Breaking Math Podcast

Machines, during the lifetime of anyone who is listening to this, have advanced and revolutionized the way that we live our lives. Many listening to this, for example, have lived through the rise of smart phones, 3d printing, massive advancements in lithium ion batteries, the Internet, robotics, and some have even lived through the introduction of cable TV, color television, and computers as an appliance. All advances in machinery, however, since the beginning of time have one thing in common: they make what we want to do easier. One of the great tragedies of being imperfect entities, however, is that we make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes can lead to war, famine, blood feuds, miscalculation, the punishment of the innocent, and other terrible things. It has, thus, been the goal of many, for a very long time, to come up with a system for not making these mistakes in the first place: a thinking machine, which would help eliminate bias in situations. Such a fantastic machine is looking like it's becoming closer and closer to reality, especially with the advancements in artificial intelligence. But what are the origins of this fantasy? What attempts have people made over time to encapsulate reason? And what is ultimately possible with the automated manipulation of meaning? All of this and more on this episode of Breaking Math. Episode 48: Thinking Machines References: * https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibniz-llull-and-the-computational-imagination * https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/history+of+natural+language+processing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-source-data This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org. [Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]Ways to support the show:Patreon Become a monthly supporter at patreon.com/breakingmath

Join Gabriel and Sofía as they delve into some introductory calculus concepts.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]Ways to support the show:Patreon Become a monthly supporter at patreon.com/breakingmath

Time is something that everyone has an idea of, but is hard to describe. Roughly, the arrow of time is the same as the arrow of causality. However, what happens when that is not the case? It is so often the case in our experience that this possibility brings not only scientific and mathematic, but ontological difficulties. So what is retrocausality? What are closed timelike curves? And how does this all relate to entanglement?This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]

Learn more about radiative forcing, the environment, and how global temperature changes with atmospheric absorption with this Problem Episode about you walking your (perhaps fictional?) dog around a park.  This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Since time immemorial, blacksmiths have known that the hotter metal gets, the more it glows: it starts out red, then gets yellower, and then eventually white. In 1900, Max Planck discovered the relationship between an ideal object's radiation of light and its temperature. A hundred and twenty years later, we're using the consequences of this discovery for many things, including (indirectly) LED TVs, but perhaps one of the most dangerously neglected (or at least ignored) applications of this theory is in climate science. So what is the greenhouse effect? How does blackbody radiation help us design factories? And what are the problems with this model?This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Climate change is an issue that has become frighteningly more relevant in recent years, and because of special interests, the field has become muddied with climate change deniers who use dishonest tactics to try to get their message across. The website SkepticalScience.com is one line of defense against these messengers, and it was created and maintained by a research assistant professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, and both authored and co-authored two books about climate science with an emphasis on climate change. He also lead-authored a 2013 award-winning paper on the scientific consensus on climate change, and in 2015, he developed an open online course on climate change denial with the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. This person is John Cook.This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch; John Cook]--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Mathematics, like any intellectual pursuit, is a constantly-evolving field; and, like any evolving field, there are both new beginnings and sudden unexpected twists, and things take on both new forms and new responsibilities. Today on the show, we're going to cover a few mathematical topics whose nature has changed over the centuries. So what does it mean for math to be extinct? How does this happen? And will it continue forever?This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Learn more about calculus, derivatives, and the chain rule with this Problem Episode about you walking your (perhaps fictional?) dog around a park.This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Ben Orlin has been a guest on the show before. He got famous with a blog called 'Math With Bad Drawings", which is what it says on the tin: he teaches mathematics using his humble drawing skills. His last book was a smorgasbord of different mathematical topics, but he recently came out with a new book 'Change is the Only Constant: the Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World', which focuses more on calculus itself.This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more info, visit creativecommons.org

On this problem episode, join Sofía and guest Diane Baca to learn about what an early attempt to formalize the natural numbers has to say about whether or not m+n equals n+m.This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support