Gresham College Lectures Gresham College

This lecture traces the history of race and disability law in the English education system. It examines the impact of discriminatory policies on Black children, children of colour, and disabled children, and how narratives around race and disability have changed.The lecture questions why inequality persists and explores possible solutions.This lecture was recorded by Leslie Thomas KC on 23rd May 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, LondonThe transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham Coll...

Logarithms were perhaps once thought of as just an old-fashioned way to do sums on slide rules. But they underpin much of modern life, from modelling the COVID pandemic to Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information (which makes mobile phones a reality) and making sense of Cristiano Ronaldo’s crazy Instagram follower numbers.This lecture will explore the basics and history of logarithms, and then show how they are a natural way to represent many models and datasets.This lecture was re...

Eventually, net zero needs to include everyone: for emissions to continue in half the world while the other half mops them up is both unsustainable and unfair. But this does not mean every country should reach net zero at the same time.Historical emitters like the UK should aim for net zero before the world as a whole, but a “staggered net zero” also carries risks for developing countries, lest they are left stranded in the race to a sustainable future.This lecture was recorded by Myles Allen...

In every financial transaction, one side has more information than the other. For example, when someone buys a used car, the seller will know better than the buyer whether the car is a plum or a lemon. Does more information leave you better off?One of the fascinating ideas behind the concept of asymmetric information is that more information can lead to you being actually worse off.This lecture was recorded by Raghavendra Rau on 20th May 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, LondonThe transcript of the...

This lecture explores the very limits of music: investigating historical efforts to catalogue musical materials including the melacarta of Carnatic music, the wazn of Arabic maqam, Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, Schillinger’s Encyclopedia of Rhythms, Forte numbers, and contemporary attempts to ‘pre-copyright’ every possible melody yet to be written.It also tackles the bigger questions: how much music might exist, whether it ever will be exhausted, and if there are any b...

Starring in My Fair Lady (1956), The Sound of Music (1965) and Cinderella (1957) gave Dame Julie Andrews unparalleled profile.These were among the most successful Broadway, Hollywood and TV musicals of their time. Yet following this golden decade, she made few films and appeared in no Broadway shows during her forties and fifties, typically an artist’s most productive period.How did she then become one of the most revered female stars of the late twentieth century?This lecture was recorded by...