Breaking Math Podcast

We live in an era of unprecedented change, and the tip of the spear of this era of change is currently the digital revolution. In fact, in the last decade we’ve gone from an analog to a digitally dominated society, and the amount of information has recently been increasing exponentially. Or at least it seems like it’s recent; in fact, however, the digital revolution has been going on for hundreds...

“ABABABABABABABAB”. How much information was that? You may say “sixteen letters worth”, but is that the true answer? You could describe what you just read as “AB 8 times”, and save a bunch of characters, and yet have the same information. But what is information in the context of mathematics? The answer is nothing short of miraculous; information theory has applications in telephony, human languag...

The void has always intrigued mankind; the concept of no concept defies the laws of human reasoning to such a degree that we have no choice but to pursue it. But ancient Assyrian, Norse, Judeo-Christian creation stories, and even our own scientific inquiries have one thing in common: creation from “nothingness”. But is it really nothingness? The ancients used the term “chaos”, and, although to som...

From Pythagoras to Einstein, from the banks of the Nile to the streamlined curves of the Large Hadron Collider, math has shown itself again and again to be fundamental to the way that humans interact with the world. Then why is math such a pain for so many people? Our answer is simple: math is, and always has been, in one way or another, guarded as an elite skill. We visit the worlds that were sha...