Breaking Math Podcast

Spheres and circles are simple objects. They are objects that are uniformly curved throughout in some way or another. They can also be defined as objects which have a boundary that is uniformly distant from some point, using some definition of distance. Circles and spheres were integral to the study of mathematics at least from the days of Euclid, being the objects generated by tracing the ends of idealized compasses. However, these objects have many wonderful and often surprising mathematical properties. To this point, a circle's circumference divided by its diameter is the mathematical constant pi, which has been a topic of fascination for mathematicians for as long as circles have been considered.[Featuring Sofía Baca; Meryl Flaherty]Patreon Become a monthly supporter at patreon.com/breakingmath

Join Sofia and Gabriel on this problem episode where we explore "base 3-to-2" — a base system we explored on the last podcast — and how it relates to "base 3/2" from last episode.[Featuring: Sofía Baca; Gabriel Hesch]

A numerical base is a system of representing numbers using a sequence of symbols. However, like any mathematical concept, it can be extended and re-imagined in many different forms. A term used occasionally in mathematics is the term 'exotic', which just means 'different than usual in an odd or quirky way'. In this episode we are covering exotic bases. We will start with something very familiar (viz., decimal points) as a continuation of our previous episode, and then progress to the more odd, such as non-integer and complex bases. So how can the base systems we covered last time be extended to represent fractional numbers? How can fractional numbers be used as a base for integers? And what is pi plus e times i in base i + 1?This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca; Merryl Flaherty]Ways to support the show:Patreon Become a monthly supporter at patreon.com/breakingmath

Numbering was originally done with tally marks: the number of tally marks indicated the number of items being counted, and they were grouped together by fives. A little later, people wrote numbers down by chunking the number in a similar way into larger numbers: there were symbols for ten, ten times that, and so forth, for example, in ancient Egypt; and we are all familiar with the Is, Vs, Xs, Ls, Cs, and Ds, at least, of Roman numerals. However, over time, several peoples, including the Inuit, Indians, Sumerians, and Mayans, had figured out how to chunk numbers indefinitely, and make numbers to count seemingly uncountable quantities using the mind, and write them down in a few easily mastered motions. These are known as place-value systems, and the study of bases has its root in them: talking about bases helps us talk about what is happening when we use these magical symbols.

Machines have been used to simplify labor since time immemorial, and simplify thought in the last few hundred years. We are at a point now where we have the electronic computer to aid us in our endeavor, which allows us to build hypothetical thinking machines by simply writing their blueprints — namely, the code that represents their function — in a general way that can be easily reproduced by others. This has given rise to an astonishing array of techniques used to process data, and in recent years, much focus has been given to methods that are used to answer questions where the question or answer is not always black and white. So what is machine learning? What problems can it be used to solve? And what strategies are used in developing novel approaches to machine learning problems? This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org. For more Breaking Math info, visit BreakingMathPodcast.app [Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch] References: https://spec

Machines, during the lifetime of anyone who is listening to this, have advanced and revolutionized the way that we live our lives. Many listening to this, for example, have lived through the rise of smart phones, 3d printing, massive advancements in lithium ion batteries, the Internet, robotics, and some have even lived through the introduction of cable TV, color television, and computers as an appliance. All advances in machinery, however, since the beginning of time have one thing in common: they make what we want to do easier. One of the great tragedies of being imperfect entities, however, is that we make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes can lead to war, famine, blood feuds, miscalculation, the punishment of the innocent, and other terrible things. It has, thus, been the goal of many, for a very long time, to come up with a system for not making these mistakes in the first place: a thinking machine, which would help eliminate bias in situations. Such a fantastic machine is looking like it's becoming clo

