Podcasts about Fields Medal

Aman Sanger, Arvid Lunnemark, Michael Truell, and Sualeh Asif are creators of Cursor, a popular code editor that specializes in AI-assisted programming. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep447-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/cursor-team-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Cursor Website: https://cursor.com Cursor on X: https://x.com/cursor_ai Anysphere Website: https://anysphere.inc/ Aman's X: https://x.com/amanrsanger Aman's Website: https://amansanger.com/ Arvid's X: https://x.com/ArVID220u Arvid's Website: https://arvid.xyz/ Michael's Website: https://mntruell.com/ Michael's LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3zIDkPN Sualeh's X: https://x.com/sualehasif996 Sualeh's Website: https://sualehasif.me/ SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Encord: AI tooling for annotation & data management. Go to https://encord.com/lex MasterClass: Online classes from world-class experts. Go to https://masterclass.com/lexpod Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex NetSuite: Business management software. Go to http://netsuite.com/lex AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (09:25) - Code editor basics (11:35) - GitHub Copilot (18:53) - Cursor (25:20) - Cursor Tab (31:35) - Code diff (39:46) - ML details (45:20) - GPT vs Claude (51:54) - Prompt engineering (59:20) - AI agents (1:13:18) - Running code in background (1:17:57) - Debugging (1:23:25) - Dangerous code (1:34:35) - Branching file systems (1:37:47) - Scaling challenges (1:51:58) - Context (1:57:05) - OpenAI o1 (2:08:27) - Synthetic data (2:12:14) - RLHF vs RLAIF (2:14:01) - Fields Medal for AI (2:16:43) - Scaling laws (2:25:32) - The future of programming PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips

This back to school season, we're bringing back some of our favorite Womanica episodes you might have missed. Today's Womanican is Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017). She was an optimist and an innovator, contributing new points of view and new teachings to the fields of dynamics and geometry. She is the only woman to have won the coveted Fields Medal. This month, we're heading back to school – and we're taking you along with us! For all of September, we'll be bringing back some of our favorite Womanica episodes you might have missed. You'll hear me – and some talented guest hosts – share both iconic and under-appreciated stories. But there's a twist... each week is dedicated to a different school subject. This week: Women you should be learning about in literature classes! History classes can get a bad rap, and sometimes for good reason. When we were students, we couldn't help wondering... where were all the ladies at? Why were so many incredible stories missing from the typical curriculum? Enter, Womanica. On this Wonder Media Network podcast we explore the lives of inspiring women in history you may not know about, but definitely should. Every weekday, listeners explore the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of groundbreaking women throughout history who have dramatically shaped the world around us. In each 5 minute episode, we'll dive into the story behind one woman listeners may or may not know–but definitely should. These diverse women from across space and time are grouped into easily accessible and engaging monthly themes like Educators, Villains, Indigenous Storytellers, Activists, and many more. Womanica is hosted by WMN co-founder and award-winning journalist Jenny Kaplan. The bite-sized episodes pack painstakingly researched content into fun, entertaining, and addictive daily adventures. Womanica was created by Liz Kaplan and Jenny Kaplan, executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, and produced by Grace Lynch, Maddy Foley, Brittany Martinez, Edie Allard, Lindsey Kratochwill, Adesuwa Agbonile, Carmen Borca-Carrillo, Taylor Williamson, Sara Schleede, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, Luci Jones, Abbey Delk, Hannah Bottum, Lauren Willams, and Adrien Behn. Special thanks to Shira Atkins. Original theme music composed by Miles Moran. Follow Wonder Media Network: Website Instagram Twitter See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode: 3139 Maryam Mirzakhani: A life in Mathematics.  Today, let's talk about the Iranian-American mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani.

