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Relatively Prime: Stories from the Mathematical Domain — Mathematics
Relatively Prime: Stories from the Mathematical Domain

A mathematics podcast from ACMEScience featuring the best math stories from the world of maths

Copyright: © Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License

Latest Episodes:

rps2OtherDuties — Other Duties as Assigned Feb 04, 2016
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Other Duties As Assigned

Mathematician is an insanely broad job title It can encompass everyone from professors to government employees to podcast hosts.

And all of these different types of mathematicians, They do very different work, In very different ways.

Except for that one constant, they all do mathematics.

What Do They Do?

My friends Jess Charlton, Gabriel Siqueiros, Jen Bokoff, and Mike Wolf called me up and let me know just what it is they think mathematicians do all day.

Anna Haensch: The Academic

Anna Haensch is a Professor of Mathematics at Duquesne University, a mathematics writer, and co-host of The Other Half a pocast about the half of mathematics which helps you makes sense of your own life. Oh, and she tweets too.

Kristin Lauter: The Professional

Kristin Lauter is Principal Researcher and Research Manager for the Cryptography group at Microsoft Research and the President of the Association of Women in Mathematics. She also tweets.

Combinations and Permuations: The Fools

Combinations and Permuations was the first podcast Samuel ever hosted. He in no way thinks you should go back and listen to the inane and vulgar jokes he and his fellow mathematics graduate students made during the shows run, but he know he can’t stop you. For Relatively Prime he got some of the old favorites, Nathan Rowe, Sean Breckling, and Brandon Metz, back together in the mail room of UNLV CDC Building 7 to record an episode all about what mathematicians do all day.

Here is a longer cut of the silliness:

Music

espi twelve (2)
lowercase n
Red Shirt Beats

rps2DiegeticPlotsC1 — Diegetic Plots: Chapter 1 Jan 28, 2016
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Diegetic Plots: Chapter One

This episode of Relatively Prime is going to be delving into the humanistic side of mathematics. It is the first chapter in a recurring series Samuel is calling Diegetic Plots. Yes that is a super nerdy joke, and yes Samuel is super proud of it.

The Colors of Math

Gizem Karaali is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College and an editor of The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, a journal which looks at mathematics as a human endeavor with am emphasis on the aesthetic, cultural, and sociological aspects of mathematics. She read her poem The Colors of Math.

Division By Zero

Ted Chiang is a multiple Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction author. Among his work is an amazing bit of math-fiction titled, Division By Zero. Samuel talked to Ted about where the idea for the story came from and what it was like to write about such an abstract mathematical idea. You can find the story in Ted’s short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others where you will also find a lot of other wonderful stories to read.

The interview is followed by a reading of Division By Zero by Jess Charlton, Kitty Stoholski, and Samuel.

Patent World Order

A black hole appears over Samuel’s desk as he tries to introduce the next segment and what appears is frightening.

The Mathematician’s Shiva

Stuart Rojstaczer has been a dishwasher, a college professor, and a grade inflation czar. He is now an author who’s debut novel was published in September 2014. The novel, The Mathematician’s Shiva, is the story of Rachela, the greatest mathematician of her age. It tells the story both of her time in a Soviet Gulag as a child and of the aftermath of her death. Samuel talked to Stuart about how he prepared to write about mathematicians, the importance of balancing all of one’s identities, and a little bit about Navier-Stokes.

A Taste of Mathematics

JoAnne Growney is a poet and a mathematician. She read her poem A Taste of Mathematics which can be found in her poetry collection Red Has No Reason

Music

Chris Zabriskie (2)

####While the interviews in this episode Relatively Prime are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, the authors reserve all rights for the poems and stories which appeared on this episode and if you want to reproduce or otherwise use their work please contact the authors to ask for their permission.

rps2Mathematicistan — Mathematistan Jan 20, 2016
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Mathematistan

Mathematics may be the most pure, the most abstract, the most ivory tower of all academic disciplines, but nothing, nothing is beyond the reach of politics. This episode of Relatively Prime looks at how politics effects mathematics and how mathematics can effect politics.

Presidential Pre-Requisites

Mathematics does not tend to be the focus of people who are aiming to become president of the United States, which really is not surprising. There are a lot of lawyers among the previous presidents, along with a few economics and business students. All of which do sound like more expected stepping stones to political office than a degree in mathematics. This does not mean they skip mathematical education in its entirety of course. Samuel spoke with Ronald Merritt of Athens State University about his research into the mathematical educations of US presidents and about which president has a proof included in Elisha Loomis’s book of proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem.

Boxers and Fighting Irish

Della Dumbaugh of University of Richmond tells us two stories of how Nazi Germany and the Boxer Rebellion changed the lives of individual mathematicians and the effects these life changes had on mathematics more broadly.

