing our lives and society as a whole from how we shop to how we access news and make decisions. Are current and traditional legal frameworks and new governance strategies able to guard against the novel risks posed by new systems? How can we mitigate AI bias, protect privacy, and make algorithmic systems more accountable? How are data protection,...

Why are there chess Grandmasters, but not Grandmasters of noughts and crosses (otherwise known as tic-tac-toe)? It is because chess is “harder” – but what do we really mean by that?  Answering that question leads us to develop the idea of mathematical complexity, which is a measure of how ‘big’ a game is.  We’ll look at the complexity of popular games, and ask: what is the hardest game of all time...