146 | Emily Riehl on Topology, Categorie...

Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There is tremendous divergence of species over time, but also repeated convergence to ... Show More

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote W.B. Yeats. I don't know about the centre, but the tendency of things to fall apart is pretty universal, ultimately due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Anyone living in a society or involved with technology must therefore be ... Show More

At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to matter, and more importantly, what does it mean for us to matter -- to ourselves as well as to others? The need to matter can be motivation t ... Show More

<p>Math wants to be friends. Let mathematician, author and Abstract Mathematologist Dr. Eugenia Cheng introduce you to a secret world: the artsy and emotional side of math. Dr. Cheng helps answer the age-old and (recently viral) question, “IS MATH REAL?” We chat about Fibonacci s ... Show More

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dr. Eugenia Cheng is Scientist In Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She won tenure in Pure Mathematics at the University of Sheffield, UK, where she is now an Honorary Fellow. Alongside her research in Category Theory and ... Show More

Mathematics as a subject is distinctive in its symbolic abstraction and its potential for logical and computational rigor. But mathematicians tend to impute other qualities to our subject that set it apart, such as impartiality, universality, and elegance. Far from incidental, th ... Show More

When does a crowd of people become unsafe? How well will the football team Aston Villa do next season? When is it cost-effective to replace a kitchen? The answers may seem arbitrary but, to Nira Chamberlain, they lie in mathematics. You can use maths to model virtually anything.D ... Show More

<p>In a fascinating conversation, renowned theoretical physicist Marika Taylor and acclaimed philosopher Julian Baggini explore the history and evolving relationship between these two disciplines. Listen in as they delve into the intricacies of how science and philosophy have bee ... Show More

One of the hottest topics in modern physics is trying to understand the scattering of fundamental particles with neither shape nor size - one step up from nothingness. Amazingly, attempts to understand these simple processes theoretically require state-of-the-art mathematics. The ... Show More

The interplay between fundamental physics and pure mathematics has led to many remarkable mathematical insights over the past fifty years. Karen Uhlenbeck is one of the mathematicians who made pioneering insights into geometry when studying the physicists' gauge theory of particl ... Show More

The nature of proof and mathematics as a creative enterprise. Not all that is true can be proved as such, the high hopes of David Hilbert for placing the entirety of mathematics on a "firm foundation", the mathematical world-shattering results of Kurt Gödel which frustrated that ... Show More

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Cognitive Crucible is a forum that presents different perspectives and emerging thought leadership related to the information environment. The opinions expressed by guests are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of or endorse ... Show More

Covering Part 8 of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event on “Theory of the Subject,” Alex and Andrew discuss the theory of subject and the event, and Badiou’s wider work. Guest Andrei Rodin contextualizes Badiou’s project through its relation to the wider philosophy of mathematics. Rodi ... Show More