Relatively Prime: Stories from the Mathematical Domain

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The Teacher:

Dan Meyer is a PhD student at Stanford University. He has also spent 6 years teaching high school math, a year as a Cirriculum Fellow at Google, and is the man behind the popular mathematics education blog dy/dan. Samuel first heard about him from the TEDx talk that spread like wildfire across the internet mathematics community.

The Organization:

Math for America is a non-profit that has made its mission since 2004 to improve the state of USA mathematics education by creating a corps of top notch educators and leaders. In order to accomplish this goal they have created fellowships to support new teachers, established teachers, and mathematics teachers that are going into administration. Samuel spoke with the president of Math for America, John Ewing, in their New York offices. He also spoke with Math for America Fellows Meredith Klein and Patrick Honner.

The Innovator:

Keith Devlin is the Executive Director of Stanford’s H*STAR institute, a mathematician, an author, an educator, and a World of Warcraft player. When you put all of those things together you get a man both qualified and inclined to think about how video games can be used in mathematics education.

Music
Calvin Cardioid (2) (3)

0,1,2,3…

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 07:22:51 +0000

This episode is all about the forgotten mathematical tool of numbers. Ok, forgotten may be a bit strong, but after a certain point in mathematics numbers seem to lose a bit of their importance. For the first few years after you start to learn math it is all add these numbers, divide this number by that one, or find that number. And then it morphs into for all numbers or let x be an arbitrary number or for epsilon greater than zero and numbers start to lose their power.

Well not on this episode. Samuel Hansen has found stories about amazing properties of numbers, how a person started collecting collections of numbers, how research can lead to a number horde which can then lead to more research, and all about favorite numbers.

Soap and Foam
Joe Nathan 007
Jared Corak
FLANDY
Joe.Crotty
Red Shirt Beats

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Numbers Gossip:

Tanya Khovanova is a freelance mathematician and mathematical entertainer currently working as a research affiliate at MIT. She is also the mind behind Number Gossip, a website for finding out surprising things about numbers. Her son Alexey Radul helped design Number Gossip, and his son Lev helped give background noise for our interview.

Sequence Encyclopedia:

Neil Sloane started collecting sequences in 1964 as a graduate student at Cornell. His collection was first published in 1973, then again in 1995, and then became the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences in 1996. He also managed to fit 43 years of work at AT&T in there somehow. Samuel caught up with Neil Sloane at the 2012 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston

0% of All Real Numbers:

Michael Shamos is the Distinguished Career Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His career has included mathematics, computer science, law, business, and pool. He is the author of “The Catalog of Real Numbers”

Which is Your Favorite:

Alex Bellos is a journalist and author. His most recent book Here’s Looking at Euclid(Alex’s Adventures in Number Land in the UK) is all about the world of mathematics. He is also the mind behind the Favourite Number Project.

The Favorite Number Gang:

David Spiegelhalter
Meredith Klein
Steven Brams
Scott Feld
Keith Devlin
Dan Meyer
Patrick Honner
Ron Graham
Dmitri Krioukov
Jonathon Schaeffer
Jerry Grossman
Joseph Gallian
Edmund Harris
Neil Sloane
Timothy Gowers
Nicholas Christakis
John Ewing
Michael Shamos
Jonathan Middleton

Music:

Erdos

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 05:32:49 +0000

Paul Erdos was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th Century, the one that other mathematicians measure their distance from, and beyond that one of the most interesting. His highly collaborative, highly nomadic life brought him in touch with hundreds if not thousands of other mathematicians, and every single on of them has their own Erdos story to tell. In order to find out more about the man, Samuel Hansen spoke to three of his collaborators and the man who runs the Erdos Number Project.

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The Naughty Step (2) (3)
Raaphorst
Grant Tregellas
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jazzer78

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Jerry Grossman is a Professor of Mathematics at Oakland University and the man behind the Erdos Number Project.

Joel Spencer is a Professor in the Computer Science and Mathematics Departments at New York University.

Carl Pomerance is the John G. Kemeny Parents Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Dartmouth College.

Ron Graham is the Irwin and Joan Jacovs Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego and Chief Scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

Music

The Score

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 05:14:12 +0000

There are many similarities between mathematics and music. They are their own vocabulary, their own written language, their own way of describing the world around us, but while they are similar the Venn diagram that contains mathematics and music doesn’t always seem to have a huge overlap. This episode of Relatively Prime brings you three stories from that intersection. First a story of mathematics applied to music, in a way that no musician would have thought up. Next a story of what happen when you take mathematician and musician and combine it into a single person. Finally, the story of a composer and how he has harnessed the power of numbers as a music creation tool.

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The Application:

Scott Rickard is the director of the Complex & Adaptive Systems Laboratory, and a Professor of Electrical Engineering, at the University College Dublin. His work on mathematics and music was initially presented at TEDxMIA, the video of which spread like wildfire.

The Mathematical Musician, or musical mathematician:

Robert Schneider is the lead singer of the band The Apples in Stereo and a cofounder of The Elephant Six Recording Collective. Oh, and he is currently studying for a Ph.D. of mathematics at Emory University.

Robert Schneider is currently studying for a Ph.D. of mathematics at Emory University. Oh, and he is the lead singer of the band The Apples in Stereo and a cofounder of The Elephant Six Recording Collective.

Here is a video of the song, CPU, played during the story.

The Composer:

Jonathan Middleton is a composer, and Professor of Composition at Eastern Washington University. His website, Musical Algorithms, provides a way to turn numbers, sequences, DNA, and many other things into compositions.

