AI-powered
podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
Is There a Cold War in the United States?
Poincare is a mathematician who kind of comes up in late 19th century France, at a time when French math is really starting to flower. There's this whole kind of moment where France has just been beaten in the Franco-Prussian war and they're like, oh my god, what did we do wrong? The Cold War is, I think, fundamental to the way people saw science and math in the Soviet Union. And mathematics was like the superpower that fuels science.