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Math Lounge: Celebrating 101 Episodes
3.2k Plays4 months ago
In this conversation, Gabe and Autumn celebrate the 101st episode of Breaking Math and discuss the evolution of the podcast. They highlight the importance of creativity in teaching mathematics and share their plans to expand Breaking Math into Breaking Math Media. They also discuss the history of physics and the big questions that inform the podcast. The hosts express their desire to collaborate with listeners and explore practical applications of math in different fields. They also mention books like 'A Quantum Story' and 'Incomplete Nature' that delve into the mysteries of quantum mechanics and consciousness. The hosts highlight the unique and creative nature of their podcast, inviting listeners to join them in the Math Lounge, a metaphorical nightclub where math and creativity intersect.
Keywords: Breaking Math, podcast, creativity, mathematics, Breaking Math Media, physics, history, quantum mechanics, book discussion, double-slit experiment, quantum mechanics, interdisciplinary discussions, machine learning, neuroscience, gamification of math, collaboration, practical applications, consciousness, Math Lounge
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Transcript
Celebrating 101 Episodes
00:00:06
Speaker
oh Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold the Pythagorean Theorem for a second. Autumn, did the clock just strike? Strike clock, Abe. Did we first track again? Something is a little bit mind bending. It seems like fractal exploration. Not exactly. My statistically significant co-host, we've officially cracked the code on 101 episodes of Breaking Math.
Reflection on Podcast Journey
00:00:29
Speaker
101 episodes? That's like a Googleplex of equations that we've tackled together. Maybe not quite that many, but it's definitely been a wild ride for the past six, seven years it since 2017. We've been on an mission to prove that math is more than just a bunch of dusty textbooks. Absolutely. It's a secret sauce to the universe.
Episode Highlights
00:00:50
Speaker
The language of intervention and yes, the key to baking a pie that won't leave your guests feeling like they need to call geometry for help. Enough reminiscing for now though. Today's episode is all about celebrating this monumental achievement with you, our fantastic listeners. We've got a treasure trove of goodies in store. From listener shout outs to brain teasers that'll have your neurons firing faster than a supercomputer and a sneak peek at the incredible math adventures we have planned for the future. So grab your slide rollers and sharpen your pencils and get ready to break the sound barriers of awesome because this is an episode you absolutely cannot
Autumn's Role in Podcast
00:01:23
Speaker
miss.
00:01:23
Speaker
I guess it's time for a little bit of a reintroduction of sorts for who we are and what we can do on this 101st episode, which we call the Math Lounge, the episode where we take you behind the scenes of what we've been cooking up. I'm Gabrielle Hesh, one of the founders of the Breaking Math Podcast. And I'm Autumn Feneff. I'm more of the project manager side of things on the podcast. Yeah. And you know, and I hesitate to say that you've taken up the reins in such an amazing way. So full disclosure, I have a whole lot of kids at home and I have a full-time job. And Autumn has basically taken the reins in many ways, which has been amazing. I mean, everything from writing scripts to finding guests, you're basically into editing full episodes to interviewing episodes. So Autumn has done more than simply only the project manager.
00:02:08
Speaker
ah You know, you basically stood in in in my shoes when I'm not available. So that's awesome. I mean, I have fun doing it. Good. Well, I'm glad. i'm We're very fortunate to do have you here.
Notable Collaborations
00:02:21
Speaker
Now say Breaking Math has been running since 2017 with a lot of collaboration from some big names on the show, such as the famous physicist Sabine Hosenfelder, who was was a phenomenal YouTube channel, as well as math with bad drawings, blog and book author Ben Orlin. Now, we also have had Marcus DeSatoi, the Simone professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, and another one of your favorite science illustrators, Zach Wienersmith, from the Web's Tune Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Here's the thing. We've been crunching away at a lot more than just
00:02:58
Speaker
Serial breaking math podcast is expanding to breaking math media. It's time to have more than just a podcast for you We've been working tirelessly with some contributors and collaborators around the globe to help expand your mathematical knowledge You've helped us grow grow to the number one all time at mathematics podcast and in the United States So we've been tirelessly building a website behind the scenes a blog uploading all of our old episodes, creating new partnerships, working on, you know, here's a little teaser for y'all, a couple of books, and ah putting out content on all of our social media channels.
Inviting Listener Collaborations
00:03:35
Speaker
Not only those things, but we also want to work with you. Yes, you are listeners. We want to open up opportunities to collaborate with us on our show and on our blog. If you would like to have an episode where you would like to share anything in the field of STEM ah or of art, history, philosophy, et cetera, and tie it back to mathematics, tech, and engineering concepts, we are open to collaborations. And if you would like to work with us on a larger scale, whether it's a sponsorship partnership or a contributor, we want you to know that the link is in our show notes. We also have everything on breakingmath.io. Now, before we get into who we are, our big questions and what this really looks like for us at Breaking Math, let's take a minute to hear from our sponsors.
