I've missed this so far but for anyone interested in the uk, ch5 at 7:15pm:
http://www.rigb.org/rimain/events/christmaslectures.jsptonight (thurs):
From the Caesar Cipher to the da Vinci Code, people have been fascinated by secret messages. Marcus leads the investigation into the clever ways people have hidden messages: from using hard boiled eggs to tattooed bald heads. We’ll see how maths was used to break the German Enigma code and win the second world war. How mathematicians turned from code breakers to code makers. Why prime numbers are now the key to the modern codes which protect credit cards from hackers on the internet. But how safe are our secrets? Codes aren’t just used to keep things secure. The digital age has exploited mathematical codes to turn everything into streams of numbers. Find out why an i-pod and a digital TV are just a load of 0s and 1s? The mathematics of codes lets us to do everything from photographing the surface of Mars to shopping securely on ebay.
fri:
Mathematics is the ultimate fortune teller. It can predict if a new design for a plane will make it off the ground. It can plan the path of a space craft so that it passes by all the planets on its way through the solar system. It can help explain how to bend a ball like Beckham. But some of Nature’s equations are harder to solve. How can we tell whether the Earth will be hit by a meteor? Why is the weather so hard to forecast? Why can’t we predict the stock market? How will populations across the world evolve over time? Is climate change a reality? The mathematics of chaos theory lies behind why we find some of Nature’s problems too hard to solve.
