The Beauty Of Diagrams (BBC) [6 Episodes+Subs]

Part 1: Vitruvian Man

He looks at the Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci's diagram of the perfect
human body, which has many layers from anatomy to architecture, and defines
our species like no other drawing. Drawn in the 1480s in Milan, it synthesises
Leonardo's passions for anatomy, for the mechanics of the human body and
for geometry. It is also full of surprises, illustrating an ancient architectural
riddle set out 1,500 years earlier

Part 2: Copernicus
When Nicolaus Copernicus developed his theory of a sun-centred universe
500 years ago, he was flying in the face of both science and religion. Mankind
believed that the earth was at the centre of the cosmos, and to disagree was
to risk derision and accusations of heresy. A young German scientist gave
Copernicus the courage to publish his book and its extraordinary diagram of
a heliocentric universe

Part 3: Newton's Prism
Isaac Newton bought a pair of prisms which were to be the basis of a series
of experiments that would unlock a secret that had occupied scientists for
centuries - the nature of light itself. To explain, he created a diagram known as
The Crucial Experiment. It is a pivotal image in scientific history, a graphic moment
when the ancient world was overturned by modern science, as Newton
demonstrated that white light is not pure but made up different colours

Part 4: Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale is best known as the Crimean War's Lady of the Lamp
but she was also a superb statistician. Nightingale's post-war report revealed that
out of 18,000 deaths, 16,000 had been due to infectious diseases in hospital rather
than battle wounds. Her revolutionary and controversial rose diagram was designed
to persuade the government that, if sanitation in hospitals was improved, many
deaths could be avoided

Part 5: DNA
Marcus du Sautoy explores the story behind arguably the most famous and
significant scientific diagram of the last 100 years - the double helix, which shows
what the structure of our DNA looks like. Francis Crick and James Watson announced
their discovery in Nature magazine in 1953, and their article included a diagram of the
structure by Odile Crick. Her image has become so well known and loved that we now
find it in a whole range of consumer products, from ties to dogs chews and a perfume