Royal Institution Talk: The Scientific Mind of Da Vinci with Martin Kemp

• Tuesday 11 August
• 2:00 - 3:00pm
• James Reckitt Reading Room, Hull Central Library

Martin Kemp explores why Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary thinking remains startlingly relevant today.

Discover how Leonardo saw humanity as integral to nature's design, viewing the human body as a "lesser world" mirroring the cosmos. Through his observations spanning anatomy, geology, optics, and engineering, we'll explore how he pioneered biomimicry, developed an "optics of uncertainty" that prefigures modern physics, and created the iconic Vitruvian Man.

Unlike today's compartmentalised knowledge, Leonardo approached learning as a unified whole – knowledge as a branching tree where each discovery illuminated the entire forest. His "lateral seeing" and integration of art with science offer profound lessons for our complex 21st-century world, showing how refusing to separate disciplines might unlock our interconnected challenges.

This is a screening from the British Library's Royal Institution Archive.