Welcome to the rest of science. This is Fieldnote. It's a kind of podcast expedition of the mind, as it were, where Michael and I, we're trading the curious thoughts that have been occupying us.

That's right. And we also entertain questions and thought experiments from you all.

We certainly do. And in general, we want you to send them in. Send us in anything

you want us to know, your thought experiments, the things that have been troubling you. Now,

later in this episode in the second half, I am going, I've got my sort of object, as it were,

it's a metaphorical object this time, Michael. I'm going to be sharing with you the thing that I currently

find most troubling about the future with AI. I've got a few stories to tell you. But we're first

going to go to your questions, as we always do, to our little mailbox. That's right. I wanted to

read you an email that we got from John. This is just very cool,

and it's so related to our previous episodes. You get extra brownie points for that. So John

emailed us to say, hi, to make the link between two of your recent programs, Paul Hoffman,

who in his biography of Erdish, the man who loved only numbers, wrote the following.

Listen to this.

Go on.

A conjecture both deep and profound is whether the circle is round.

In a paper of Erdish, written in Kurdish, a counter-example is found.

So we've got Maths, Limerericks and Erdisch.

Erdosh. How did we say it in the show?

How did we say it in the show?

I don't think we said it to rhyme with Kurdish.

This limerick is a brilliant way to remember how to pronounce Urdish, because it rhymes with Kurdish.

I think that's one of the reasons Hoffman wrote it.

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