All music on this episode was provided by the guests

The Shape of Things

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 05:10:28 +0000

Mathematics is rather unfairly thought of as a numbers game, but there really is much more too it and after scouring the world Samuel Hansen found a man proud to stand on his geometric soapbox, another with some important breaking mathematical news from out of this world, two more who speak with Samuel about his favorite building in the whole world, and finally one who helped to find the shape of something that is generally thought not to have one.

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The Mathematical Land Grab:

Edmund Harriss is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arkansas, as well as being an artist that uses the inherent beauty of mathematics to create beautiful things in the real world. Also, he happens to have a very broad definition of mathematics.

The Out of this World News

Matt Parker is the Stand-Up Mathematician. He started out as a normal mathematics teacher and you can now see him talking about mathematics all over the UK, as well as turning up from time to time on the BBC and the pages of the Guardian. Sometimes he also makes nearly unbelievable mathematics discoveries.

La Sagrada Familia

Marcella Giulia Lorenzi works at the University of Calabria in the Laboratory for Scientific Communication, Mauro Francaviglia at the University of Torino in the Department of Mathematics, and together they wrote the article on the mathematics in Antoni Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia.

The Shape of the Internet

Dmitri Krioukov is the Senior Research Scientist for the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the University of California, San Diego. He, along with his collaborators, have created a new, hyperbolic map of the internet and made very interesting observations about what this new map may mean.

Music:

The Unexpected

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:24:11 +0000

Sometimes an approach you are sure will work yields results. Maybe the Cambridge sandwich year and a unicycle society will lead to traveling around the world talking about the mathematics behind throwing things in the air. Other times a sociologist’s observations about the statistics of networks decades later might help predict epidemics. Also who knows where an epiphany had while giving an exam may lead. For this episode Samuel Hansen searched near and far for stories of what was not expected.

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Ronin Beats
Red Shirt Beats (2)
Mashmoll

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The Unexpected Result:

Timothy Gowers is a Professor at Cambrige University, a Fields Medalist, a blogger, and the man who started the Polymath Project, where he and many others from around the world collaborated through comments on his blog to find a new combinatorial proof of the Density Hales-Jewett theorem.

The Unexpected Juggle:

Colin Wright has given his Mathematics of Juggling talk all over the world and you really want to see it. He also runs the MathsJam annual conference and talks about mathematics on his twitter and blog.

The Unexpected Application:

Scott Feld is a Professor of Sociology at Purdue University and is the author of the best titled research paper in the history of science: “Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do”

Nicholas Christakis is a physician and social scientist who works as a Professor at Harvard University in the Departments of Health Care Policy, Medicine, and Sociology. He has done extensive work into the relationship between social networks and health with his collaborator James Fowler.

The Unexpected Constant:

Robert Palais is a Professor of Mathematics at Utah Valley University and the author of “Pi is Wrong!”

Michael Hartl is an educator and entrepreneur, as well as being the author of “The Tau Manifesto” and the creator of Tau Day.

Music

The Toolbox

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 06:30:44 +0000

The mathematics that we all learn in school is great. No, really, it is. How can anyone get through life without knowing how to add or subtract. Multiply or divide. Solve for an unknown or factor a polynomial. OK, you might be able to get through life without that last one, but the point still stands, the mathematics that we all learn in school is great. It isn’t everything though. There are a lot of other tools that mathematics has to offer that could enrich people’s lives. On this episode Samuel Hansen rummages through his mathematical tool box and showcases three tools he feel are going to be very important in the coming years.

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Tool 1 Game Theory:

Game theory has numerous applications in economics and political science, but thanks to the new book by NYU Professor Steven Brams, Game Theory and the Humanities, it has broken out of its shell and started to play in the same realm as Shakespeare and the Bible. Samuel spoke with Professor Brams at the 2012 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston.

Tool 2 Risk:

Risk is a word that can mean anything to anyone. From a technical perspective it is probably best defined as the probability that an action will lead to a negative result, but that is not the definition that most people have in mind when they hear the word. For them risk can be a person, risk can be an action, a loss, or even what makes you feel alive. Risk can have to do with death, with money, or with security. She could be a risk, he can risk it all, you might be told to just take a risk, and you definitely shouldn’t risk your life on getting anyone to agree on a definition of risk. In order to clear up these problems Samuel tracked down two of his favorite Risk minded thinkers. First on the list he spoke with the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk, as well as the man behind Understanding Uncertainty, David Spiegelhalter. Then he tracked down the stand-up mathematician Matt Parker, co-creator of Your Days are Numbered: The Maths of Death comedy show(the other mind behind the show was Timandra Harkness).

Tool 3 Relief Geometry:

Recent disasters have taught some people two things: disaster relief shelter is incredibly important and disaster relief shelters have major issues. It was with those thoughts in mind that Vinay Gupta created the original Hexayurt, a zero waste relief structure that can be built from basic materials that already exist in most supply chains, plywood and nails. They were very simple and very small structures, so when he wanted to create an expanded version of the hexayurt he enlisted the help of University of Arkansas mathematician Edmund Harriss.

Music:

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Chinook

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 06:26:18 +0000

You may not think of checkers as an important game intellectually. It certainly has never had the cachet of chess. That did not stop it from becoming the obsession of the University of Alberta computer science professor for nearly two decades and the center of one of the most ambitious Artificial Intelligence projects ever undertaken. This is their story.

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