Expansion to Breaking Math Media
00:04:24
Speaker
So as you had heard before our commercial break, ah Breaking Math, the the Breaking Math podcast is now Breaking Math Media, and I'm very, very excited. The goal since the beginning has been to tell stories of the significance of mathematics and the history of mathematics using creativity, using art. And sometimes that's kind of a challenge to do because I kind of feel like the analytical side of my brain and the creative side are different, but also kind of complimentary. You know, do you ever feel that way about creativity?
00:04:50
Speaker
I really do a lot of the times. You can kind of take one piece and connect it to the other. And, you know, ah I'll just leave it as you need the creativity to be a mathematician, to be an engineer, to work in STEM and that side of your brain, even though you may think it's a disconnect, it really isn't at the same time.
Creative Teaching Methods
00:05:09
Speaker
Yeah, I hear you. Now, I want to especially send this as a call to action out to our listeners where if you are thinking of or if if you feel that you have a creative way of teaching about mathematics, you are the one that we want to hear from. Whether that's, you know, in some funny comics, kind of like the XKCD comics that are phenomenal. We mentioned earlier, Zach Wienersmith's Saturday morning breakfast cereal cartoon, or, you know, or any other cartoon that kind of, you know, tells stories and illustrates concepts in mathematics or in science. You're the ones that that we want to hear from and we want to we want to collaborate. We want to collaborate. um This kind of stuff excites us. In fact, I do my own cartoons. You all don't know this, but I've been tempted to debut some of my cartoons. I'm just too nervous right now, but I've been working a lot on drawing cartoons of our guests. So I think I should finally date debut them and see what what you guys think. um
00:05:55
Speaker
Now, I want to mention real quick here ah with Sophia and I, the late Sophia, who we all know um passed away this past year, and we miss her dearly. ah She was very creative. ah In the early days of the Breaking Mouth podcast, we would do things like go around our campus at the University of New Mexico and do interviews on my iPhone 6 at the time. We didn't use any fancy mics. We just recorded things on our iPhone 6. To this day, if you go to the old Facebook breaking math page, there's breaking math community, and then there's the breaking math podcast page. They are separate. I'm referring to the latter. um Incidentally, I no longer have the um login. so
00:06:31
Speaker
So it it just exists there, but it's a great repository of our old stuff. There is a video, there are many videos actually that Sophia created, including one of them that animates um an interview I did with a philosophy student talking about math. I don't know if y'all are aware of the story of ah full of Socrates and the story of Mino's slave. I don't want to spoil it for you all, but essentially, ah There's an apocryphal story that involves Socrates teaching ah his friend Minos' slave how to do mathematics. And the point of the story in part is to show that that slaves are very capable of doing and understanding math, not just humans.
00:07:07
Speaker
Because even back then, they had the wrong idea about many classes of people, including those who were slaves. And and Sophia animated it. um It's amazing. It's available right now on the Facebook page. I say all this because, again, we like to incorporate creativity, whether it's cartoons or videos or or comics or funny memes into conversations about math. We think it's delightful and we think it's awesome. um I have a ah couple other examples here as well. And again, this isn't just going to be a trip down memory lane, but for those who haven't listened to all of our episodes, Sophia and I deliberately would do things like make fun of movies in an effort to teach about math.
Math and Pop Culture
00:07:46
Speaker
I don't know, Autumn, have I ever shown you um the beginning of our episode where we made fun of the Saw franchise during our episodes on Game Theory? ah No, I don't think I've ever seen that.
00:08:02
Speaker
hello listenersers don't know me but i know you. I want to play a game. In your ears are two earbuds. Connected to the earbuds are a podcast playing an episode about game theory. Posting that podcast are two knuckleheads. And you're locked into this episode. The key is at the end of this episode. What is game theory? Why do we parody the Saw franchise? For what twisted lessons will you learn? Let the games begin.
00:08:33
Speaker
and Episode 37, the one where the parody saw.
00:09:06
Speaker
but Literally, at the time, we're just thinking, you know how do we explain game theory? And at the time, this was years ago. I don't know how popular the soft franchise is right now, so I don't know how relevant it is. I'm sure it'll be popular again because you know and nostalgia always cycles into being in fashion again. Always. Yeah, I had no idea that you could do this, but at the time, Sofia just went to Google and said, how do I modulate my voice using, I think it's one of the programs, either Audacity or um Adobe Audition. And how do I modulate it to sound like jigsaw from the movie saw that's literally it He just did some very simple things to modulate his voice or that's really neat Yeah, and then not only that but we have a musician again another creative a musician with the show Elliot Smith who's been a part of our show and Elliot Smith did our typical intro music and Elliot redid our intro music to sound like the intro to saw and It was amazing. It was amazing. So, um you know, I just, I find it delightful to use all these analogies, you know, and I don't know what we would do this day and age, like what movies are popular now and what could we use to talk about, ah you know, we like to make fun of pop culture. So it's, it's, it's pretty fun.
