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It’s play time on Start the Week. The mathematician Marcus Du Sautoy looks at the numbers behind the games we play, from Monopoly to rock paper scissors. In Around The World in 80 Games he shows how understanding maths can give you the edge, and why games are integral to human psychology and culture.The historian Anthony Bale looks at game-playing in the medieval world. In A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, he finds travellers passing the time with dice and tric trac, as well as collecting pilgrim badges along the way. Many of today’s most popular video games immerse players in historical settings, and the practice of collecting items along the way is nothing new to gamers. The co-director of the Games and Gaming Lab at the University of Glasgow, Jane Draycott, researches the historical authenticity of these online worlds, and especially the depiction of women.And the mathematician G.T. Karber has taken his love of classic detective fiction and puzzles to create the murder-mystery riddle Murdle. A combination of Cluedo and Sudoku, what started as an online game is now a series of bestselling books. The latest is Murdle: More Killer Puzzles.Producer: Katy Hickman

Tim Peake was the first British astronaut to visit the International Space Station, and is one of only 628 people in human history to have left the Earth’s atmosphere. In Space he tells the human story of space exploration – from launch to landing. In Samantha Harvey’s latest novel Orbital six astronauts on a space station rotate above the Earth. While their waking lives are spent conducting scientific experiments and maintaining the spacecraft, their attention is constantly drawn back to the Earth – its beauty as they circle it, and the fragility of the human life on it. The cosmologist Roberto Trotta stands on firm ground and gazes skyward. In Starborn he wonders how different our world would be if our ancestors had looked up and there were no stars. From navigation to time, gravity to the wonder of the universe, the cosmos has profoundly shaped our understanding of the world.Producer: Katy Hickman

The Impressionist painter Claude Monet wrote that he was driven ‘wild with the need to put down what I experience’. In his long career he revolutionised painting and made some of the most iconic images of western art. The art critic Jackie Wullschläger’s biography of Monet looks at the man behind the famous artist.Monet’s late series of paintings of water lilies became less and less concerned with a conventional depiction of nature. The artist Mat Collishaw’s latest works also draw on evocative imagery from the natural world, including use of AI technology. At an exhibition at Kew Gardens (until April 2024) Collishaw takes inspiration from 17th century still life paintings of flowers, but on closer inspection the viewer sees the flowers morph into layers of insects. Humans have always used technology to expand our limited vision, from the stone mirror 8,000 years ago to facial recognition and surveillance software today. Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. In her book, Machine Vision, she looks at the implications of the latest technologies, and how they are changing the way we see the world.Producer: Katy Hickman