The Math Factor: Recent Episodes
C Goodman-Strauss Kyle Kellams
A brief, weekly math conversation and puzzle, airing on KUAF 91.3 FM, Fayetteville Arkansas. Send your answers, comments, questions, puzzles, or cash, to mathfactor@uark.edu!
A break from puzzling to discuss the history of the great Newton-Liebnitz dispute over the invention of Calculus, with the playwright Todd Taylor.
The great aerialist Barbette makes an wholly gratuitous appearance on the Math Factor, and a few quick puzzles.
Back with an interview with two fantastic puzzlers, Ed Pegg (mathpuzzle.com) and James Stephens (puzzlebeast.com) Check out mathfactor.uark.edu for lots of links to the puzzles and people they talk about.
We are taking the summer off (at a minimum) but check back in a while for new segments. And don't forget to drop us a line!
A conversation with Greg Chaitin, creator of Chaitin's Omega and author, most recently, of MetaMath!! These ideas are well worth a close listen.
Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science describes a fundamental principle, showing how irreducible complexity arises even in simple systems.
Quick interviews at the Gathering, with Stephen Wolfram, Will Shortz, Dale Seymore, John Conway and many others!
We catch up with Ed Pegg, of mathpuzzle.com who gives us three great puzzles! Now Tweeting from G4G9!
The Math Factor hits the road, with live updates from the Gathering For Gardner! And the premier of James Greeson's Canon and Chorale on Pi.
Derrick Niederman tells us what is so un-22 about Catch 22, and other marvels from his new book, Number Freak.
That's right, we return with our sixth anniversary "special". Can a clip show be far behind?
A plan for the shop, and still more tormented prisoners. What is the deal with those poor souls anyway?
Yay! Another Fraud Detection Prevention tip from your friends and accomplices at the Math Factor, as well as further discourse on Benford's Law.
If you're gonna commit accounting fraud, some things to watch out for! Benford's law is an amazing property of many kinds of lists of data.
Chaim's new Math 2033 is going like gangbusters! Check out the class wiki at math2033.uark.edu
Paul Nahin discusses his fabulous new book "Mrs Perkins Electric Quilt", mosquitos, falling through the Earth, whether mathematics is "real" and much more!
Clifford Pickover discusses his beautiful new Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics.
Stephen Morris, mathfactor correspondent at large, discusses the Kate Bush conjecture and how to get a dead clock to tell the right time many times throughout the day!
Man, what is it about puzzlers and prisoners? Jeff Yoak lines em up and the stakes are high!
Jeff Yoak, one of the mathfactor website authors, shares a puzzle with an intriguing twist!
David Singmaster, Puzzler Extraordinaire, early master of the Rubik's Cube, poser of the Singmaster Conjecture, etc, etc, engages in some wordplay.
We express regret, answer a puzzle, shake hands and welcome back astronauts Arp and Bif.
Kyle and Chaim return to the studio with an interview with Michael Breen, of the hit gameshow, "Who Wants To Be A Mathematician?" Lots of puzzles!
Another Sam Loyd puzzle: what is the largest square table that can be covered by three 1 foot square napkins?
If I give you a number, can you always find another number whose sum and product with my number are the same?
Having lost their thumbs, Arp and Bif twiddle screws instead investigating a simple, but counterintuitive bit of 3D geometry.
Paranoid scientists don't trust anyone! How many locks are needed to protect the vital contents of a safe?
Another segment from the Golden Age of Mathradio, Math Factor #5, aired February 22, 2004.
Math Factor Number Four; how much water is required to get across the desert? (This is basically the same problem as BK. Bananas and Rockets)
After all these years, we finally get around to putting the Monty Hall Problem up on the web-- it's deja vu all over again as we post the third math factor segment ever!
Our servers are back up, after an astounding ice storm that shut down the town; we celebrate with a special double feature: "Google, Flutes and Monopoly" and the very first Math Factor Episode ever aired.
Shortly after taping this segment, Kyle and Chaim suddenly hit on a great way to make huge amounts of money. We'll offer you a terrific opportunity you can't refuse in next week's segment!!
Our favorite new and not-so-new products for 2008! Check out Zome, Puzzellations, DROD, Magic Mirror Coloring Book, The Riddles of the Sphinx, the Nikoli puzzle company, The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, How Round is your Circle and many more ideas!
Dirk Huylebrouck discusses the incredible Ishango bone, and thousands of years of arithmetic.
Just two months ago, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, discovered a huge prime number, with more than ten million digits! Mersenne primes are closely related to the famous "perfect" numbers, numbers which are the sum of their divisors.
Ed Pegg, of mathpuzzle.com, joins us to discuss cellular automata and a fiendishly difficult puzzle.
Peter Winkler returns to discuss the bonus chapter in his book Mathematical Mind Benders!
We discuss math on TV, the smallest ungoogleable number and a devilish game with billiard balls.
In which we discuss the Fibonacci numbers, the law of small numbers, and just why one should expect to see the golden ratio so often.
The worm makes it, in only about 15,092,688,622,113,788,323,693,563,264,538,101,449,859,497 steps! (Give or take a few) This incredible fact depends on the mysterious Harmonic Series, discussed a little more on the Math Factor website mathfactor.uark.edu.
Dana Richards, editor of The Colossal Book of Short Problems and Puzzles, talks to us about Martin Gardner and his legacy.
