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When the Spanish filmmaker and graphic designer Cristóbal Vila looks at nature, he sees numbers, and the remarkable elegance of mathematics. Uniting music and animation with mathematics, Nature by Numbers is a sensory science film, an immersion in the world of the minute and microscopic, and an exciting introduction to some of the great geometric and scientific concepts.
Director: Cristóbal Vila
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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
video
Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
video
Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
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Astronomy
The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky
5 minutes
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Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes
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Physics
Groundbreaking visualisations show how the world of the nucleus gives rise to our own
10 minutes
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Earth science and climate
There’s a ‘climate bomb’ ticking beneath the Arctic ice. How can we prepare?
8 minutes
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Political philosophy
The radical activist couple who fought for social change in the courtroom
21 minutes