4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
0:09.6 | Thank you for downloading the more or less podcast. |
0:12.6 | We are weekly guides to the numbers all around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim |
0:16.4 | Harford. |
0:17.6 | This week, my guest is David Sumpter, he's professor of Applied Mathematics at the University |
0:22.5 | of Uppsala, Sweden, and the author of a new book, Four Ways of Thinking, David, welcome |
0:27.9 | to more or less. |
0:28.9 | Thank you very much. |
0:29.9 | Four Ways of Thinking. |
0:32.0 | You got this idea from the prodigy Stephen Wolfram, I understand, why are you explaining |
0:36.8 | the book? |
0:37.8 | Tell us a little bit about him and why you wanted to adapt his work. |
0:41.4 | It was a very nice starting idea, so Wolfram, he was a sort of child genius and a theoretical |
0:46.4 | physicist, and he had this idea that every system in the world could be explained as being |
0:50.8 | either stable, periodic, chaotic or complex, and so you can think of this in various different |
0:57.7 | ways. |
0:58.7 | It's maybe an argument that somebody might want to have, or somebody is having an argument, |
1:03.0 | and you can think of a stable argument, comes to an agreement very quickly. |
1:06.3 | A periodic argument is a back and forth just going through the same arguments over and |
1:11.5 | over again, chaotic argument. |
1:13.7 | You don't really know, nobody knows what they're talking about, and a complex argument |
1:17.9 | is when you're really getting to the substance of a matter, and so that's a way to think |
... |
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