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
Mar 4
Caravaggio’s Bodies
In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made his name by painting this violent, chaotic world’. On this episode, Erin joins Thomas Jones to discuss the ways that Caravaggio rep ... Show More
43m 56s
Feb 25
On Politics: The Rearmament Consensus
‘We must build our hard power because that is the currency of the age,’ Keir Starmer declared to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. It’s a sentiment shared across Europe, where leaders have cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the rise of Chinese power and US insta ... Show More
1h 5m
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