00:10:10
Speaker
And we've done that as well in other episodes, too. We did a three-part series on black holes, and that three-part that threepress series just got really technical. And Sophie and I were were so exhausted after all of the research that we had to have a fun, relaxing episode to unwind. So we did a um kind of a science fiction Monty Python Comedy called black hole heist and basically we took all of our knowledge of black holes and all the hard problems of science like explaining consciousness and explaining where quantum mechanics meets Relativity we put all of that into a blender and mixed it up and basically it's a short 17 minute sci-fi about an evil doctor that builds a black hole in the lab that
00:10:55
Speaker
gains consciousness. And then it becomes kind of a Frankenstein, Frankenstein's um um monster story. But ah every other line is a pun. The whole thing is puns. I think ah the evil general is named general specific. And there's also major chromatic. Y'all will have to take a listen to it. It's it's pretty fun. But Sophie, and I love to be creative, lighthearted, fun, and bring that into serious conversations about breaking math, you know, or about mathematics and science. I think that's a good way to do it. You know, it's relatable, it's approachable, it's fun. Not everything is super serious where you have to like have a graduate level understanding of mathematics to enjoy these conversations.
Art and Math Integration
00:11:32
Speaker
Absolutely. And what I really have appreciated about breaking math is how much you make the show accessible to people. And it's just making topics that sometimes people
00:11:46
Speaker
won't understand and our larger, broader audience really wants to be able to understand the world around them. So um a little bit about me that the viewers don't know and don't see is that before I like to say that I'm just a mathematician and an engineer, I call myself an artist. So the way that I have always thought about this is if you're an artist you think a little differently and abstractly and you really understand the beauty of mathematics and apply it to everything from designing clothes and being able to I'll just throw out maybe even packing a solar array.
00:12:33
Speaker
for a space shuttle, ah putting it onto the rocket ship and launching it into space. How do you do that? That's all art. That's all mathematics. And even those same concepts can be brought into simple things like the configurations of bendy straws. That is all math. that is all polymers, that is all physics and really being able to study that and the interpretations of that has been like a lifelong journey for me and discovery of taking these concepts that are really difficult and boiling them down.
00:13:20
Speaker
A lot of my work over the years has incorporated these topics. In addition to that, I have done Jane NFT space where I've sold out 11,000 pieces of art in under two and a half hours. And I've taken that work and helped create communities with some of the top writers in tech where there was over, I'd say about it maybe a thousand women that were great executives and just smart, educated women who love to be able to do the work that they did.
00:14:01
Speaker
Nice. That's really incredible. I hope you don't mind me typing in here, but that's one of the things that I really enjoyed. I know I, and I forgive me, I've said this in a previous um episode before, but you know, when you're, when we, when I was looking for somebody to help me out on the Breaking Math podcast and you and I were small talking, it's gosh, it doesn't always, it doesn't always come up in my conversations with engineers about what kind of art do you do, but your art is all over the place. it's all over the It's all over, you know, Twitter X, whatever you want to call it. um Your work in communication with magazines. How many people do you know that have not only taught engineering at ah at a college level, taught mathematics at a college level, you know, been involved in high-end literature? Sorry, I said high-end. How do you say like like polymer physics, literature review, ah views in like biomedical engineering and are also, um sorry, and also have experience working with a magazine
00:14:51
Speaker
and posting their artwork um on on Twitter. like that's That's really, really cool. you know So that that's experience with communication, with expression, as well as with the analytical thinking required to um to engage with science at at a high level. So yay, that's awesome. Thanks Gabe. But to the thing is like, I never expected to fall into this field, right? So sometimes you take a job because you think it's cool, you think it's interesting, and stuff happens along the way.
00:15:25
Speaker
You know, and that is how I have navigated my educational experience, my educational journey, um my academic work, and a lot of it has actually fallen and under maybe two or three categories.
00:15:47
Speaker
And people don't think about this stuff. The same topics in origami, blockchain, polymer cross-linkages, industrial engineering systems and networks, and even fundamentals of evaluation when you're going into a company and evaluating them. That is the same math, the same optimization, And I was always wondering, what's the theme? How does this carry through?
00:16:24
Speaker
And for me, it was staying curious, keeping it to supply chains and finding really cool applications that I was never bored with. And, you know, sometimes being someone who just likes interesting problems, you have to find core themes to get funding to write for your own funding and research. And that that like narrates its own story over time and spins its own web. And I know that here at Breaking Math, we have a lot of complex questions that have guided you on the podcast over time.
