Today I talked to Alfred S. Posamentier, a co-author (with Christian Spreitzer) of Math Makers: The Lives and Works of 50 Famous Mathematicians (Prometheus, 2020). This charming book is more than just mathematics, because mathematicians are not just makers of mathematics. They are human beings whose life stories are often not just entertaining, but are somet ... Show More
Yesterday
Andrew H. Jaffe, "The Random Universe: How Models and Probability Help Us Make Sense of the Cosmos" (Yale UP, 2025)
An award-winning astrophysicist looks at how the understanding of uncertainty and randomness has led to breakthroughs in our knowledge of the cosmos
All of us understand the world around us by constructing models, comparing them to observations, and drawing conclusions. Scientis ... Show More
1h 29m
Nov 21
Thomas Morel, "Underground Mathematics: Craft Culture and Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Thomas Morel joins Jana Byars to tell the story of subterranean geometry, a forgotten discipline that developed in the silver mines of early modern Europe, talking about his book Underground Mathematics: Craft Culture and Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge UP, ... Show More
46m 15s
Oct 19
David Bressoud, "Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas" (Princeton UP, 2019)
Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas (Princeton UP, 2019) takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story of how calculus evolved into the subject we know today. David Bressoud explains why calculus is credited to seventeenth-century fi ... Show More
1h 27m
Sep 2021
164 | Herbert Gintis on Game Theory, Evolution, and Social Rationality
<p>How human beings behave is, for fairly evident reasons, a topic of intense interest to human beings. And yet, not only is there much we don’t understand about human behavior, different academic disciplines seem to have developed completely incompatible models to try to explain ... Show More
1h 29m