Gresham College Lectures

Caribbean migrants not only came to work in the buses and hospitals. Many - such as the novelists George Lamming and Sam Selvon - came to Britain in search of opportunities to be paid to think and write. Others such as Stuart Hall, Vidia Naipaul and Walter Rodney came as students.

London also received a stream of de facto political refugees from the Caribbean and the United States, such C.L.R. James, the poet and publisher John LaRose, and Claudia Jones, the first theorist of 'intersectionality' and founder of the Notting Hill Carnival. Visual artists such as Horace Ove, Frank Bowling, and Donald Locke made painting, sculpture and film at the frontier of the avant-garde.

From London, they reassessed the past and imagined new futures for the Caribbean, Britain and the World. We are only now beginning to see as a whole this hidden current in Twentieth-century British intellectual life.

A lecture by Richard Drayton 26 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/windrush-thinkers

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

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In the face of enslavement, colonialism and cultural suppression, peoples of African descent have fought to maintain cherished cultural practices.

Dr Gus Casely-Hayford, the new Director of V&A East, tells the story of how that resistance came to inspire the creation of some of the most dynamic artistic practice of the modern age.

A lecture by Guy Casely-Hayford 15 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/african-resistance

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Algorithms, loosely translated, are systems for doing things. Algorithms are thus the link from pre-history to the modern world – without algorithms we would have an inanimate universe without all the mess and complexity of real life. It turns out that the history of algorithms is messy.

There are also general theories of algorithms, and those ideas are not messy at all; they are very beautiful, powerful and should be required reading for the internet age.

A lecture by Richard Harvey 20 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/algorithms-intro

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Pattern and structure are essential to music, from the permutations in a Bach fugue, to the structure of a round.

This lecture will explore the mathematics of musical symmetries, such as the “translational symmetry” of the transposition of keys, and the “rotational symmetry” of the duet “Der Spiegel”, attributed to Mozart.

It will go on to explore the last century’s experimentation with the use of mathematical forms to produce intriguing effects, including in the works of Arnold Schoenberg and Per Nørgård.

A lecture by Sarah Hart 13 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/maths-music

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

This lecture examines the centuries long presence of the African diaspora as an integral part of Britain's history since Roman times. Unfortunately, this history is still too often ignored, its promotion limited only to October.

Attempts to restrict it only to the period following the arrival of the Windrush in 1948, lead to a distortion of the past which has serious consequences for all of us.

A lecture by Hakim Adi 22 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/african-britain

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

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Musorgsky was a proficient, but not virtuosic pianist: in his youth, he entertained society ladies with popular marches and quadrilles, and in his last years, he toured as an accompanist in song recitals. On the basis of these modest exploits, no one could have predicted his Pictures at an Exhibition. This cycle of piano pieces is a kind of travelogue, following a Russian at home and abroad. We tour around the Russian Empire and beyond, and we are also invited to contemplate the drawings of Musorgsky’s friend Victor Hartmann (the work stands as a touching memorial to his art).

Drawing inspiration from the Romanticism of Schumann and Liszt, Musorgsky filtered their ideas through his own Russian Realist aesthetic, and attempted to create accurate and convincing depictions of his subjects, with their distinctive voices, behaviour and locations. His piano writing is idiosyncratic, and sometimes even awkward, but it conveys his thoughts effectively in a riot of colour and contrasts. His instinctive, empirical approach to harmony was a formative influence for Debussy, the first of the great post-Romantic piano composers.

A lecture by Marina Frolova-Walker 22 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/musorgsky-piano

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies.

A lecture by D'Maris Coffman 21 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/reserve-currencies

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Support the show

This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies.

A lecture by Andrew Lewis-Pye 21 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/cryptocurrencies

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Support the show

This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies.

A lecture by Norman Biggs 21 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Support the show

Algorithms, loosely translated, are systems for doing things. Algorithms are thus the link from pre-history to the modern world - without algorithms we would have an inanimate universe without all the mess and complexity of real life. It turns out that the history of algorithms is messy.

There are also general theories of algorithms, and those ideas are not messy at all; they are very beautiful, powerful and should be required reading for the internet age.

A lecture by Richard Harvey 20 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/algorithms-intro

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Support the show