Math Mutation: Recent Episodes
Erik Seligman
Welcome to Math Mutation, a podcast for people of all ages where we discuss fun, interesting, or just plain weird corners of mathematics that you would not have heard in school.(Feedback email erik@mathmutation.com).
We discuss Fermat's Little Theorem, along with an elegant visual proof.
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Why did a famous math author translate a classic Russian epic poem?
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Audio of a recent conference talk relating Math Mutation topics to the verification of processor designs.
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How the Long Tail theory enables Math Mutation to exist.
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How poor communication of accurate math destroyed a space shuttle.
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How the Base Rate Fallacy can help us find out if the sun has exploded.
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Exploring the secrets of the only animals with cubic dung.
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Can we use mathemtical insights to reduce the partisan conflicts surrounding ballot counting after every election?
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Do digital methods truly represent the original music, or are we missing something?
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Are being asleep and awake distinct states, or part of a continuous spectrum?
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The pitfalls of planning using impact-effort analysis.
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The surprising properties of the number 6174, known as Kaprekar's Constant.
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Discussing the late Bob Dorough's oddest song, "Little Twelvetoes".
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What would a diagram of all human knowledge look like?
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Does the "Buridan's Ass" paradox prove the existence of free will?
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The strange relativistic phenomenon of Terrell Rotation.
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Do human languages really need rules of syntax?
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The suprisingly primitive method used for standardizing the kilogram.
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How the Pythagorean Theorem influenced Hobbes' Leviathan.
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Is there merit to the "Six Degrees of Separation" concept?
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Buckminster Fuller's first four-dimensional house.
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Should professors assign famous unsolved problems as homework?
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If you test a conjecture with values up to 60 digits, can you assume it will be true forever?
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Exploring the "Collatz Conjecture", which is simple enough to explain to a child, but has yet to be proven.
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Gulliver's lesser known voyage to Laputa, which satirized out-of-touch mathematicians.
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If a friend wants to meet "a year from Monday", when exactly is that?
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How stochastic computing cleverly utilizes the laws of probability.
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Did the Third Pound Burger fail because people thought it was too small?
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Harness the power of your "R-mode" for problem solving.
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Are abstract expressionist paintings really fractals?
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Are modern physicists just playing a "glass bead game"?
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Are the "Cognitive Biases" reallly flaws in the human mind?
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John Cage's music and the mathematics of the I Ching.
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Can you travel in time using the International Dateline?
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Discussing a lesser-known group of 14th-century philosophers who laid the foundations for Galileo.
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David Bowie was once in a live Escher lithograph.
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Could someone invent a device that alters the laws of probability?
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Are there any good educational math games out for smartphones/tablets?
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Did Rudolf Steiner prove our minds are four-dimensional 100 years ago?
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How to fight stereotypes and prejudice using indexing and dating
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I shamelessly plug my new Formal Verification book.
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The surprising properties of non-circular curves of constant width.
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The Flynn Effect shows that our collective IQ is increasing with each generation.
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A 13th century monk shows us how to discover all life's answers thru combinatorics.
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Do the random processes of the universe prefer some digits over others?
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Seeking success advice from the successful exposes a mathematical fallacy.
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Update on the strange but brilliant genius who refused the Fields Medal.
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Understanding large numbers thru small probabilities.
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Can removing a grain of sand from a heap make it a non-heap?
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We celebrate episode 200 by answering the questions about Math Mutation that have been eating away at your brain.
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Why does Nassim Nicholas Taleb want to ban GMOs?
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How Louis Pasteur discovered that molecules have handedness.
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After all the original members left, was the Velvet Underground still the same band?
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How replacing English with E prime can make our language more logical and end human strife.
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Are there solar systems out there where time runs backwards?
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Thinking of evolution as a journey through a multidimensional space.
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Can we replace English with something more mathematically sound?
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Is a government lottery really a tax on stupidity?
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A number so big that writing it down would fill up the known universe.
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Is the golden ratio phi as important as people claim?
