WS MoreOrLess: Brazil’s Maths Superstar
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2014
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Man Who Counted, a book of 'Arabic' mathematical tales written by Middle Eastern scholar Malba Tahan was published in Brazil in the 1930s. It became a huge success. Malba Tahan's birthday, May 6th, is now celebrated as Brazil's National Day of Mathematics. But the author wasn't who everybody thought he was. Alex Bellos tells his story. This programme was first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the short edition of Morales, first broadcast on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:09.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use go to |
| 0:13.0 | BBCWorldService.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:19.0 | Hello and welcome to Morales on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:23.0 | It's not the size of our dataset that matters, it's what we do with it that counts. |
| 0:27.0 | I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:29.0 | The World Cup is coming and all eyes are turning to Brazil, |
| 0:32.0 | which means that over the next few months you'll be hearing a lot about football, |
| 0:35.0 | beaches and Samber. |
| 0:37.0 | You probably won't hear a lot about maths. |
| 0:40.0 | Now of course, at Morales, we're not just going to take that lying down, |
| 0:44.0 | sipping a caipreneer while listening to the greatest hits of Gilberto Gil. |
| 0:48.0 | So we turn to the only person we know who's an expert on both Brazil and mathematics. |
| 0:54.0 | Alex Bellos, and we challenged him to find a fantastical tale, |
| 0:58.0 | which combines the two, preferably something to do with a national day of mathematics |
| 1:02.0 | that Brazil celebrated last Tuesday. Easy. |
| 1:14.0 | Rio de Janeiro, 1925 and Brazil is on the up. |
| 1:19.0 | Workers are building the city's landmark, Christ the Redeemer statue, |
| 1:23.0 | Samber, and new music is becoming a national craze, |
| 1:26.0 | and the country's main newspaper, Anouche, introduces a new star writer |
| 1:32.0 | with a story on the front page. |
... |
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