The quest to predict the future

Royal Institution Christmas Lectures • Season 41 • Episode 5

About this episode

Mathematics is the ultimate fortune teller. It can predict if a new plane design will make it off the ground. It can plan the path of a spacecraft so it passes close to every planet on its journey through the solar system. But some of nature's equations are more tricky. Why is weather so hard to forecast? How will world populations evolve? The mathematics of chaos theory helps explain why problems like these are so challenging.