Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy travels from Egypt and Babylon to modern universities tracing how mathematics developed across four episodes. The opening part, The Language of the Universe, finds him measuring shadows against the Great Pyramid to explain Egyptian geometry and reading Babylonian clay tablets that already show a grasp of what became Pythagoras's theorem, before moving to Athens and Euclid's Elements. Later episodes shift east, crediting Indian mathematicians with the invention of zero and Persian scholar al-Khwarizmi with algebra, then follow the story into Renaissance Europe with Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz fighting over calculus. The final episode pushes into the strange territory of infinity, following Georg Cantor's work on infinite sets and Kurt Gödel's proof that some mathematical truths can never be proven. Du Sautoy visits the actual sites, archives, and blackboards where these ideas took shape, treating each breakthrough as the work of a specific person solving a specific problem rather than an abstract inevitability.