00:17:12
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. yeah yeah If that gets really good segue into this. Now, I know I didn't talk a whole lot about myself and my background. I'll probably just go over that very, very briefly. But ah essentially, this this podcast was born out of um experiences in in in grad school with Sophia. but Sophia was my was my math tutor at the time. And there were just ah the more we explored math, both in learning and teaching, I i found personally that whyt you would learn a topic and then you'd go
Gabrielle's Math Journey
00:17:35
Speaker
and teach it. you understand it in a whole different way. And you may have light bulbs and applications that go off, boom, boom, boom in in different ways. And I thought, this is so cool. And I almost became like a mathematics evangelist, so to speak, but the audience wasn't always there. Like, um you know, my wife didn't necessarily always want to hear about why FOIA transforms are awesome, you know what I mean, or the beauty ah of Euler's formula. um And she tried her best. And I understood that. But I thought, man, if only I could find an audience that really wanted to hear it. So then I just thought, well, let's record it and let's slap it on the internet.
00:18:05
Speaker
Now, also, ah i I want to mention that there are some really big questions that sort of inform the Breaking Math podcast.
Historical Math Moments
00:18:13
Speaker
We talk about the history of mathematics in general, um but it's also guided. um I think that so much of math is is interlaced like strands of DNA with the field of physics, you know, that we we talk about the history of physics a lot. Um, there's actually a book that I want to bring up real quick. It is one of of the books on the history of physics. Um, in my experience, but one of my favorites that I've ever read is called the quantum story ah history and 40 moments by Jim baggett. But the reason why I bring up this book is
00:18:41
Speaker
it it It dissects everything. I say everything. it It dissects the big questions in quantum mechanics starting with Max Planck and where he came up with his idea of the of the Planck constant and why he came up with it. What went through his head and like how does scientific progress work essentially with Max Planck. He was completely stuck trying to make sense of of the observations of um Light radiation, you know, and you have these models that that sort of worked, but only worked in certain cases. And finally, he he he couldn't figure it out. So he borrowed an idea from a physicist named Boltzmann. And Boltzmann was somebody back in the 1800s who believed that gases were made of individual molecules.
00:19:23
Speaker
I don't think I've lost anyone here yet, right? The the whole idea that gases are not this like ephemeral spirit and are made of a bunch of small things, that was a really controversial idea. But Boltzmann insisted that the behavior of thermodynamics and heat can be better explained by statistical distributions of small particles of things. Now we take it for granted that air and gases are are you know mostly described or you know very effectively described as, Well, yeah, clouds ah of atoms. So now it's common sense. But for a long time, it wasn't. And and not everybody agreed with him. Anyways, Planck did the same thing with energy. He thought, well what if i we assume that it's not continuous, but it's discrete at these very, very small increments? And then very quickly, he came up with an equation that described perfectly the behavior of light radiation at small waves and large waves.
00:20:15
Speaker
the book itself starts with plank then it goes into einstein and is for monumental papers on on special relativity and on the photoelectric effect on brownian motion and on um one duration where um The book goes on into Einstein's four papers on the photoelectric effect, on Brownian motion, on special relativity, and on the mass-energy equivalence in his famous equation E equals MC squared. It talks about what inspired Einstein. And essentially, he read up on Planck and then applied Planck's model to ah known and unknown physics. And ah you know he he had four amazing earth-shattering papers. And the paper on the photoelectric effect won him a Nobel Prize. But truth be told,
00:20:59
Speaker
All four of them were slam dunks and those pretty much solidified his status as a scientist. But then the book goes on past that and it talks about, um, uh, Neil's boar and the boar model of the atom, which is so interesting. It's interesting to me because it's so ad of hoc, like. With Bohr's original model of the atom, he threw things together and he he described behaviors that were just so. like He wasn't interested in why it behaved that way. He was just interested in in his model explaining the math. and He's like, yeah, at this level, electrons just jump. There's no reason why. They just jump you know to a different energy level.
00:21:39
Speaker
And I guess as I'm reading the biographies of these thinkers, some people were obsessed with explaining the why. And Niels Bohr wasn't interested in that so much, which just boggles my mind, you know. um And then it goes, there's more to say on that. Did did you all know that on Niels Bohr's um honeymoon, he suddenly stopped everything and had his wife take out notebook paper and write down a bunch of ideas because he had a strike of inspiration on his honeymoon. Can you imagine what that would be like? ah calls for divorce I know right on his honeymoon he starts nerding out about physics and has his wife write down all these things but anyways they were happily as far as I know there's evidence that they were happily married so that that wasn't a deal breaker at the time which was good um but anyways essentially the entire book takes apart chunk by chunk
00:22:24
Speaker
the standard model of physics, as we know right now, which was very, it was pretty well solidified into the to what we presently know of the standard model, you know, through things like particle accelerators through the mathematics of Richard Feynman, you know, including, to including things like quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics, which explains the behavior of force carriers, you know, at the subatomic level. Anyways, a lot of that is done through, you know, as I said earlier, particle accelerators, but it and it answers the question of why or how do we know what we know to what level of precision do we know these things how sure are we where are the uncertainties and this is just physics and cosmology and this leads into the big bang and you know there's even
00:23:09
Speaker
Folks mentioned in this book, who um I don't remember the name right now, but who are responsible for the whole idea that ah electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are one and the same in certain conditions. And that leads into the big bang where you know things spread out and were super hot and dense, and then they cooled down. And during that time, you could have had the the decoupling of the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. I realize this is a whole lot here. The point i'm trying I'm trying to make here is the book is very, very rich in talking about what we now know of as the standard model of physics and where the uncertainties still are. For that reason, ah since the beginning of the Breaking Math podcast, I've wanted to do a book discussion on this book. I'm also thrilled to announce that I am asked the author, Jim Baggett, if we could do a book group discussion on the podcast and his is answer was an emphatic, sure, but go for it.