Escher expert Doris Schattschneider sits down with us in Leeuwarden, Friesland, his boyhood home.
Some functions just take off! Amazingly there are functions that cannot be bounded in by anything that can be computed!
We finally get around to discussing the Dumb Robots problem, the nature of computation, and baseball.
We shamelessly plug our beautiful new book, the Symmetries of Things, by John H. Conway, Heidi Burgiel and Chaim Goodman-Strauss.
In which we discuss the incredible Collatz function, and smashing dumb robots into each other.
We consider that perennial spring conundrum: Would a woodchuck chuck her own wood if she would chuck would for exactly those woodchucks who would not chuck their own wood?
Ed Burger of Williams College tells us about puzzles and proofs, and poses his trousers puzzle.
We interrupt Ed Pegg, of mathpuzzle.com and Wolfram research while he is working on a script for Numb3rs.
A short poker puzzle from Peter Winkler, author of the new collection, Mathematical Mind Benders.
Robert Schneider of Apples in Stereo tells us about his unusual musical scale and his love of mathematics.
Bernie Madison tells us about his new innovative math course and whether college algebra is a waste of time for most students.
... and Dennis Shasha, puzzle columnist for Scientific American and author of Puzzles for Programmers and Pros gives the solution to last week's puzzle.
More discussion of Mismatched Pennies, and Kyle and Chaim face a difficult choice: Rat or Don't Rat!
John H. Conway explains his "Doomsday" rules for finding the day of the week of any date.
Save Indiana, his girlfriend, his father and his father's sidekick from certain doom! They must cross a bridge across a gorge in less than one hour!
Niclas Hedell asks how to find a third tree in the forest. And the stork nabs the frog.
Lord Butler has never heard of last week's puzzle, but does agree he moves down the table each year. And the Stork asks how to catch the Frog.
The twenty-five members of the Royal Order of the Garter meet once each year about a round table. From time immemorial, there has been a rule that no two members may be seated next to one another more than once a decade. But can they do better?
A contestant for our Million-Dollar-Give-Away sent in Rayo’s Number, hitherto the largest number ever used for any real purpose: winning a LARGE NUMBER CHAMPIONSHIP! Check out mathfactor.uark.edu for details!
We discuss the results of the fabulous Math Factor Million Dollar Giveaway. and confess this was an excuse to bring up Game Theory and how to talk about really big numbers.
Twenty three people split into two teams of eleven & one ref; no matter how they split, the teams have the same total weight! Can the players themselves be different weights?
A short, but tricky puzzle: how many guests must you invite before you can be sure that there are at least three mutual acquaintances or three mutual strangers?
Up to $1,000,000 in Prize Money May Be Given Away! Whoever sends us the largest number wins the prize-- a million dollars divided by the winning entry!
We visit a giant model of a four-dimensional polyhedron, made of the fabulous Zome math construction toy. Paul Hildebrandt, president of Zome, weighs in.
Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. He didn't really say that, but the sentiment is valid. If you compound more and more frequently, is there a limit on the interest one can earn?
Jeff Weeks tells us about the hypersphere, the Poincaré conjecture and the topology of the universe!
Jeff Weeks, author of "The Shape of Space", discusses the hypersphere and the famous Poincaré Conjecture!
Join Chaim and Kyle at Bamboopalooza 3! Octahedral pencil holders, giant 12 pointed bamboo stars, pig lighters and other mathematical oddments were enjoyed by all! (Google for pictures!)
Credit card numbers have an error catching code, that uses the tricks of the last few weeks.
Is this podcast legally a "munition"? Old ideas in number theory are the basis for a whole new class of powerful encryption schemes that underlie the modern internet economy.
How do modern "trap-door" encryption schemes work? Over the next three weeks we'll explain, but to warm up, we talk about the medieval practice of "casting out nines".
Peter Winkler answers his puzzle set in the Land of Kleptomaniacs, and we chat about Martin Gardner. We'll pose another puzzle next week!
We answer last week's puzzle and Peter Winkler asks how to send a ring through the land of the kleptomaniacs.
Is a man of perfectly average height, and perfectly average weight, too heavy for his size? Averages are not what they seem to be.
When will the crisis come? When will we run out of Social Security Numbers, and other musings.
Dennis Shasha, puzzle columnist for Scientific American, asks about a curious way to multiply numbers on your fingers.
Peter Winkler, author of "Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection", asks how many coins are needed to cover a table.
Two players take turns removing coins from a line; how can the first player always be sure to have at least as much money as the second?
Can A be better than B, B be better than C and C be better than A? No voting system will ever be fair!
Why 462 is the least interesting number less than 1000, and the students get a paradoxical pop quiz.
The solution to the problem of the Three Gods: one always tells the truth; one always lies; one sometimes lies and sometimes tells the truth. When asked which is which, the one of the left says the one in the middle is the god of truth. The one in the middle says he sometimes lies and sometimes tells the truth. And the god on the right says the god in the middle is the god of falsehood. Who is who?
There are vastly many more real numbers than fractions! The MathFactor CD hidden track.
Which way leads out of the forest of Liars & Truth-tellers? This is the first episode on the Mathfactor CD, and the first mathfactor episode podcast to the world! For more information, listen to the podcast and send us an email!
The Mathfactor is broadcast each Sunday morning on KUAF 91.3 FM, in Fayetteville Arkansas.