Join Gabriel and Sofía as they delve into some introductory calculus concepts.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]Ways to support the show:-Visit our Sponsors:       theGreatCoursesPlus.com/breakingmath Get a free month of the Great Courses Plus while supporting this show by clicking the link and signing up!         brilliant.org/breakingmath Sign up at brilliant.org, where breaking math listeners get a 20% off of a year's subscription of Brilliant Premium!Patreon Become a monthly supporter at patreon.com/breakingmathMerchandise Purchase a Math Poster on Tensor Calculus at our facebook store at facebook.com/breakingmathpodcast--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Time is something that everyone has an idea of, but is hard to describe. Roughly, the arrow of time is the same as the arrow of causality. However, what happens when that is not the case? It is so often the case in our experience that this possibility brings not only scientific and mathematic, but ontological difficulties. So what is retrocausality? What are closed timelike curves? And how does this all relate to entanglement?This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Learn more about radiative forcing, the environment, and how global temperature changes with atmospheric absorption with this Problem Episode about you walking your (perhaps fictional?) dog around a park.  This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Since time immemorial, blacksmiths have known that the hotter metal gets, the more it glows: it starts out red, then gets yellower, and then eventually white. In 1900, Max Planck discovered the relationship between an ideal object's radiation of light and its temperature. A hundred and twenty years later, we're using the consequences of this discovery for many things, including (indirectly) LED TVs, but perhaps one of the most dangerously neglected (or at least ignored) applications of this theory is in climate science. So what is the greenhouse effect? How does blackbody radiation help us design factories? And what are the problems with this model?This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Climate change is an issue that has become frighteningly more relevant in recent years, and because of special interests, the field has become muddied with climate change deniers who use dishonest tactics to try to get their message across. The website SkepticalScience.com is one line of defense against these messengers, and it was created and maintained by a research assistant professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, and both authored and co-authored two books about climate science with an emphasis on climate change. He also lead-authored a 2013 award-winning paper on the scientific consensus on climate change, and in 2015, he developed an open online course on climate change denial with the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. This person is John Cook.This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch; John Cook]--- This episode is sponsored by ·

Mathematics, like any intellectual pursuit, is a constantly-evolving field; and, like any evolving field, there are both new beginnings and sudden unexpected twists, and things take on both new forms and new responsibilities. Today on the show, we're going to cover a few mathematical topics whose nature has changed over the centuries. So what does it mean for math to be extinct? How does this happen? And will it continue forever?This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Learn more about calculus, derivatives, and the chain rule with this Problem Episode about you walking your (perhaps fictional?) dog around a park.This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Ben Orlin has been a guest on the show before. He got famous with a blog called 'Math With Bad Drawings", which is what it says on the tin: he teaches mathematics using his humble drawing skills. His last book was a smorgasbord of different mathematical topics, but he recently came out with a new book 'Change is the Only Constant: the Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World', which focuses more on calculus itself.This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more info, visit creativecommons.org

On this problem episode, join Sofía and guest Diane Baca to learn about what an early attempt to formalize the natural numbers has to say about whether or not m+n equals n+m.This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Statistics is a field that is considered boring by a lot of people, including a huge amount of mathematicians. This may be because the history of statistics starts in a sort of humdrum way: collecting information on the population for use by the state. However, it has blossomed into a beautiful field with its fundamental roots in measure theory, and with some very interesting properties. So what is statistics? What is Bayes' theorem? And what are the differences between the frequentist and Bayesian approaches to a problem?Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (creativecommons.org)Ways to support the show:Patreon Become a monthly supporter at patreon.com/breakingmath

Children who are being taught mathematics often balk at the idea of negative numbers, thinking them to be fictional entities, and often only learn later that they are useful for expressing opposite extremes of things, such as considering a debt an amount of money with a negative sum. Similarly, students of mathematics often are puzzled by the idea of complex numbers, saying that it makes no sense to be able to take the square root of something negative, and only realizing later that these can have the meaning of two-dimensional direction and magnitude, or that they are essential to our modern understanding of electrical engineering. Our discussion today will be much more abstract than that. Much like in our discussion in episode five, "Language of the Universe", we will be discussing how math and physics draw inspiration from one another; we're going to talk about what different fields (such as the real, complex, and quaternion fields) seem to predict about our universe. So how are real numbers related to cla

We communicate every day through languages; not only human languages, but other things that could be classified as languages such as internet protocols, or even the structure of business transactions. The structure of words or sentences, or their metaphorical equivalents, in that language is known as their syntax. There is a way to describe certain syntaxes mathematically through what are known as formal grammars. So how is a grammar defined mathematically? What model of language is often used in math? And what are the fundamental limits of grammar?

Game theory is all about decision-making and how it is impacted by choice of strategy, and a strategy is a decision that is influenced not only by the choice of the decision-maker, but one or more similar decision makers. This episode will give an idea of the type of problem-solving that is used in game theory. So what is strict dominance? How can it help us solve some games? And why are The Obnoxious Seven wanted by the police?Patreon Become a monthly supporter at patreon.com/breakingmath

Hello listeners. You don't know me, but I know you. I want to play a game. In your ears are two earbuds. Connected to the earbuds are a podcast playing an episode about game theory. Hosting that podcast are two knuckleheads. And you're locked into this episode. The key is at the end of the episode. What is game theory? Why did we parody the Saw franchise? And what twisted lessons will you learn?-See our New Youtube Show "Turing Rabbit Holes Podcast" at youtube.com/TuringRabbitHolesPodcast.   Also available on all podcast players.  --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support