Surveillance Both Ways

Keith Devlin may not have born in the United States, but he is a very proud US citizen. He had only recently received his citizenship when the tragic events of September 11, 2001 came to pass. After the attacks, like a lot of other really smart people, Keith was contacted by the government and asked to lend his expertise to try and stop another attack. Keith talked to Samuel about went into his decision, whether or not he would make the same decision today, and some stuff which went down in Germany in the 70s.

And All of Gerry’s Man(dering)

Gerrymandering – the dividing of a state, county, etc., into election districts so as to give one political party a majority in many districts while concentrating the voting strength of the other party into as few districts as possible.

Few aspects of politics are as clearly open to mathematical analysis as gerrymandering. Just looking at district maps seems to scream for geometric analysis, and there really are a lot of different tests out there. Samuel spoke to David Austin about some potential gerrymandered districts and ways to test for them, then things got a bit bizarre. Samuel also sat down with Jonathan Hodge to talk about a technique Hodge helped develop to test for gerrymandering called the Convexity Coefficient.

Not all of the ways to test for possible gerrymandering rely on geometry. Duke University Professor Jonathan Mattingly and his former student Christy Vaughn, she is currently a graduate student at Princeton, decided to use probability theory to check to see if the districts used in North Carolina’s 2012 elections had been drawn fairly. The results were eye opening.

Music

Lowercase n (2)
Gibson
LOCOFLOP
Ryan Vice

rps2DailyRecommend — Your Daily Recommended Math Jan 13, 2016
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Your Daily Recommended Math

We all use mathematics everyday. At least that is what we all like to tell our friends who ask us, “What good is math anyway?” The problem is so much of this everyday mathematics is, how should I say this, non-obvious. No one thinks they are doing mathematics when they figure out the larger peanut butter is not actually a better deal than the smaller size or when they cut across the intersection diagonally to save time or when they decide to ask that friend they don’t really talk to much to spread the word about their new project because that friend has more friends than they do(not that I have any history doing this last one, no history in doing it at all). Sure those are just algebra, geometry, and network analysis problems deep down, but they are also just normal every issues. In this episode of Relatively Prime we look at three regular, everyday problems and use mathematics to make them a bit more comfortable, a bit more pleasant, and, in the case of the first story, a bit more delicious. Oh, and we have a couple quick pieces of advice about how to make pumping gas fun and tipping more secure.

Parker’s Palindromic Pumping

Samuel was talking to Matt Parker, on of the nerds in The Festival of the Spoken Nerd and author of Things to Make or Do in the Fourth Dimension which sadly is only a three dimensional book, and asked him if he had any everyday tasks which mathematics could make better. His answer will change how you pump gas forever.

But I Want That Piece

Say you are living in a new city and you haven’t made any new friends yet and your birthday is coming up. This was the exact situation Samuel was in last year. He still wanted to have a cake though, but as he was by himself Samuel was worried if he cut his cake in the traditional way it would go stale. Enter Alex Bellos, Guardian Columnist, author of Here’s Looking at Euclid, The Grapes of Math, and, with Edmund Harriss, the math coloring book Snowflake Seashell Star, to tell Samuel about Sir Francis Galton’s perfect cake cutting technique.

Of course since Samuel recorded the interview with Alex before his birthday something was going to have to happen to make it not relevant. In this case it was a happy occurrence, Samuel actually made a friend with whom he could celebrate his birthday. Which was awesome, except it meant Alex’s cake cutting method wasn’t going to be too useful. Samuel wasn’t going to have a birthday without a mathematically appropriate cake cut though so he called up Steven Brams to determine how to fairly divide his cake between him and his new friend.

Just Choose a Spot Bob

Of course this meant Samuel needed to go get his birthday cake, and in order to do that he was going to need to find himself a parking spot. For most people this is an everyday problem, but since Samuel usually rolls out of bed and lands in front of his microphone he needed some help to choose the best spot to choose when buying his cake. Thankfully Laura Mclay, who writes the blog Punk Rock Operations Research, had his back or he would probably still be driving around the bakery’s parking lot.

Should We Stay or Should We Go

Imagine this: It is a Thursday night and the pub a few blocks away has an Irish music night you really like, but it is a small pub and when there are a lot of people there you don’t enjoy yourself. Should you go to the pub or should you stay home? This is the exact problem W. Brian Arthur found himself having in Santa Fe with the El Farol Bar in the early 90s and being trained in economics and mathematics Brian did the logical thing, he wrote a paper on it.

