The Story of Maths is a four-part British television series outlining aspects of the history of mathematics.

[1] The consultants were the Open University academics Robin Wilson, professor Jeremy Gray and June Barrow-Green.

[2] The series comprised four programmes respectively titled: The Language of the Universe; The Genius of the East; The Frontiers of Space; and To Infinity and Beyond.

He also looks at mathematics in Europe and then in America and takes the viewers inside the lives of many of the greatest mathematicians.

Du Sautoy commences in Egypt where recording the patterns of the seasons and in particular the flooding of the Nile was essential to their economy.

[3] Du Sautoy discovers the use of a decimal system based on the fingers on the hands, the unusual method for multiplication and division.

A controversial figure, Pythagoras' teachings were considered suspect and his followers seen as social outcasts and a little bit strange and not in the norm.

As well as his work on the properties of right angled triangles, Pythagoras developed another important theory after observing musical instruments.

Du Sautoy describes both the Chinese use of maths in engineering projects and their belief in the mystical powers of numbers.

He mentions Madhava of Sangamagrama and Aryabhata and illustrates the - historically first exact - formula for calculating the π (pi).

[5] Du Sautoy then considers the Middle East: the invention of the new language of algebra and the evolution of a solution to cubic equations.

From the seventeenth century, Europe replaced the Middle East as the engine house of mathematical ideas.

Du Sautoy visits Urbino to introduce perspective using mathematician and artist, Piero della Francesca's The Flagellation of Christ.

He shows how one of Pierre de Fermat's theorems is now the basis for the codes that protect credit card transactions on the internet.

He describes Isaac Newton’s development of math and physics crucial to understanding the behaviour of moving objects in engineering.

He further covers Leonhard Euler, the father of topology, and Gauss's invention of a new way of handling equations, modular arithmetic.

[2] For 30 years Hilbert believed that mathematics was a universal language powerful enough to unlock all the truths and solve each of his 23 Problems.

Yet there existed a mutually exclusive but equally consistent mathematical proof that Hypothesis was false and there was such a set.

To answer this Julia Robinson, who created the Robinson Hypothesis which stated that to show that there was no such method all you had to do was cook up one equation whose solutions were a very specific set of numbers: The set of numbers needed to grow exponentially yet still be captured by the equations at the heart of Hilbert's problem.

This part of the solution fell to Yuri Matiyasevich who saw how to capture the Fibonacci sequence using the equations at the heart of Hilbert's tenth.