Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, looks at how fundamental mathematics affects our lives before exploring the mathematics of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece.

Marcus du Sautoy visits China and explores how mathematics helped build imperial China and was at the heart of such amazing feats of engineering as the Great Wall.

Visiting France to look at the work of Rene Descartes, an outstanding mathematician and theoretical physicist.

In the final part of this BBC science documentary, Marcus du Sautoy investigates the great problems of mathematics that remain unsolved and the minds that tried to decipher them, including Cantor's work on infinity and conjecture about chaos theory from Poincare. But will anyone ever reconcile Riemann's hypothesis on prime numbers, which carries with it a $1million prize for whoever can crack it?