If you cover a surface with tiles, repetitive patterns always emerge - or do they? In this week's episode, mathematician Natalie Priebe Frank and co-host Janna Levin discuss how recent breakthroughs in tiling can unlock structural secrets in the natural world.
Yesterday
More Conversations, Complex Questions, and Bold Ideas in Season Five of 'The Joy of Why'
What is the future of gene editing with CRISPR? Has AI changed mathematics forever? Will we find other civilizations in the universe? What if we’ve been wrong about dark energy all along? These are just a few of the big, bold questions we’ll be exploring in the new season of The ... Show More
1m 23s
Aug 2025
How Can Math Protect Our Data?
<p>Every time data travels — from smartphones to the cloud, or across the vacuum of space — it relies on a silent but vigilant guardian in the form of error-correcting codes. These codes, baked into nearly every digital system, are designed to detect and repair any errors that no ... Show More
39m 40s
Feb 2025
863: TabPFN: Deep Learning for Tabular Data (That Actually Works!), with Prof. Frank Hutter
Jon Krohn talks tabular data with Frank Hutter, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Universität Freiburg in Germany. Despite the great steps that deep learning has made in analysing images, audio, and natural language, tabular data has remained its insurmountable obstacle. In ... Show More
1h 6m
Feb 2023
Why It’s So Hard for Us to Subtract
Leidy, professor of engineering at the University of Virginia, talks about his book, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. As Klotz shows throughout the book, we pile on “to-dos” but don’t consider “stop-doings.” We create incentives for ... Show More
1h 7m
Jan 2025
Board Game Science
It’s that time of the year when many of us are at home with friends and family, losing track of time, eating leftovers, and, of course, playing games. This festive season, we look at the science of games and, of course, play some ourselves. It’s presenter Marnie Chesterton versus ... Show More
28m 10s