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Hello and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast.

We are a weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life and I'm Tim Harford.

If I asked you what Shakespeare gave us, you might talk about his flare for language,

descriptions that trip off the tongue, the nuance and his narratives, his insight into the human condition.

But what does the most influential writer in the English language have to do with more or

less? Well, much. According to today's guest, Rob Eastaway,

math's communicator and author of Much Adieu about numbers.

Welcome back to more or less, Rob. I think a lot of people will not associate

Shakespeare with mathematics. They feel like they're different sides of the

GCSC curriculum so to speak. So what is the association between numbers and

Shakespeare? I don't think I would have expected to find any association between

maths and Shakespeare until I started searching for math's words because I was

asked to do a session for a group of math teachers at a conference in Stratford-upon-Avon which is Shakespeare's birthplace.

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