00:24:02
Speaker
so Here we are. Now, I'm not going to dive more into that today, but I've tried to get you to read the book and I've i've sent you a little bit of it. What do you think about it so far, Autumn? I'm absolutely thrilled because, you know, it talks about some of the science riffs behind the scenes. Every good Science story does always have some sort of conflict. People and collaborators toss out ideas and you get to get some really interesting results. Do they all agree at the beginning? No, never. but what When do people actually agree in science when they have these different theories? But the best science comes from trial and error, like scientific method.
00:24:47
Speaker
Yeah, actually, now that you mentioned it, this book covers a huge rift that was an ah um an amazing thing to read. The letters between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr arguing about the proper interpretation of the, I'm sorry, arguing about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. and oh I've never read something that was more thrilling to read. It was like watching two titans battling you know to the death, but it was just intellectual ideas. you know
00:25:18
Speaker
And I think that Albert Einstein would like write a whole thought experiment ah you know ah about how how um it's not that quantum mechanics or it's not that nature it has fundamental uncertainty. it's It's that it is certain. It's just just that we are limited in our ability to measure it right now. And he said, you know I'd like to think that ah the moon is there even when I'm not looking at it. That alludes to the measurement problem in quantum. Absolutely. I think that also brings in a lot of other interdisciplinary questions that we have, right? oh yeah yeah let's Let's look at also the big picture of things. We talk about um ah machine learning, AI, where taking apart um all of these other areas
00:26:11
Speaker
that integrate what is the design of a coffee cup even? And why do we have a handle on the side and not on the bottom? yeah Right? yeah yes So if you're thinking about that as a scientist, that that makes that very, very interesting with your basic fundamentals of design. yeah ah But also we have big questions um such as election systems. We just did this major interview about election systems and what sort of voting that we have going on. What should work better? Why is our system antiquated? We have
00:26:59
Speaker
a lot of other conversations that we want to reach out to political scientists and social scientists. which so Generally here, as we as we pivot topics here, I appreciate how you bring up all these other grander questions that relate. and in In other words, it it seems that we could describe our ambitions with this show as being an interdisciplinary discussion using mathematics as the bridge of conversations.
Math in Election Systems
00:27:22
Speaker
And this comes up as is a theme in the episode you're talking about. We interviewed Ismar Bolich, who is from Bosnia. And he talked about the necessity of using mathematics to to ensure stable systems of election. Great interview, great interview. But throughout the interview, he kept talking about a strong desire to to talk with social scientists and with anthropologists and with people who can talk about human behavior, modeling human behavior, psychology, also systems of power.
00:27:50
Speaker
you know, ah there's it's a rich area. It's a very, very, very rich interdisciplinary area for people in different fields to overlap and work together. And that's, that's kind of cool. That's kind of cool, isn't it? Absolutely. yeah Also, things that we really have wanted to explore are the ability to model neuroscience, right?
Modeling Complex Systems
00:28:12
Speaker
And machine learning with that. So there's a lot of questions with neural networks, right? So think of a disease that can be modeled.
00:28:25
Speaker
when you're modeling something with a pandemic, you're having that what sort of system in which you have a population and it starts from one person. How does that spread on to the 20th person of that nature? and how How do we really synthesize that and maintain the structural integrity of our system while modeling these patterns? And does that even have information spread from one person to the next? And that could even be information on politics and voting. How does that model even correlate to something as simple as picking people for ranks for a political campaign?
00:29:13
Speaker
Wow, yeah, that's that's fantastic. Oh my goodness, a book that brings together trivial, we say it trivial, you know, like lighthearted things like memes or even jokes or styles, for example, that are spread like on music videos and stuff and relating that to political identities and ideologies. Wow. Oh, fascinating stuff. Fascinating stuff. yeah you know it's it's It's really cool. And when you talk about the spread of things here, yeah, these are areas where different fields overlap. Like with the training of neural network models, um you know that there's a reinforcement function and there is a distributed, both a distributed, but also a an integrated ah knowledge throughout ah neurons in a neural network. And I sometimes wonder if humans themselves could be individual neurons in a bigger neural network per se. I don't want to i don't want to go too conspiracy theory or or rather I need to find support for that idea, but i that idea has crossed my mind before. you know um you know So what we've been talking about is is great big ideas and small ideas. I like to refer to the big ideas in the Breaking Math podcast as like big logs and a fire. You know what I mean? Like when you're building a campfire, you're bringing together these really big logs, but you also have kindling as well.
