My Favorite Theorem

Join mathematician Francis Su to find out why he thinks the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem is so appealing.

Category theorist Emily Riehl tells us her second-favorite theorem: right adjoints preserve limits. Since this is category theory we get another theorem for free by dualizing: left adjoints preserve colimits. Listen to find out Emily's favorite theorem, too.

Join former NFL lineman/current mathematician John Urschel to learn about how to take a dense graph and find a sparse graph whose Laplacian is very close to that of the original graph. Applied math at its finest.

Join applied mathematician Nalini Joshi to learn about Mittag-Leffler's theorem, a fundamental result in complex analysis that tells us how to build meromorphic functions on the plane with any prescribed set of poles.

If you stand at the origin in a forest whose trees lie at integer lattice points, what proportion of them can you see? Jayadev Athreya guides us to the answer and then goes further.

Mathematician Federico Ardila loves matroids and combinatorics. And he's a DJ. A great combination, you can count on it.

Join mathematician Laura Taalman for a journey into the realm of Reidemester moves on knots and just how many you may need to untangle an unknot. The answer may surprise you.

Our guest Patrick Honner tells us about Varignon's Theorem about the midpoints of quadrilaterals. Spoiler alert: if you connect them you always (!) get a parallelogram.

Our guest Candice Price tells us about Conway's rational tangles and how they relate to the topology of DNA. Also, shakes from In 'N' Out.

Mathematician Jeanne Nielsen Clelland tells us about the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem, connecting the curvature on a surface to its Euler characteristic. This episode ends with a bang.

Join our guest Mohamed Omar in his love of Burnside's Lemma and learn how to count the number of ways to paint blocks.

In this episode our guest tells us about Birkhoff's Ergodic Theorem and how it reminds her of certain minimalist music pieces.

Our guest Justin Curry really likes Platonic solids. So much so, in fact, that he has all five of them tattooed on his body. In this episode we talk about the classification of these solids and what ancient piece of literature they pair with best.

Henry Fowler is on the faculty of Dine College in the Navajo Nation. In this episode he tells us about traditional Navajo homes and their relationship to astronomical calculations. The Pythagorean theorem plays an important role.

We are joined by Eriko Hironaka, who tells us about the first theorem she proved. This episode deals with a lot more than just math and it's one of our favorites.

Dusa McDuff tells us about Gromov's non-squeezing theorem, a fundamental result in symplectic topology.

University of Wisconsin professor Jordan Ellenberg reveals that his favorite theorem is Fermat's Little Theorem, which, when you really boil it down, asserts that 1+1 = 2.

University of San Francisco math professor Emille Davie Lawrence joins us to talk about the classification of compact surfaces, west coast coffee, and where to find good donuts.

Math Horizons editor Dave Richeson joins us to talk about the area of a circle. You memorized the formula in grade school, but you've probably never thought about the proof or who proved it. Dave knows.

A conversation with Prof. Amie Wilkinson of the University of Chicago about her favorite theorem. It's a classic.

Your hosts math prof Kevin Knudson and math/science freelance writer Evelyn Lamb discuss their favorite theorems and reveal what pairs best with them.