Michael Freedman is a mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1986 for his solution of the 4-dimensional Poincare conjecture. Mike has also received numerous other awards for his scientific contributions including a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Medal of Science. In 1997, Mike joined Microsoft Research and in 2005 became the director of Station Q, Microsoft's quantum computing research lab. As of 2023, Mike is a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Mathematics and Scientific Applications at Harvard University. Patreon (bonus materials + video chat): https://www.patreon.com/timothynguyen In this wide-ranging conversation, we give a panoramic view of Mike's extensive body of work over the span of his career. It is divided into three parts: early, middle, and present day, which respectively include his work on the 4-dimensional Poincare conjecture, his transition to topological physics, and finally his recent work in applying ideas from mathematics and philosophy to social economics. Our conversation is a blend of both the nitty-gritty details and the anecdotal story-telling that can only be obtained from a living legend. I. Introduction 00:00 : Preview 01:34 : Fields Medalist working in industry 03:24 : Academia vs industry 04:59 : Mathematics and art 06:33 : Technical overview II. Early Mike: The Poincare Conjecture (PC) 08:14 : Introduction, statement, and history 14:30 : Three categories for PC (topological, smooth, PL) 17:09 : Smale and PC for d at least 5 17:59 : Homotopy equivalence vs homeomorphism 22:08 : Joke 23:24 : Morse flow 33:21 : Whitney Disk 41:47 : Casson handles 50:24 : Manifold factors and the Whitehead continuum 1:00:39 : Donaldson's results in the smooth category 1:04:54 : (Not) writing up full details of the proof then and now 1:08:56 : Why Perelman succeeded II. Mid Mike: Topological Quantum Field Theory (TQFT) and Quantum Computing (QC) 1:10:54: Introduction 1:11:42: Cliff Taubes, Raoul Bott, Ed Witten 1:12:40 : Computational complexity, Church-Turing, and Mike's motivations 1:24:01 : Why Mike left academia, Microsoft's offer, and Station Q 1:29:23 : Topological quantum field theory (according to Atiyah) 1:34:29 : Anyons and a theorem on Chern-Simons theories 1:38:57 : Relation to QC 1:46:08 : Universal TQFT 1:55:57 : Witten: Donalson theory cannot be a unitary TQFT 2:01:22 : Unitarity is possible in dimension 3 2:05:12 : Relations to a theory of everything? 2:07:21 : Where topological QC is now III. Present Mike: Social Economics 2:11:08 : Introduction 2:14:02 : Lionel Penrose and voting schemes 2:21:01 : Radical markets (pun intended) 2:25:45 : Quadratic finance/funding 2:30:51 : Kant's categorical imperative and a paper of Vitalik Buterin, Zoe Hitzig, Glen Weyl 2:36:54 : Gauge equivariance 2:38:32 : Bertrand Russell: philosophers and differential equations IV: Outro 2:46:20 : Final thoughts on math, science, philosophy 2:51:22 : Career advice   Some Further Reading: Mike's Harvard lecture on PC4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSF0i6BO1Ig Behrens et al. The Disc Embedding Theorem. M. Freedman. Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Weyl. arxiv:2206.14711   Twitter: @iamtimnguyen   Webpage: http://www.timothynguyen.org

We're very excited to be going to this year's European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which will take place in Seville, Spain, in July! We noticed that mathematicians who win one of the prizes awarded at the ECM by the European Mathematical Society quite often go on to win a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics. So to celebrate the run-up to the ECM we've launched Euromaths, a miniseries of podcasts revisiting interviews with Fields Medallists who previously won an EMS prize. This week we hear from Maryna Viazovska who won a Fields Medal in 2022 and an EMS prize in 2020, talking about the theory of optimal transport and how it applies to a wide range of things, from crystals to clouds. You can read about Maryna's work in this article. To listen to previous episodes of Euromaths click here. This content was originally produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.