Music:
Red Shirt Beats(1)(2)(3)

rps2Lexicon — The Lexicon Jan 03, 2016
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The Lexicon

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The Three R’s, Reading Writing and ’Rithmetic, have formed the basis of formal education for centuries, at least since they were mentioned by Sir William Curtis in 1795, even if he probably used Reckoning instead of ‘Rithmetic. Most of the time though the three R’s can be simplified down even further to the two Glyphs, Letters and Numbers.

For most people ‘Rithmetic or reckoning or mathematics or what ever you want to call it, falls directly under the umbrella of numbers. That is not incorrect. Numbers are very much mathematics brand. Numbers are how mathematics is represented to children from a young age and when you show an aptitude for the subject you are often branded a numbers person. There is even a youtube channel featuring videos about cool mathematics called Numberphile.

But mathematics is more than numbers, and before you go making a joke about how of course it is otherwise we could never solve for x, mathematics is more than individual letters too. Letters, and that thing you get when you put a bunch of letters together and make them into words and then you take those words and you put them together according to some set of rules called language, plays a very important role in mathematics. This episode of Relatively Prime, The Lexicon, explores this role.

The Trans-Atlantic Battle

Lynne Murphy is an American born, University of Sussex employed linguist. This made her the perfect person to talk to about the linguistic fight which destroys more Anglo-American mathematical friendships than which type of breakfast pastry to serve at a conference: Is it Math or is it Maths? (Ed. Note: It is math, I do not care at all what the story actually concludes)

Digging Down to the Roots

One of the things about the language of mathematics is a lot of it comes from language, like from the languages that we speak. To be fair not the actual languages we speak, at least not that we speak anymore. Unless you just happen to be a scholar of Greek, Latin, or Arabic.

This is where Anthony Lo Bello’s Origins of Mathematical Words: A Comprehensive Dictionary of Latin, Greek, and Arabic Roots comes in. Samuel was joined by Anthony for a conversation about the dictionary and some of the origins therein.

Words’ Younger Sibling

A discussion of mathematical language which only touched on mathematical words would be really unsatisfying. It would probably feel like only one half of a dialogue. This is of course because it would be skipping over half of what constitutes mathematical language, it would be skipping over symbols.

Today symbols are just as much part of the language of mathematics as words. This is a surprisingly recent development. For example, when Algebra was first being developed it was entirely in prose. Joseph Mazur wrote about how symbols were developed and integrated into mathematics in his book Enlightening Symbols and he spoke to Samuel about the evolution of symbols and how they have changed mathematics.

A Train Left Station U Traveling 40 mph…

There are two words which can elicit a groan in almost any mathematics classroom, word problem. Thankfully this does not have to be the case. Tharanga Wijetunge and Kirthi Premadasa are here with the solution. Their research has shown that using different language to frame the problems can help students not only enjoy the problems more, but also better recall the mathematics.

No Words at All

Tim Chartier is a person who spends half of his life trying to find stories within mathematics and the other half telling those stories in as many ways as possible. While this would be a hard enough task if Tim just wrote books, made videos, and gave podcast interviews. All of which he does, but Tim, along with his wife, have gone one step farther and now tour the world tell mathematical stories without any words at all. That is right, they do mathematical mime.

Mime-matics – The Plunger from Tim Chartier on Vimeo.

Mime-matics – the infinite rope from Tim Chartier on Vimeo.

Mime-matics – The Tube (with Topology discussion) from Tim Chartier on Vimeo

relprime-edu — 1+1=2 Oct 08, 2012
Show notes

It hardly seems that a week can go by without seeing another newspaper story or television report about the decline of the American Educational Establishment. Particularly in respect to mathematics. As a product of said establishment Samuel Hansen can not say that he thinks that it is as bad as the doomsayers would have us all think, but that is not to say that he thinks everything is peachy keen either.

There are problems, ranking 25th, out of 34 countries, on the mathematical section of the OECD’s International Student Assessment test, a score they refer to as being Statistically significantly below the average makes that clear. As does the general populace’s ill will towards the subject.

The problems are not insurmountable though, in fact Samuel may have spoken to some the people who will help solve them.

Listen to the Episode

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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)

relprime-0123 — 0,1,2,3… Oct 05, 2012
Show notes

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.

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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:

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

relprime-erdos — Erdos Sep 23, 2012
Show notes

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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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

A P Clarke
The Naughty Step (2) (3)
Raaphorst
Grant Tregellas
jmgriffiths (2)
jazzer78

relprime-thescore — The Score Sep 22, 2012
Show notes

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.

OR

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

relprime-shapeofthings — The Shape of Things Sep 21, 2012
Show notes

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.

Listen to the Episode

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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:

ElBjornBjorn

YJC

Ricky Splinter

Red Shirt Beats (2)

djpeef

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