Maths and Storytelling

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 1999

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the relationship between maths and storytelling. Is there a hidden mathematical logic in stories? The American mathematician John Allen Paulos thinks so. It’s an intriguing thought. Patterns, measurement, the logic of jokes, numerology from Leviticus to Alice in Wonderland, but does it really go to the square root of fiction? According to anthropologists, both have similar origins - in our prehistoric ancestors’ need to measure and assess the world around them. Both mathematics and stories need a shape and structure to make any sense. But does it go further than that? Is it possible to apply mathematical logic to literature or to reduce a joke to an algebraic equation? Or are literary imagination and scientific substance irreconcilable?With John Allen Paulos, Presidential Scholar of Mathematics, Temple University, Philadelphia and author of Once Upon a Number - The hidden mathematical logic of stories; Marina Warner, novelist, historian, critic, former Reith Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, London.

Transcript

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0:45.2	Hello. I'm joined today by John Alan Paulos and Marina Warner to examine the links between mathematics and storytelling
0:52.4	According to anthropologists, they have similar origins in our prehistoric ancestors
0:56.7	need to measure and assess the world around them.
0:59.4	Both mathematics and stories need a shape and structure to make any sense. But does it go any further than
1:04.1	that? Is it possible to apply mathematical logic to literature or to reduce a joke to an algebraic
1:09.2	equation or of the literary imagination and scientific substance irreconcilable.
1:14.0	Jolland Pollis is presidential scholar of mathematics at Temple University of Philadelphia.
1:18.1	He's the author of enumeracy, mathematical illiteracy and its consequences, which became an instant bestseller and was subsequently translated into 11 languages
1:26.9	described as America's favorite mathematician his latest book is called Once Upon a Number
	...

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