We're very excited to be going to this year's European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which will take place in Seville, Spain, in July! We noticed that mathematicians who win one of the prizes awarded at the ECM by the European Mathematical Society quite often go on to win a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics. So to celebrate the run-up to the ECM we've launched Euromaths, a miniseries of podcasts revisiting interviews with Fields Medallists who previously won an EMS prize. This week we hear from Artur Avila who won a Fields Medal in 2014 and an EMS prize in 2012, talking about the theory of optimal transport and how it applies to a wide range of things, from crystals to clouds. You can read about Artur's work in this article. To listen to previous episodes of Euromaths click here. This content was originally produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.

We're very excited to be going to this year's European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which will take place in Seville, Spain, in July! We noticed that mathematicians who win one the prizes awarded at the ECM by the European Mathematical Society quite often go on to win a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics. So to celebrate the run-up to the ECM we've launched Euromaths, a miniseries of podcasts revisiting interviews with Fields Medallists who previously won an EMS prize. This week we hear from Alessio Figalli who won a Fields Medal in 2018 and an EMS prize in 2012, talking about the theory of optimal transport and how it applies to a wide range of things, from crystals to clouds. You can read about Alessio's work in this article. To listen to previous episodes of Euromaths click here. This content was originally produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.

We're very excited to be going to this year's European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which will take place in Seville, Spain, in July! And we noticed that mathematicians who win one the prizes awarded at the ECM by the European Mathematical Society quite often go on to win a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics. So to celebrate the run-up to the ECM we've launched Euromaths, a miniseries of podcasts revisiting interviews with Fields Medallists who previously won an EMS prize. This week we hear from James Maynard who won a Fields Medal in 2022 and an EMS prize in 2016, talking about is work on the fabled twin prime conjecture. You can read about James's work in this short introduction and this in-depth article. Click here to listen to last week's episode of Euromaths featuring Fields Medallist Hugo Duminil-Copin. This content was originally produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.

We're very excited to be going to this year's European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which will take place in Seville, Spain, in July! One of the interesting things that happens at an ECM is that the European Mathematical Society (EMS) awards ten prizes to mathematicians who are under the age of 35 at the start of the year the prizes are awarded. When looking through previous winners we noticed that quite a few winners of EMS prizes later go on to win a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics, awarded every four years at the International Congress of mathematicians. To celebrate the run-up to this year's ECM, we launch our Euromaths miniseries of podcasts, which revisits interviews with Fields Medallists from years past, who previously also won an EMS prize. We start the series by revisiting our interview with Hugo Duminil-Copin in 2022, when won a Fields Medal for his work transforming the mathematical theory of phase transitions in statistical physics. Hugo first won an EMS prize in 2016. We hope you enjoy the interview! Hugo Duminil-Copin (Photo Matteo Fieni)   You can read about Hugo's work in this short introduction and this in-depth article. This content was originally produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.

