For centuries, mathematicians have been uncannily accurate at describing and predicting the physical world that physicists have later discovered. Why is this so?

Renowned astrophysicist Mario Livio explores this question by taking a fresh look at cosmology, religion, and cognitive science, beginning with ancient Greeks such as Pythagoras and Plato, continuing with Archimedes, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and up to the scientists of today. Many of these mathematician-philosophers made discoveries that had no practical application at the time but have since advanced various fields of science in remarkable ways.

For example, Kepler and Newton discovered that planets in our solar system follow orbits in the shape of ellipses—the very curves studied by the Greeks two millennia earlier. And new types of geometry outlined by Bernhard Riemann in an extraordinary 1854 lecture were precisely the tools Einstein needed to explain the fabric of space and time.

Livio is a senior astrophysicist at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute and author of The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved. Is God a Mathematician? (Simon & Schuster) is available for signing after the program.

CODE: 1J0-502