The Hidden Secrets of Math: Beauty and Power (Part 1)

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2024

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mathematics communicator and drag queen Kyne Santos will help you discover the beauty and power of math in this three-part Friday miniseries. Kyne takes us back to ancient Greece to illustrate the elegance of mathematics. We meet mathematician Tom Crawford, who combines fieldwork and modeling to predict the impacts of pollution, as well as philosopher and logician Mark Jago. Recommended reading: – Gift Wrapping Five Oranges Has Outwitted the Best Minds in Mathematics for Generations – The SAT Problem That Everybody Got Wrong E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman and Kyne Santos. Our show is edited by Madison Goldberg with fact-checking by Shayna Posses, Emily Makowski and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Here's the truth about AI.
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0:21.9	use right now. That's why the world works with ServiceNow. Visit ServiceNow.com
0:27.8	slash UK slash AI for people. When Tom Crawford climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and stood 5,895 meters above sea level, he was
0:41.8	astounded by the natural beauty of the view.
0:44.6	Who wouldn't be?
0:46.8	But unlike most climbers, Tom had something else on his mind too.
0:51.2	Math.
0:52.7	If I can see another peak in the distance, in my head, I'm like, I wonder if I could like
0:57.2	calculate the height of that based on, you know, the angle I'm at and the distance.
1:01.9	He doesn't actually crunch those numbers.
1:04.5	But as a mathematician at the University of Oxford, Tom's instinct is always to translate the world
1:10.1	around him into patterns and numbers.
1:12.6	In other words, to turn mountains into math.
1:15.6	For me, the beauty is you can apply maths to absolutely anything.
1:22.6	Give me any situation, any problem, any set of data, and you can use maths to try to understand
1:30.0	what's happening.
	...

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