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University of Wales, Bangor - Mathematics Department
Horizon : "The Bible Codes" |
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Eagle-eyed viewers of the Horizon programme
The Bible Codes
shown on BBC2 on Thursday 20th November 2003 at 21:00,
may have noticed in the final credits
"Thanks to Bangor University".
What was the connection?
The programme summary:
"Michael Drosnin is an American journalist and best selling author.
He has written two books claiming that he
can see into the future using a 3000 year old code, hidden in the Bible.
What he can see is truly horrific; according to Drosnin,
the world could end in an atomic holocaust - in 2006.
It sounds preposterous yet Drosnin claims to have
serious scientific backing.
Behind his findings lies the work of one of the world's most
brilliant theoretical mathematicians,
an Israeli professor called Eliyahu Rips.
In 1994, using exactly the same ancient code, Michael Drosnin accurately
predicted the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin -
twelve months before it occurred.
Drosnin's books on the Bible Code have been translated into
most of the world's major languages and are read by millions of people.
If he's right, he's stumbled on one of the most important discoveries
ever made.
This week Horizon investigates the science behind the Bible Code."
The program also contained contributions from
Brendan McKay, from Canberra,
another well-known Statistician and Combinatorialist.
Brendan has performed similar searches on other texts, such as "Moby Dick",
in an attempt to show that the occurrence of the words found by
Michael Drosnin, hidden in the Hebrew version of the book of Genesis,
is not statistically significant.
It happened that Brendan McKay was a delegate at
In the event, there were three brief clips in the programme,
of approximately 5 seconds each, showing Brendan lecturing
to a group of conference delegates,
but with a voice-over discussing text searching and not bipartite graphs.
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