How to think like a mathematician

The Infinite Monkey Cage

BBC

Comedy, Science

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedian Jo Brand, mathematicians Prof Hannah Fry and Dr Eugenia Cheng, and xkcd webcomic creator Randall Munroe to discover how thinking like a mathematician could solve some tricky everyday conundrums. From the optimal strategy to finding your true love, to how to fix a wonky table in the pub, thinking like a mathematician can help you in some very unlikely situations. They discover how mathematical thinking can help answer some truly out of this world questions as well: how much soup would it take to fill the solar system? What would happen if you shrank Jupiter to the size of a house? Not problems we'd encounter in everyday life maybe, but all questions sent to Randall Munroe for his "What If?" series of books. At first glance the questions may seem impossible, but, as it turns out, maths and physics can provide an answer to these headscratchers, as the panel discover.

Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:04.9	Hello, I'm Brian Cox.
0:06.2	And I'm Robin Hinton.
0:07.4	This is the Infinite Monkey Cage.
0:08.8	We are back from our Australian holiday.
0:11.2	All of us, as you can see, heavily bronzed by the olden rain
0:14.9	that you managed to bring to Australia.
0:16.7	How?
0:17.3	What are the chances of us having a month of rain in Australia
0:22.2	when you promised it was going to be all lovely and night spring?
0:25.7	Well, all I'm saying is don't travel with him.
0:29.0	He brings the mores with him.
0:30.4	He's like terrible Heathcliff figure.
0:33.4	And I refer that Heathcliff figure, not Lawrence Olivier
0:35.9	playing him, Cliff Richard in the awful musical.
0:38.6	Anyway.
0:40.7	Today's show is, well, basically, it's a rebuttal, too.
0:43.5	I'm sure everyone here knows someone who goes,
0:45.4	I don't even know what was the point in learning maths at school?
0:48.6	All of those kind of stupid things
0:50.1	where you had to learn about, you know,
0:51.4	Euclidean geometry and algebra and quadrilateral equations.
	...

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