The Story Of 1 (2005 film)

Only a Python can make the history of math seem so interesting. Made in 2005 the Oxford team of Palin and Jones had become no strangers to the BBC documentary scene as they made trademark styles of documentaries. Palin with his wonderful travels discovering the cultures of interesting places like the Sahara or the Himalayas and Terry Jones looking into the past with humor into Ancient Inventions and Medieval Lives. None of those have I yet got to see although based on what I have seen of clips I am eager to find them. My mom being a math teacher had got this documentary from another teacher and my mom had me watch it to see if there was anything interesting she could use in her class and make a quiz based on the material. Well many parts are side notes (like Pythagoras' other teachings which actually were his teachings it is not made up) or in the case of the opening a mock evolution of one. But by in large is strongly math related with explanations of how different cultures expanded the concepts of math. One interesting thing was how Pythagoras and Archimedes had put math in the forefront of Greek culture and put theoretical math into practice. The Egyptians were the first to design rulers of a cubit and the Indians invented the concept of 0 giving what we know as Arabic numerals 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 etc. The Romans we learn had done more to stunt the growth of math with Roman numerals like IVXLCDM making arithmetic almost impossible (as they used an abacus). The invent and acceptance of usury aka loans with interests caused Arabic numerals to replace Roman numerals. Other great facts is how they found the oldest certain use of counting on notches by the fact the notches were grouped in fives by neat lines. Also the Mesopotamian society invented the use of tokens to subtract. Lastly in an incoherent random trivia summary the focus of how an Aborigine tribe survived without math not even using measurements by landmarks described in song as directions.