On budget day, Tom Johnson joins Malin Hay to discuss the revolution in numeracy and use of numbers in Early Modern England, from the black and white squares of the ‘reckoning cloth’ to logarithmic calculating machines, as described in a new book by Jessica Marie Otis. How did the English go from seeing arithmetic as the province of tradespeople and craftsme ... Show More
May 7
On Politics: The Fall of Orbán, the Rise of Magyar
For more than a decade, Viktor Orbán has stood alongside Trump and Modi as a global figurehead for authoritarian nationalism, and an inspiration to popular strongmen everywhere with his model for the ‘illiberal’ democratic state. But on April 12 his sixteen-year tenure as Hungary ... Show More
1h 5m
Apr 29
James Lasdun's road trip to America's courts
‘Courtroom encounters present you with only a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest,’ James Lasdun wrote recently in the LRB. Last October, he set out on a road trip across America, with the aim of attending as many different ki ... Show More
50m 12s
Mar 2024
60. For the love of maths
As a child, Kate Ertmann starred in commercials, in soap operas and on Broadway. But acting wasn’t her first love - mathematics was. She considered it to be “a balm" for her brain. And yet societal and teenage pressures made her turn away from maths.Growing up in Sweden, Sebastia ... Show More
29m 5s
Sep 2024
Math for English Majors with Ben Orlin
Math & Language: Creativity, Quantification, and Making Math Accessible with Ben OrlinIn 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 uniq ... Show More
58m 44s
Jul 2024
Among the Ancients II: Plautus and Terence
In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to set the tone for centuries of playwrights (and school curricula), came from the ma ... Show More
15m 12s
<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
