Information plays a huge role in the modern world, with vast amounts of data literally at our finger tips. The Internet is leading to an ever-increasing amount of data, leading to the ‘challenge of Big Data’, in which we have to deal with huge amounts of data of direct relevance to people’s lives. Without mathematics, we would be unable to store, transmit, interpret, process or understand any of this. The rise of Big Data is associated not only with major technological challenges, but also with significant ethical and privacy issues, and has major policy implications.

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

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 1,900 lectures free to access or download from the website.

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