Choose Your Own (Math) Adventure

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2022

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ever read those Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 80s and 90s? As a kid, Dr. Pamela Harris was hooked on them. Years later she realized how much those books have in common with her field: combinatorics, the branch of math concerned with counting. It, too, depends on thinking through endless, branching possibilities. She and several students set out to write a scholarly paper in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure books. Dr. Harris tells Regina G. Barber all about how the project began, how it gets complicated when you throw in wormholes and clowns, and why math is fundamentally a creative act.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, tomorrow shortwave is throwing a birthday party on Twitter.
0:04.4	It's on Wednesday, October 19th at 3pm Eastern on the NPR main account.
0:10.0	Just visit the NPR Twitter page at 3pm tomorrow and start listening.
0:14.1	See you there, shortwavers.
0:15.9	You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:20.5	Warning!
0:27.5	Your spaceship is crash landing on a forbidden planet.
0:34.2	Before you brace for impact, you have just enough time to course correct and land in one
0:39.1	of two locations.
0:41.2	The toxic jungle to the west or the sunken sea to the east.
0:45.4	What's it going to be?
0:46.7	Read onward or turn to page 5 and find out.
0:50.3	So remember those choose your own adventure books of the 80s and 90s?
0:54.4	You know, the ones that had you exploring far away planets or dark dungeons.
0:59.4	Well, for Dr. Pamela Harris, they're more than just nostalgia.
1:03.6	She remembers reading her very first one as a kid and getting hooked instantly.
1:07.9	I think by like the fifth page or something like this, I already had to make a choice
1:12.5	about where the story would lead.
1:14.8	And it was something like, do you want to stay and fight the dragon, go to page 73, or do
1:20.5	you want to run away, go to page 75?
1:24.3	And so all of a sudden I had to make a decision about what was going to happen to the future
1:29.5	of me as this character.
	...

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