Gresham College

For more than 400 years, Gresham College has been providing challenging, thought-provoking and educational lectures for the general public - now it is taking them into the 21st century with the launch of a new series of Enhanced Lectures.

Five of the 100-plus lectures from the 2024-25 series have been selected for this treatment.
Each of them will use the lecture as the starting point. They have been given by some of the top academics in the country, and cover a multitude of topics including science, music, space and health.
The skilled team at Gresham College carefully select and add in additional elements to the hour-long talks so they look and feel more like a television documentary.

The first Enhanced Lecture will be released on Friday, November 22.
It will be The Ancient History of Computers and Code, given by Professor Victoria Baines. Originally given in September, the talk explores some of the earliest devices used long before electricity was discovered.

Four other lectures have been selected:

Milton Mermikides - Magical Mystery Tour: The Invention of The Beatles
Rob Eastaway - Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times
Raghavendra Rau - Is Your Money Safe? Unveiling Hidden Conflicts in Finance
Chris Lintott - Black Holes and Bangs.

These will be uploaded across the course of the academic year, and there are more than 2,500 recordings of lectures dating back to the 1990s on the website.

1 month ago | [YT] | 18

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.

4 months ago | [YT] | 12

Gresham College

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.

5 months ago | [YT] | 26

Gresham College

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.

5 months ago | [YT] | 18

Gresham College

In every financial transaction, one side has more information than the other. Does more information leave you better off?

5 months ago | [YT] | 12

Gresham College

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.

5 months ago | [YT] | 16

Gresham College

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?

5 months ago | [YT] | 12

Gresham College

Weather and climate-related events can cause significant mortality and disability.

Sudden cold, heat, storms and floods all present risks to health, especially to the most vulnerable.

This lecture considers how weather events cause harm to health, and our countermeasures.

5 months ago | [YT] | 16

Gresham College

In this lecture I will show you some mathematical illusions: “proofs” that 1=0, that fractions don’t exist, and more. There are curious and important implications behind what’s going on.

6 months ago | [YT] | 6

Gresham College

What species might evolve in the next ten million years? How will evolutionary processes change as a result of human innovation and what are the risks of us getting it disastrously wrong?

6 months ago | [YT] | 14