Breaking Math Podcast

Math is a gravely serious topic which has been traditionally been done by stodgy people behind closed doors, and it cannot ever be taken lightly. Those who have fun with mathematics mock science, medicine, and the foundation of engineering. That is why on today's podcast, we're going to have absolutely no fun with mathematics. There will not be a single point at which you consider yourself charmed, there will not be a single thing you will want to tell anyone for the sake of enjoyment, and there will be no tolerance for your specific brand of foolishness, and that means you too, Kevin.

Centuries ago, there began something of a curiosity between mathematicians that didn't really amount to much but some interesting thoughts and cool mathematical theorems. This form of math had to do with strictly integer quantities; theorems about whole numbers. Things started to change in the 19th century with some breakthroughs in decrypting intelligence through examining the frequency of letters. In the fervor that followed to increase the security of existing avenues of communication, and to speed up the newfound media of telegraphy, came a field of mathematics called discrete math. It is now an essential part of our world today, with technologies such as online banking being essentially impossible without it. So what have we learned from discrete math? What are some essential methods used within it? And how is it applied today?

In this episode, we interview JW Weatherman of mathbot.com, and ask him about his product, why he made it, and what he plans on doing with it.--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

An interview with Ben Orlin, author of the book 'Math with Bad Drawings,' as well as the blog of the same name.  The blog can be found at www.mathwithbaddrawings.com.--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

The hosts of Breaking Math had too much time on their hands.--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

A lot of the information in this episode of Breaking Math depends on episodes 30 and 31 entitled "The Abyss" and "Into the Abyss" respectively. If you have not listened to those episodes, then we'd highly recommend going back and listening to those. We're choosing to present this information this way because otherwise we'd waste most of your time re-explaining concepts we've already covered.Black holes are so bizarre when we measured against the yardstick of the mundanity of our day to day lives that they inspire fear, awe, and controversy. In this last episode of the Abyss series, we will look at some more cutting-edge problems and paradoxes surrounding black holes. So how are black holes and entanglement related? What is the holographic principle? And what is the future of black holes?--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Black holes are objects that seem exotic to us because they have properties that boggle our comparatively mild-mannered minds. These are objects that light cannot escape from, yet glow with the energy they have captured until they evaporate out all of their mass. They thus have temperature, but Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts a paradoxically smooth form. And perhaps most mind-boggling of all, it seems at first glance that they have the ability to erase information. So what is black hole thermodynamics? How does it interact with the fabric of space? And what are virtual particles?

The idea of something that is inescapable, at first glance, seems to violate our sense of freedom. This sense of freedom, for many, seems so intrinsic to our way of seeing the universe that it seems as though such an idea would only beget horror in the human mind. And black holes, being objects from which not even light can escape, for many do beget that same existential horror. But these objects are not exotic: they form regularly in our universe, and their role in the intricate web of existence that is our universe is as valid as the laws that result in our own humanity. So what are black holes? How can they have information? And how does this relate to the edge of the universe?

In the United States, the fourth of July is celebrated as a national holiday, where the focus of that holiday is the war that had the end effect of ending England’s colonial influence over the American colonies. To that end, we are here to talk about war, and how it has been influenced by mathematics and mathematicians. The brutality of war and the ingenuity of war seem to stand at stark odds to one another, as one begets temporary chaos and the other represents lasting accomplishment in the sciences. Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest western minds, thought war was an illness, but worked on war machines. Feynman and Von Neumann held similar views, as have many over time; part of being human is being intrigued and disgusted by war, which is something we have to be aware of as a species. So what is warfare? What have we learned from refining its practice? And why do we find it necessary?

The history of physics as a natural science is filled with examples of when an experiment will demonstrate something or another, but what is often forgotten is the fact that the experiment had to be thought up in the first place by someone who was aware of more than one plausible value for a property of the universe, and realized that there was a way to word a question in such a way that the universe could understand. Such a property was debated during the quantum revolution, and involved Einstein, Polodsky, Rosen, and Schrödinger. The question was 'do particles which are entangled "know" the state of one another from far away, or do they have a sort of "DNA" which infuses them with their properties?' The question was thought for a while to be purely philosophical one until John Stewart Bell found the right way to word a question, and proved it in a laboratory of thought. It was demonstrated to be valid in a laboratory of the universe. So how do particles speak to each other from far away? What do we mean whe

The fabric of the natural world is an issue of no small contention: philosophers and truth-seekers universally debate about and study the nature of reality, and exist as long as there are observers in that reality. One topic that has grown from a curiosity to a branch of mathematics within the last century is the topic of cellular automata. Cellular automata are named as such for the simple reason that they involve discrete cells (which hold a (usually finite and countable) range of values) and the cells, over some field we designate as "time", propagate to simple automatic rules. So what can cellular automata do? What have we learned from them? And how could they be involved in the future of the way we view the world?