Richard Borcherds is a mathematician and professor at University of California Berkeley known for his work on lattices, group theory, and infinite-dimensional algebras. His numerous accolades include being awarded the Fields Medal in 1998 and being elected a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the National Academy of Sciences. Patreon (bonus materials + video chat): https://www.patreon.com/timothynguyen In this episode, Richard and I give an overview of Richard's most famous result: his proof of the Monstrous Moonshine conjecture relating the monster group on the one hand and modular forms on the other. A remarkable feature of the proof is that it involves vertex algebras inspired from elements of string theory. Some familiarity with group theory and representation theory are assumed in our discussion. I. Introduction 00:25: Biography 02:51 : Success in mathematics 04:04 : Monstrous Moonshine overview and John Conway 09:44 : Technical overview II. Group Theory 11:31 : Classification of finite-simple groups + history of the monster group 18:03 : Conway groups + Leech lattice 22:13 : Why was the monster conjectured to exist + more history 28:43 : Centralizers and involutions 32:37: Griess algebra III. Modular Forms 36:42 : Definitions 40:06 : The elliptic modular function 48:58 : Subgroups of SL_2(Z) IV. Monstrous Moonshine Conjecture Statement 57:17: Representations of the monster 59:22 : Hauptmoduls 1:03:50 : Statement of the conjecture 1:07:06 : Atkin-Fong-Smith's first proof 1:09:34 : Frenkel-Lepowski-Meurman's work + significance of Borcherd's proof V. Sketch of Proof 1:14:47: Vertex algebra and monster Lie algebra 1:21:02 : No ghost theorem from string theory 1:25:24 : What's special about dimension 26? 1:28:33 : Monster Lie algebra details 1:32:30 : Dynkin diagrams and Kac-Moody algebras 1:43:21 : Simple roots and an obscure identity 1:45:13: Weyl denominator formula, Vandermonde identity 1:52:14 : Chasing down where modular forms got smuggled in 1:55:03 : Final calculations VI. Epilogue 1:57:53 : Your most proud result? 2:00:47 : Monstrous moonshine for other sporadic groups? 2:02:28 : Connections to other fields. Witten and black holes and mock modular forms.   Further reading: V Tatitschef. A short introduction to Monstrous Moonshine. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.03118.pdf Twitter: @iamtimnguyen Webpage: http://www.timothynguyen.org

We tend to think of mathematics as purely logical, but the teaching of math, its usefulness and its workings are packed with nuance. So what is “good” mathematics? In 2007, the mathematician Terence Tao wrote an essay for the “Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society” that sought to answer this question. Today, as the recipient of a Fields Medal, a Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics and a MacArthur Fellowship, Tao is among the most prolific mathematicians alive. In this episode, he joins Steven Strogatz to revisit the makings of good mathematics.

Scott Aaronson is one of the deepest mathematical intellects I have known since, say Ed Witten—the only physicist to have won the prestigious Fields Medal in Mathematics. While Ed is a string theorist, Scott decided to devote his mathematical efforts to the field of computer science, and as a theoretical computer scientist has played a major role in the development of algorithms that have pushed forward the field of quantum computing, and helped address several thorny issues that hamper our ability to create practical quantum computers. In addition to his research, Scott has, for a number of years, written a wonderful blog about issues in computing, in particular with regard to quantum computing. It is a great place to get educated about many of these issues. Most recently, Scott has spent the last year at OpenAI thinking about the difficult issue of AI safety, and how to ensure that as AI systems improve that they will not have an unduly negative or dangerous impact on human civilization. As I mention in the podcast I am less worried than some people, and I think so is Scott, but nevertheless, some careful thinking in advance can avert a great deal of hand wringing in the future. Scott has some very interesting ideas that are worth exploring, and we began to explore them in this podcast. Our conversation ran the gamut from quantum computing to AI safety and explored some complex ideas in computer science in the process, in particular the notion of computational complexity, which is important in understanding all of these issues. I hope you will find Scott's remarks as illuminating and informative as I did. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Get ready for some conversations about if you like apples.  Join your favourite TransAtlantic podcasting crew: Ian, Liam, Ethan and Georgia (Megan's trying to pick up a retainer in a job interview) as we're headed to MIT in search of a Fields Medal in Good Will Hunting.  We certainly won't be unoriginal in our 188th episode as we discuss: Matt Damon and if he is the greatest actor of our time The various ways you can interpret the title and if the name of the protagonist ruins it Georgia checks in with which scenes made her cry in this film (it's not a short list) Why is Sean Maguire's freak-out so powerful Who did the studio want to play the Will & Chuckie parts instead of Matt & Ben? Who did Matt & Ben see playing the Sean Maguire role when they wrote it? What practical joke did Damon & Affleck play on the studios to see if they wrote the script Who is the unlikeliest hero of ensuring this film got made with Matt & Ben in the lead roles There's another good coda this week Whether or not Good Will Hunting is the Best Film Ever Become a Patron of this podcast and support the BFE at https://www.patreon.com/BFE We are extremely thankful to our following Patrons for their most generous support: Juleen from It Goes Down In The PM Hermes Auslander James DeGuzman Lina Oberholzer Ensign Ian Davies Chris Pedersen  Duane Smith (Duane Smith!) Randal Silva The Yeetmeister Nate The Great Rev Bruce Cheezy (with a fish on a bike) Andy Dickson Holly Callen Richard Ryan Kuketz Dirk Diggler Shai Bergerfroind AJ from Nova Scotia Stew from the Stew World Order podcast Buy some BFE merch at https://my-store-b4e4d4.creator-spring.com/ Massive thanks to Lex Van Den Berghe for the use of 'Mistake' by Luckydog.  Catch more from Lex's new band, The Maids of Honor at https://soundcloud.com/themaidsofhonor Also massive thanks to Moonlight Social for our age game theme song.  You can catch more from them at https://www.moonlightsocialmusic.com/

