46. Misadventures in Baby-Making

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4.6 • 32K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2011

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

We are constantly wowed by new technologies and policies meant to make childbirth better. But beware the unintended consequences.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, my name is Gert Jan Olster.
0:05.3	My last name is Olster.
0:06.7	Spellt is OLSDER.
0:09.6	My 1867, which in the Netherlands means Jardiett.
0:14.8	Before he retired, here Jan Olster was a university professor in applied mathematics.
0:21.6	In 1975, Olster was 31 years old.
0:25.2	He and his colleagues at 20 university were very bright.
0:30.8	They thought they could do anything.
0:35.6	It simply popped up suddenly.
0:37.4	Why don't we work on population planning?
0:41.1	Of course.
0:41.9	Population planning.
0:43.0	What else should a mathematician be working on?
0:45.8	Olster's crew imagined an island nation with no emigration or immigration,
0:51.3	just births and deaths.
0:53.2	It looked like a nice mathematical problem.
0:55.5	The essential riddle was this.
0:57.5	As the population aged and as longevity increased, what was the right birth rate to prevent
1:03.7	the island from becoming overpopulated?
1:06.8	Olster and his colleagues worked hard on the problem, and they came up with an elegant
1:11.0	equation.
1:12.4	Their research paper was called Population Planning, a distributed time optimal control
	...

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