00:30:25
Speaker
And the big logs will burn for a long time. And with respect to a podcast about math or science, I think of of the big i the big logs as the big ideas that you marinate on. you know We can talk about them, but there are multiple episodes, and you just sit there and ponder on them for like a long time. like I think that's how Einstein was. He was a big log kind of thinker. But then there's also fun topics that are sometimes called popcorn topics or kindling topics, because sometimes You just wanna hear some gee whiz cool facts. I'm not gonna lie, I get a dopamine rush from really well presented gee whiz facts. Didn't we all, didn't we all? I actually love doing that. like you You go into a lot of the big topics yeah and I love stuff that's really fun and interesting and will hold the attention of the audience yeah on something new, whether it's something
00:31:17
Speaker
such as how do origami robots work in one sense, then bringing that over to even fashion design and integrating the mathematics behind digital fashion. Wow. You don't think of how these topics really correlate or something that I've been really passionate about that I know people talk about in a sense of, oh, crypto, what is the usage? What is the sense behind this stuff? um
00:31:56
Speaker
folks don't realize the very, very practical applications that these topics have, whether it's your engineering licenses or even digital certifications.
00:32:12
Speaker
And finding practicality in sometimes these little niche topics that people talk about or finding some interesting topic in left field or even talking to people at um Amazon about their systems and supply chains you or what's the new up and coming research Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love those topics just as much as us doing our big reviews and our book reviews. Yes. Yeah. That's that's been fun. yeah Haven't you felt like it's pretty awesome having a math podcast that that's been going on for this long because what
00:32:57
Speaker
I feel fortunate. We get emails every single month, multiple emails from book publishers about, here's the latest, you know, math, you know, the book that describes mathematics this way or that way. It's really cool. So like the, you know, like you get to talk to a subject matter expert who took the time to write a book, you know, so it's, I don't know. i like and And I think the thing that we want listeners to know about this is that we're inviting you to come work with us. yes Yes. We want this to be sustainable. If you're doing a cool topic or you think it's cool, we may be we may not even know about it. yeah If it has anything to do with science, art, and the integration of that with math, maybe engineering, maybe machine learning, right? How about a Broadway musical about mathematics? Any takers? any takers
00:33:54
Speaker
I that would be just as interesting yeah no i think it'd be awesome it'd be awesome yeah yeah it wouldd be a way to experience the math multi-sensor multimodal experiencing of the math you know that's actually what we didn't think of a whole lot actually is other ways to not just know the math but to experience it you know um if do If you've been to like one of those science museums for kids, we've got one here in Albuquerque called Explorer, where there's a bunch of sand on on a um like a ah metal plate, and it'll vibrate at certain figuencies, and you can see the sand suddenly forming into a pattern that looks like a violin or something like that.
00:34:28
Speaker
those are the best. yeah yeah yeah Being able to just experience the math, knowing what we're doing, ah whether it's hands-on applications or some really interesting workshop, yeah you know those are the things that make math and science fun. Yes. Yes. No, I agree. I agree. So yeah. So please on our website, just go to our website right now, breakingmath.io. I'm not meaning to sound like a salesperson here, but no, seriously. There's a section, there's there's a section on how you can collaborate with us. And we just, we'd love to see your emails and celebrate ah math and creativity and science and the human experience together. That would be awesome.
00:35:07
Speaker
Now, super quick, ah you mentioned earlier about machine learning and about some of the deeper questions. There's another book that I wanted to mention similar to a quantum story. um You think it's a good time to bring that book up real quick? Go for it. Okay, very good. So so the one of the deepest questions that I've heard anyone talk about, anyone, whether it's science or philosophy or anything at all, is the mystery of human consciousness. Now I'll mention a book for you guys and and the book is rooted in thermodynamics as well as ideas about zero. The book is called Incomplete Nature. Again, it's called Incomplete Nature and it's by Terence
Consciousness and Thermodynamics
00:35:44
Speaker
Deacon. Now some of the ideas are a little scary and by scary, I mean they they make me feel a little uncomfortable, but they're important ideas and they are ideas about about, you know, where does consciousness come from? Now there's a running joke on Twitter that I've discovered that nobody has actually read the entire book.
