Dave Cole, the author of the Math Kids series of books, talks about introducing kids to math as a fun challenge and puzzle beyond the rote memorization they've come to expect. Kids who like to read are enticed by puzzles and mysteries. Möbius s

Egyptian Fractions

May 22nd, 2024 17m 21s

Neil Epstein, Associate Professor of Mathematics at George Mason University, introduces us to the fractions used by the ancient Egyptians, well before the Greeks and Romans. The Egyptian fractions all had a unit numerator. They could represent

Da Vinci's Math Teacher: Merging the Practical and Theoretical

Apr 24th, 2024 16m 46s

Jeanne Lazzarini joins us again to introduce us to the mathematician Luca Pacioli, whose views of numbers and shapes influenced Leonardo da Vinci, leading to a period of art and invention. His book, De Divina Proportione, is the only book ever

Alon Amit, sharing the mathematical journey in Quora and Math Circles

Mar 27th, 2024 20m 26s

Alon Amit, probably the most prolific answerer of math questions on Quora, shares his reasons for his deep involvement. He seeks to share the journey, the exploration and stumbles of solving a problem. He's especially drawn to questions that wi

Too Much Math in the Schools? These Books Counter That Narrow View

Feb 28th, 2024 20m 59s

Lee Kraftchick continues his tour of books about math written for the non-mathematician like himself. We also can't let go of Gödel Escher Bach. Lee cites an opinion piece in the Washington Post, titled, "The Problem with Schools Today is Too M

Books for the Mathematical Tourist

Jan 24th, 2024 20m 41s

Lee Kraftchick discusses some of his favorite books for non-mathematicians to explore the breadth of mathematics. These books range from very old to current. Some discuss beautiful proofs, whether math is invented or discovered, and how to thin

Reflecting on Kaleidoscopes

Dec 27th, 2023 20m 18s

Jeanne Lazzarini talks about kaleidoscopes and the mathematics that makes them work. This "beautiful form watcher" uses the laws of reflection to make ever-changing repeated symmetries. The use of more mirrors, rectangles, cylinders or pyramids

Meet the young Davidson Fellowship winners

Nov 22nd, 2023 14m 10s

Ethan Zhao and Edward Yu are the winners in mathematics of the prestigious Davidson Fellow Scholarships, awarded based on projects completed by students under 18. Ethan's project was on learning models and Edward's was on combinatorics. It was

Gödel's Incompleteness, Fundamental Truths, and Reasoning in Math and Law

Oct 25th, 2023 22m 7s

Lawyer Lee Kraftchick discusses the search for truth and basic principles in the legal community and the surprising parallels and similarities with the same search in the math community. Mathematical and legal arguments follow a similar structu

Math and the Law

Sep 27th, 2023 20m 22s

Lee Kraftchick, a lawyer with a math degree, discusses some of the surprising parallels between the fields. Math is used directly to make statistical arguments to rule out random chance as a cause. He gives examples from his experience in redis

Fabulous Fibonacci

Aug 23rd, 2023 20m 32s

Jeanne Lazzarini looks for math in the real world and finds the Fibonacci sequence and the closely related Golden Ratio. These appear as we examine plants, bees, rabbits, flowers, fruit, and the human body. These natural patterns and pleasing s

Vowels and Sounds and a Little Calculus

Jul 26th, 2023 11m 38s

Brian Katz, from California State University Long Beach, invites us to explore the various layers of ordinary sounds, informed by a little calculus. The limited frequencies that come out of the wave equation are what separates sounds that commu

The Hat: A Newly Discovered "Ein-stein" Tessellation Tile

Jun 28th, 2023 13m 41s

Jeanne Lazzarini, who has visited us before to talk about tessellations, discusses a new mathematical discovery that even earned a mention on Jimmy Kimmel. It's a shape that can be used to fill the plane with no gaps and no overlaps and, most r

Interfacing Music and Mathematics

May 24th, 2023 21m 12s

Lawrence Udeigwe, associate professor of mathematics at Manhattan College and an MLK Visiting Associate Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, is both a mathematician and a musician. We discuss his recent opinion piece in the Notices

Fourier Analysis: It's Not Just for Differential Equations

Apr 26th, 2023 18m 23s

Joseph Bennish returns to dig into the math behind the Fourier Analysis we discussed last time. Specifically, it allows us to express any function in terms of sines and cosines. Fourier analysis appears in nature--our eyes and ears do it. It's

Joseph Fourier, the Heat Equation and the Age of the Earth

Mar 22nd, 2023 17m 32s

Joseph Bennish, Professor Emeritus of California State University, Long Beach, joins us for an excursion into physics and some of the mathematics it inspired. Joseph Fourier straddled mathematics and physics. Here we focus on his heat equation,

The Ten Most Important Theorems in Mathematics, Part II

Feb 22nd, 2023 15m 37s

Jim Stein, Professor Emeritus of CSULS, returns to complete his (admittedly subjective) list of the ten greatest math theorems of all time, with fascinating insights and anecdotes for each. Last time he did the runners up and numbers 8, 9 and 1

The Ten Most Important Theorems in Mathematics, Part I

Jan 25th, 2023 25m 24s

Jim Stein, Professor Emeritus of CSULB, presents his very subjective list of what he believes are the ten most important theorems, with several runners up. These theorems cover a broad range of mathematics--geometry, calculus, foundations, comb

Surprisingly Better than 50-50

Dec 28th, 2022 18m 15s

Jim Stein, Professor Emeritus of California State University Long Beach, discusses some bets that appear to be 50-50, but can have better odds with a tiny amount of seemingly useless information. Blackwell's Bet involves two envelopes of money.

Fascinating Fractals

Nov 23rd, 2022 21m 6s

Jeanne Lazzarini joins us again to discuss fractals, a way to investigate the roughness that we see in nature, as opposed to the smoothness of standard mathematics. Fractals are built of iterated patterns with zoom similarity. Examples include

Approximation by Rationals: A New Focus

Oct 26th, 2022 21m 35s

Joseph Bennish, Prof. Emeritus of CSULB, describes the field of Diophantine approximation, which started in the 19th Century with questions about how well irrational numbers can be approximated by rationals. It took Cantor and Lebesgue to devel

Tessellations

Sep 28th, 2022 20m 47s

Jeanne Lazzarini, a math education specialist, returns to discuss tessellations and tiling in the works of Escher, Penrose, ancient artists and nature. We go beyond the familiar square or hexagonal tilings of the bathroom floor. M.C. Escher was

Rational, Irrational and Transcendental Numbers

Aug 24th, 2022 21m 48s

Joseph Bennish returns to take us beyond the rational numbers we usually use to numbers that have been given names that indicate they're crazy or other-worldly. The Greeks were shocked to discover irrational numbers, violating their geometric v

Math as Art

Jul 25th, 2022 18m 42s

Jeanne Lazzarini, a math education specialist, shares the connections between math, such as fractals and the golden ratio, and art. These are everywhere--nature, architecture, film and more. She shares hands-on mathematical activities that help

Exploration in Reading Mathematics

Jun 22nd, 2022 16m 31s

Lara Alcock of Loughborough University shares what she learned, by tracking eye movements, about how mathematicians and students differ in the ways they read mathematics. She developed a 10-15 minute exploration training, that increases student