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Does it make any sense to add and multiply infinities?
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Math that directly influenced our Founding Fathers.
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Prize money for provingdisproving famous conjectures.
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Are modern Common Core Discovery Math programs destined for failure?
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Discussing Rudy Rucker's idea of using natural processes as a paracomputer.
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With a brain the size of a pinhead, how do cicadas know about prime numbers?
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What do math and physics say about life after death?
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Discussing mathematical proofs that we live in the Matrix.
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The various complications in creating 11 scale maps.
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Are scientists and engineers really afraid of equations?
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Why adding up digits isn't just for crazy numerologists.
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Try drawing the trisectors of each angle of a triangle, and you're in for a surprise.
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Can math give us insights into the quality of a work of fiction?
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Newton's lesser-known second career in law enforcement.
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The strange properties and applications of the Mobius strip.
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How hard is it for a simple automaton to act like a real insect?
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Did Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science really revolutionize scientific inquiry?
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How does the Black Swan concept modify the theory of Comparative Advantage?
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How improbable Black Swans affect our lives and society.
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When estimating probabilities, we are biologically wired to give the wrong answer.
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Can a die be fair without being a Platonic solid?
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Is perspective in art just a cultural artifact?
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Are people who give Pythagoras credit for his theorem really cracked?
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Can knowledge of fractals be useful in a day-to-day business setting?
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How the New Math confused a decade's worth of students and teachers.
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Trying to make sense of Russell's conversation with Wittgenstein.
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How D'Arcy Thompson united mathematics and the study of evolution.
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How the basis of modern music shifted from whole to irrational numbers.
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Review of Logicomix, a graphic novel on the life of Bertrand Russell.
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Does knowing that a surprise will be a surprise prevent the surprise?
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The same brains that make us vulnerable to New Age silliness are what enable success in science math.
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Was there a time when Rod Stewart's lyrics would make sense?
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Einstein, the fourth dimension, and Casablanca.
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You may find multidimensional geometry on your kitchen shelf.
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Can pure mathematics prove the existence of God?
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Those funny Greek letters that torment calculus students.
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How unknown alien cultures can see your Facebook photo.
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Is there some mystical number that describes you in detail?
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Tic tac toe, extended into multiple dimensions quantum mechanics.
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Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau De Marot, and how math relates to translating poetry.
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Newcomb's paradox, another challenge to free will.
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Does the Grandfather Paradox show time travel is impossible?
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Why do mirrors reverse right and left, but not up and down?
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What did Columbus really think about the Earth's size and shape?
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The colorful biography of Asperger's sufferer John Elder Robison high school dropout, KISS roadie, professional engineer, auto mechanic, and entrepeneur.
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Does basic probability show that life in our universe could not have come about through evolution?
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With different physical constants in the universe, could we still exist?
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Did Cantor's transfinite numbers advance mathematics and glorify God, or were they a tool of the devil?
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Can each episode of Math Mutation be correct, while there is an error somewhere in the series?
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Were Gregor Mendel's experimental results a bit too good?
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Can an architect in our 3-D world build a four dimensional house?
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Amdahl's Law, de-worming, and the One Laptop Per Child initiative.
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Changing a test of artificiall intelligence into one of natural nonintelligence.
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The struggle for a theory of physics that would enable cats to jump onto chandeliers.
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Looking at the contributions of the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta.
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If you test positive for a rare disease, should you be worried?
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Why Math Mutation exists, winners of the Math Day Madness contest, and a correction.
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Daniel Tammet's view of the root cause of his savant abilities.
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After E Day and Pi Day, how many other math-related holidays are there?
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Can Rain Men really instantly count 100 fallen matches?
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English tally sticks, and how they destroyed Parliament.
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Why Zeno didn't prove that motion is impossible.
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Mathermatics and the life of Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn.
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How Dr. Seuss's 'The Cat In The Hat Comes Back' introduces fractals.
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What are we leaving behind for our descendants in the year 12000?