A paradox is characterized either by a logical problem that does not have a single dominant expert solution, or by a set of logical steps that seem to lead somehow from sanity to insanity. This happens when a problem is either ill-defined, or challenges the status quo. The thing that all paradoxes, however, have in common is that they increase our understanding of the phenomena which bore them. So what are some examples of paradox? How does one go about resolving it? And what have we learned from paradox?--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

The spectre of disease causes untold mayhem, anguish, and desolation. The extent to which this spectre has yielded its power, however, has been massively curtailed in the past century. To understand how this has been accomplished, we must understand the science and mathematics of epidemiology. Epidemiology is the field of study related to how disease unfolds in a population. So how has epidemiology improved our lives? What have we learned from it? And what can we do to learn more from it?

Information theory was founded in 1948 by Claude Shannon, and is a way of both qualitatively and quantitatively describing the limits and processes involved in communication. Roughly speaking, when two entities communicate, they have a message, a medium, confusion, encoding, and decoding; and when two entities communicate, they transfer information between them. The amount of information that is possible to be transmitted can be increased or decreased by manipulating any of the aforementioned variables. One of the practical, and original, applications of information theory is to models of language. So what is entropy? How can we say language has it? And what structures within language with respect to information theory reveal deep insights about the nature of language itself?--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

In the study of mathematics, there are many abstractions that we deal with. For example, we deal with the notion of a real number with infinitesimal granularity and infinite range, even though we have no evidence for this existing in nature besides the generally noted demi-rules 'smaller things keep getting discovered' and 'larger things keep getting discovered'. In a similar fashion, we define things like circles, squares, lines, planes, and so on. Many of the concepts that were just mentioned have to do with geometry; and perhaps it is because our brains developed to deal with geometric information, or perhaps it is because geometry is the language of nature, but there's no doubt denying that geometry is one of the original forms of mathematics. So what defines geometry? Can we make progress indefinitely with it? And where is the line between geometry and analysis?--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://

Gödel, Escher, Bach is a book about everything from formal logic to the intricacies underlying the mechanisms of reasoning. For that reason, we've decided to make a tribute episode; specifically, about episode IV. There is a Sanskrit word "maya" which describes the difference between a symbol and that which it symbolizes. This episode is going to be all about the math of maya. So what is a string? How are formal systems useful? And why do we study them with such vigor?--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Some see the world of thought divided into two types of ideas: evolutionary and revolutionary ideas. However, the truth can be more nuanced than that; evolutionary ideas can spur revolutions, and revolutionary ideas may be necessary to create incremental advancements. General relativity is an idea that was evolutionary mathematically, revolutionary physically, and necessary for our modern understanding of the cosmos. Devised in its full form first by Einstein, and later proven correct by experiment, general relativity gives us a framework for understanding not only the relationship between mass and energy and space and time, but topology and destiny. So why is relativity such an important concept? How do special and general relativity differ? And what is meant by the equation G=8πT?--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

From MC²’s statement of mass energy equivalence and Newton’s theory of gravitation to the sex ratio of bees and the golden ratio, our world is characterized by the ratios which can be found within it. In nature as well as in mathematics, there are some quantities which equal one another: every action has its equal and opposite reaction, buoyancy is characterized by the displaced water being equal to the weight of that which has displaced it, and so on. These are characterized by a qualitative difference in what is on each side of the equality operator; that is to say: the action is equal but opposite, and the weight of water is being measured versus the weight of the buoyant object. However, there are some formulas in which the equality between two quantities is related by a constant. This is the essence of the ratio. So what can be measured with ratios? Why is this topic of importance in science? And what can we learn from the mathematics of ratios?--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The eas

The art of mathematics has proven, over the millennia, to be a practical as well as beautiful pursuit. This has required us to use results from math in our daily lives, and there's one thing that has always been true of humanity: we like to do things as easily as possible. Therefore, some very peculiar and interesting mental connections have been developed for the proliferation of this sort of paramathematical skill. What we're talking about when we say "mental connections"  is the cerebral process of doing arithmetic and algebra. So who invented arithmetic? How are algebra and arithmetic related? And how have they changed over the years? --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Duration and proximity are, as demonstrated by Fourier and later Einstein and Heisenberg, very closely related properties. These properties are related by a fundamental concept: frequency. A high frequency describes something which changes many times in a short amount of space or time, and a lower frequency describes something which changes few times in the same time. It is even true that, in a sense, you can ‘rotate’ space into time. So what have we learned from frequencies? How have they been studied? And how do they relate to the rest of mathematics?--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support