A Mathematician Asks ‘Is Math Real?’

<p>African grey parrots are internet stars. It’s easy to see why—the charismatic birds sing, tell jokes, and sling profanities. But how do the endangered birds get from African forests to your feed? </p><p>Wildlife crime reporter Rene Ebersole joins Host Flora Lichtman to describ ... Show More

<p>After years of getting your emails and phone calls, we know that SciFri listeners are in the 99th percentile when it comes to nerdy knowledge. We’re putting your fact retention skills to the test with the first ever Super Food Science Excellence Trivia Blowout (SFSETBO).</p><p ... Show More

<p>Some animals have a very different <a href="https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/animal-fountain-of-youth/?utm_source=wnyc&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=scifri" target="_blank">relationship to aging</a> than we do: They don’t get cancer, they never go through menopause, an ... Show More

<p><span data-sheets-root="1" data-sheets-value= "{"1":2,"2":"Mathematician and author Eugenia Cheng visits Google to discuss her book "Is Math Real?: How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics' Deepest Truths." The book aims to liberate math from its shackles to show how human ... Show More

Math & Language: Creativity, Quantification, and Making Math Accessible with Ben Orlin In this episode of Breaking Math, hosts sit down with Ben Orlin, author of Math for English Majors and Math with Bad Drawings, to explore the intersection of math and language. Discover the uni ... Show More

Children who are being taught mathematics often balk at the idea of negative numbers, thinking them to be fictional entities, and often only learn later that they are useful for expressing opposite extremes of things, such as considering a debt an amount of money with a negative ... Show More

Today, one of the world’s most creative mathematicians offers a new way to look at math. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices 

From Pythagoras to Einstein, from the banks of the Nile to the streamlined curves of the Large Hadron Collider, math has shown itself again and again to be fundamental to the way that humans interact with the world. Then why is math such a pain for so many people? Our answer is s ... Show More

<p>Geometry is one of the oldest disciplines in human history, yet the worlds it can describe extend far beyond its original use. What began thousands of years ago as a way to measure land and build pyramids was given rigor by Euclid in ancient Greece, became applied to curves an ... Show More

Where does math come from? Mathematicians are still debating whether math is an inherent part of nature or an invention of the human mind. Mathematics communicator and drag queen Kyne will guide you through the question of what math really is in this three-part Friday miniseries. ... Show More

The abstract numeral that changed everything, according to mathematician Talithia Williams. Before the introduction of zero, mathematics was a tangible subject, where numbers held weight and substance. With zero came the concept of a mathematical “nothing;” it turned our solid un ... Show More

When CrowdScience listener Israel from Papua New Guinea received a bad grade on a maths test in third grade, he looked around the class and realised that almost all the other students had received a better result. Since then, he has always wondered: why are some people better at ... Show More