00:36:01
Speaker
Nobody's read it, but everybody's read the Wikipedia page. But essentially, one of the themes that the author talks about is the role of the number zero. And the way he describes it is not only him, but others as well is ah zero is very, very important in mathematics. It's not only you know a placeholder, but it's not just emptiness. But but it's its role in describing is things are not defined um only by what is there, but equally by what is not there. Um, you know, like, like, like both positive and negative spaces or rather space and the taking up of space together are important in describing the reality of something. And he goes on to describe various phenomena in the human brain and the human body in his implication. is that therisal of of of the the conscious feeling of you is similar. it It is defined both by what is not there as well as what is there. I didn't mention ah ah the the author, Terrence Deakin, has written two books. ah One of them is called The Symbolic Species, which is all about the origin of language in humans. And the other book, of course, is what I'm talking about now called um
00:37:08
Speaker
ah Incomplete Nature. Deacon's first book, The Symbolic Species, focused on the evolution of human language, in that book, Deacon notes that much of the mystery surrounding language origins comes from a profound confusion about the nature of s semiotic processes or processes themselves. Accordingly, the focus of incomplete nature shifts from human origins to the origin of life and semiosis. Incomplete nature can be viewed as a sizable contribution to the growing body of work, positing that the problem of consciousness and the problem of the origin of life are inexorably linked. Deacon tackles these two linked problems by going back to the basics. The book expounds upon the classical conceptions of work and information in order to give an account of intentionality. that is consistent with a limited materialism, and yet does not seek to explain away or pass off as epiphenomenal, the non physical properties of life. So he talks about like consciousness can be hard to study because you can't, you know, take away everything that's not conscious. And are you left with consciousness? No, you can't, because consciousness is what's there and what's not there. Anyways, it is, it's really, really cool. Now, the book goes on and on. He basically, he attempts to to address, you know, traditional ideas from Renee
00:38:18
Speaker
the cart in the mind-body problem which is a dualistic look at things and he looks he takes ideas from Aristotle and he tries to rephrase them using modern understandings of thermodynamics. So whoa this book is a doozy. I think I was talking to you about this book as being very similar to dropping like a watermelon into a pool like You know what I mean? And then and again, it's it's similar to the book, Gertle Escherbach. and Now, of course, Gertle Escherbach is written by Douglas Hofstadter. He's another person who do attempts to describe where consciousness could come from material processes by something like a brain that that you know maps reality, attempts to map itself, but then the there's the incompleteness problem because you can't fully map yourself unless you map yourself mapping yourself.
00:39:03
Speaker
or a brain thinking about a brain, thinking about a brain, thinking about a brain. is so you And it's mapping itself. Yeah. Yeah. It's mapping itself. So that's the, the ideas here. And again, I think that these are worthy ideas here, even just for for the sake of like, you know, if you're going to do some task, like, you know, learn karate and you learn a black belt, I think taking on this, this book and the quantum story book together, stuff like the black belt of, of science and philosophy conversations, don't
Neural Networks and Consciousness
00:39:33
Speaker
you think? even if the books are wrong, or even if they're critiqued, I think they are more than worthy to have conversations about on this podcast. So we should have people who have delved deep into those books and try to take on that boss fight, if this were an RPG, and report to us on this podcast, you know, and break down some of those 20, $20 words. Yeah, that they hit so hard. Math, math, math, math, math, right? Yeah, yeah no, no, great time exactly. Yeah.
00:40:01
Speaker
Yeah, but you know, the reason why we bring up that book, no for reals though, is because we're talking about things like neural networks and artificial and intelligence. What would a neural network need in order to actually be conscious? We don't think it is. We think right now, you know, I was having a conversation with a physicist at work, ah who who believes that like, you know, a neural network right now is about as conscious as something like an a like a snow avalanche, literally. Yeah. think ah and And really, it's just a statistical response to an input. And it puts out ah what it believes is the best statistical output. So it's an avalanche it's sort of like an avalanche in some ways, but also kind of like playing an an arcade game, 10 Ball Machine. Exactly.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yeah. Why am I thinking of Street Fighter at the same time? oh Oh my gosh. I was telling you this, you know speaking of Street Fighter and being creative. Do you all remember the game Street Fighter? you you It's kind of like you know more of a more of a PG-13 version of Mortal Kombat where you have these characters that fight like in Smash Brothers, but then you have the bonus levels where you're like smashing a car in a certain amount of time. Can we do that with math? Like, imagine playing a little character on screen and and you're solving a math equation, but it's got the same street fighter energy and the same music. You know what I mean? Absolutely. I think that'd be awesome. I think we should have that as an overlay yeah for Matlab. Oh my God. As it does all the complex stuff.