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Do a few statistically significant studies prove a strange phenomenon is true?
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A mathematical contribution from President James Garfield.
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The bizarre mathematical methods John Cage used to produce some of his music.
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Was Homer Simpson's theory of a donut-shaped universe correct?
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The connections between mathematics and the founding of modern nursing.
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If a stock has a 90% chance of going up, should you buy it? Maybe not!
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The surprising connection between mathematics and Voltaire's satirical novel.
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Can you tile your bathroom floor without ever repeating the pattern?
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Why does the word billion sometimes mean 10 to the 9th, and other times mean 10 to the 12th?
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You need to think about more than one universe when judging risky decisions.
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Does the Chinese Room Paradox show that artificial intelligence is impossible?
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If mice can do probability theory, why can't worms do calculus?
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According to some experiments, mice can be better at math than humans.
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How do you know your lawn is green, and not bleen?
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Charles H. Hinton's 'realistic' two-dimensional world of Astria.
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Are Space Shuttle parts really based on the width of an ancient Roman horse's rear end?
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On a number line, are positive and negative infinity really the same point?
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How calculator-based education almost cost me a hamburger.
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The unusual story of the Indian mathematician Ramanujan.
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A recent theory may replace the Big Bang with a collision of multidimensional membranes.
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What appears to be random is not always random.
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What is the connection between dice and driving?
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Is the line between math and religion always clear-cut?
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What comes next in this sequence addition, multiplication, exponentiation, ...?
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Calculating what we can see in the universe isn't as simple as counting light-years.
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How ancient Egyptian math may be the source of an 18th-century poem.
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If you separate your brain into indiividual neurons, is it still a brain?
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We describe a figure whose surface can never be painted, though its interior can be filled using a finite volume of paint,
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The randomly-created-music fad of the late 18th century.
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How would chemistry and physics change in a two-dimensional universe?
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Tiny graphs that look like words of text can be surprisingly useful.
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What's so special about the number 7 in our calendar?
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Breathe in an actual molecule shared with Baby Jesus.
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After 50 episodes, I finally figure out what I'm talking about.
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Some engineers have their brains cross-wired to see circuit schematic AND, OR, and NOT gates as particular colors.
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A strange lottery run by Douglas Hofstadter in the early 1980s, with interesting implications for human society.
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A new theorem by a British undergraduate has just established the simplest possible computer.
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Can we calcuate the number of intelligent life forms in our galaxy with one simple equation?
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Story of a 19th-century Frenchwoman who pretended to be male for her career in mathematics, and how she revealed her identity to save Gauss.
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Strangely enough, pure math can tell us interesting things about global weather patterns.
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The Burmese military junta's numerological failures.
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The surprising story of how George Dantzig, the father of linear programming, earned his Ph.D.
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Where are the missing dimensions of string theory?
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How the Romans coped with the odd ratios of the day, the lunar cycle, and the solar cycle.
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How non-Euclidean geometry lets you draw a triangle with three right angles.
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Has the riddle of Fermat's Last Theorem truly been solved?
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Today we talk about an early Polish success in cracking the Enigma coding machine.
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Does quantum computing prove the existence of parallel universes?
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Where does that weird infinity symbol come from?
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Surprisingly, any map can be filled in with just four colors.
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Discussing one of Johannes Kepler's lesser known, and sillier, theories.
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How Godel twisted statements about numbers into statements about statements.
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How Godel's Incompleteness Theorem blew away hopes of a complete system of mathematics.
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How to look like a math genius, even if you're not.
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More on fractals, and why they are considered to have fractional dimensions.
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Describing the Koch Snowflake, a classic example of a fractal curve.
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Do religious Jews and Christians really believe pi=3?
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What would it look like if a four-dimensional creature dropped by for a visit?
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What kind of pictures do you draw when your attention wanders?
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We discuss Borges' Library of Babel, which contains every possible book.
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The bizarre human drama surrounding the proof of the Poincare Conjecture.
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