The Happy Twin - with Ben Sparks
The Numberphile Podcast
Brady Haran
4.9 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2020
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our guest is Ben Sparks - teacher, math populariser, and Numberphile regular.
Videos with Ben on Numberphile
Video of Tim Sparks performing Your Own Idea - Nikko Fir and here's Tim's website
Ben's Mandelbrot Video on Numberphile
Advanced Mathematics Support Programme
With thanks to
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today's guest is Ben Sparks. |
| 0:05.0 | Ben's a teacher, a public speaker, a math populariser. |
| 0:09.0 | In fact, as you'll find out today, he's a man who wears many hats. |
| 0:13.0 | And not all of them are great fashion choices. |
| 0:17.0 | Hopefully, you might already know Ben from his number file videos which are always favourites with our viewers. |
| 0:23.6 | They include amazing explanations of the Mandelbrot set and an explanation of why the golden ratio is so irrational. |
| 0:30.6 | But this interview starts with a topic I always find personally fascinating. |
| 0:35.6 | Ben really often I ask people I always find personally fascinating. |
| 0:44.5 | Ben, really often I ask people about like their childhood and their really early days. |
| 0:52.2 | I'm really excited to ask you about this because if memory serves correctly, you are a twin. |
| 0:53.7 | I am a twin. |
| 0:55.8 | I'm fascinated by twinness. |
| 1:01.0 | So am I, but then that's personal sort of experience or victimisation perhaps. |
| 1:02.3 | What's that like being a twin? |
| 1:03.2 | It's normal. |
| 1:07.2 | I mean, this is the question everybody asks when they find something unusual, right? |
| 1:10.4 | Particularly maybe twins, but it's completely normal for me. |
| 1:27.7 | I don't know any other way. So it's very difficult for me to compare some sort of normal existence where I don't have someone who's genetically identical to me. But it, you know, there are pros and cons, like many arrangements in this life. Yeah, it's an identical twin, is that? Identical twin, not fraternal. What's the opposite? Monozygotic, is that the technical word? |
| 1:28.4 | One egg. |
| 1:29.3 | Oh, okay. |
| 1:30.2 | One egg which splits, which is the opposite of if a twin. Twins could come out if there were two eggs happen to be lurking around and they both get fertilised. Yeah. And that's just like siblings. That's non-identical twins. Yeah. I'm sure they share a special button, but it's nothing like the annoyance that I can create to my twin brother and vice versa. |
| 2:02.6 | So yeah, we are genetically exactly the same. One sperm, one egg turned into two people. He's called Tim. And if people want to go and find him online, he's doing some awesome bits of music. So there's always fun to again. All right. We'll link to whatever we need to so people can go and check him out. |
... |
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