00:41:24
Speaker
but do do do do do yeah You're smashing this like card of pieces, but it's the math or like do you mean the game dance dance revolution? Yeah, you were stomping on on on these things here and this dude was dancing there needs to be a can someone do a math equation version of that you're there solving a problem and suddenly somebody like turns into a ninja and just slices up a I don't know I know they have like fruit ninja but like you can destroy like like ah like a mountain or something I mean like pick some something to destroy and as you're solving it when you solve it correctly it's the same satisfaction as playing Tetris and you watch the Tetris pieces go
00:42:02
Speaker
It's like, yeah, primarily, I don't want to call it an addiction here. But it's a it's a source of dopamine. So imagine solving some really hard partial differential equation. And like your reward for that should be something cool, like seeing a giant robot, whatever, just blow up bit by bit, you know, that'd be pretty cool. Absolutely. I'd play that game. I would play that. That would be the gamification of of complex analysis. you know Right? i ah Yeah, yeah. so guys get it Yeah, this is our creative conversations. You know, you know, you talk about the the ethics of ah of of of gamifying activities and and also deep conversations about the nature of reality, the limitations of human knowledge and where does consciousness even come from? How's that for you? Are are the other rival math podcasts doing that? Are they?
00:42:49
Speaker
e No, I'm just kidding. I have no idea. They might be. I have not listened to them much. I don't think so. I don't think so. Not yet. So that is more to come for all the people who want to do this or want to volunteer to have it with our show. Oh, and super quick, super quick. So I want to talk about, we said it in the beginning, we talked about the name
Math Lounge Playlist Introduction
00:43:11
Speaker
of this episode. It's called the math lounge. So the math lounge may exist only in our heads right now as this cool nightclub that's themed, you know, with mathematics where I was talking to my, when I taught sixth grade math, we're like, yeah, that'd be like a, you know, a neon sign or a neon cosine. Get it?
00:43:29
Speaker
but I don't even know. like ah All the art would be mathematics themed and there'd be fractals and stuff. I don't know what would be in a said math lounge, but like you have to imagine one. We actually made made a mathematics playlist that we're calling Math Lounge. I have it available right now on YouTube Music. So what is in, so yeah, you can listen to the creators of the Breaking Math podcast and hear what kind of music we like. Um, you want to mention any songs that you're going to put on your math lounge, breaking math? You know, I think I, I want the listeners to actually check it out for once. Okay. Okay.
00:44:05
Speaker
hi um I'm going to spoil a few songs real quick. I've been listening to a YouTuber who does a lot of heavy metal songs in new styles. I believe his name is Anthony Vincent and he does things like um Genie in a Bottle by Christina Aguilera done in the style of Tool.
00:44:22
Speaker
He also does things like Man in a Box by Alison Shaines done in the style of um New Wave 80s synth music. It's amazing. So I put a lot of Anthony Benson in there. Also, other covers of Tool done by, you know, piano and done by guitar. I've gotten really into heavy metal lately and, you know, piano and orchestral covers of it. So yeah, that's just kind of been my thing. So yeah, go to YouTube Music like and search up the math lounge. playlist. It's ours and let us know what you guys think. we'd We'd love to hear that. We'd love to share our playlist with you and listen to it while you do your own math equations. Thank you for so much for joining us on this episode. By the way, I had the creator of this episode ah create a a math lounge, breaking math theme, and it was kind of its described as like, you know, imagine like a red carpet grand opening of a brand new nightclub and all the celebrities are there. So
00:45:15
Speaker
Let's take a listen as we end this episode to to the Breaking Math theme. Yes. And actually, before we go, a couple reminders. So for folks that are listening in today, you want to know where you can find us, ah we have a new website, which is breakingmath.io. We also have a merch store attached to it. So if you like Breaking Math, and you want to get a t-shirt, you want to support us, we're going to have some really cool shirts and posters and mugs in there as well. ah We'll also be slowly updating a YouTube channel and having a lot of our episodes posted on YouTube. We're expanding to all of our social media. And finally, last but not least, we do have a website where we encourage you to go check it out and also contribute to our blog.
00:46:10
Speaker
Yeah, we love that lucky to have everybody on there. We have more too. We have merch. So we've got, we want to design some awesome merch that has yeah math equations written in like the coolest script or maybe graffiti or something like that. All those ideas are coming. They're coming soon, but check out our merch and give us ideas from rich too. If you want to have like, yep I don't know, uh, like the Taylor expansion series, you know, like, like in done, as I said earlier, in graffiti writing or other, some other cool font or some design, I think that would be awesome. If we start, if the math enthusiasts start to represent with their clothing. That'd be pretty cool. Definitely. So without further ado, let's play the club music presented to you by Elliot Smith, the composer of the breaking math theme. Here is the the math lounge remix for your enjoyment.
00:47:04
Speaker
We officially invite you to experience the math. Dance with the math. Break the math. now celebrating 101 years episodes whoopsie daisy calling all intellectually curious microcosmically minded explorers of the universe people who used to do all the work for groups at school admirers for those who used to do all the work in the groups at school university professors looking to nitpick pod people nerds geeks and number-loving freaks absolutely all are welcome to a podcast called Breaking Man