Oxford mathematician James Maynard explains why he feared accidentally refusing the most famous prize in mathematics. Watch this full interview on YouTube - https://youtu.be/yz-5BY_TTNI Full 2022 Fields Medal Winners - https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/fields-medal/fields-medals-2022 See our Fields Medal Playlist - https://bit.ly/Fields_Playlist More James Maynard videos - https://bit.ly/JamesMaynard James Maynard - https://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/discover/people/professor-james-maynard/ You can support Numberphile on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/numberphile Here are our Patrons - https://www.numberphile.com/patrons

In this episode, our guest is Alessio Figalli, Director of the Institute for Mathematical Research at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Professor Figalli completed his Ph.D. at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in Italy and at the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon in France. He has also worked as a researcher at universities in France, the United States, and Switzerland. His achievements have been recognized with several prizes, including the Fields Medal in 2018 for his contributions to the theory of optimal transport, and the European Mathematical Society Prize in 2012 in recognition of his excellent contributions to mathematics.In a lively conversation with Luigi Ambrosio, a Professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Figalli discusses his early days in mathematics and his unique career path. He also comments on the differences in university systems among countries, how he manages his time with professional, personal, and family duties, the increasing importance of optimal transport in recent years, and his approach to problem-solving in mathematics.Originally aired by the UNITEXT Springer Nature Webinars series, this interview has been specifically adapted for the podcast format.

Isadore Manuel Singer (May 3, 1924 – February 11, 2021) was an American mathematician. He was an Emeritus Institute Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Singer is noted for his work with Michael Atiyah, proving the Atiyah–Singer index theorem in 1962, which paved the way for new interactions between pure mathematics and theoretical physics. In early 1980s, while a professor at Berkeley, Singer co-founded the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) with Shiing-Shen Chern and Calvin Moore. __________________________________________________ Sir Michael Francis Atiyah (22 April 1929 – 11 January 2019) was a British-Lebanese mathematician specializing in geometry. His contributions include the Atiyah–Singer index theorem and co-founding topological K-theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 and the Abel Prize in 2004. Original video ⁠here⁠⁠ Full Wikipedia entry for Isadore Singer ⁠here⁠ | Isadore Singer's books ⁠here Full Wikipedia entry for Michael Atiyah here | Michael Atiyah's books here --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theunadulteratedintellect/support

Oakland 5 Patron Stephen Leckbee hosts this week's great game! Ken and Neal compete against Matt and Jeff. The real running man and Comrade Kirby also enter the fold. Who will take the title in this week's match up? This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. https://www.betterhelp.com/triviality Please complete the Airwave listener survey here:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Airwave Supporters: https://www.trivialitypodcast.com/the-cream-of-the-crop/ Please RATE, REVIEW, and SUBSCRIBE on iTunes or your preferred podcast app! Follow us on social media, and support the show on Patreon for great perks!  Support us Directly: www.Patreon.com/TrivialityPodcast All Social Media: https://linktr.ee/trivialitypodcast Want to hear your trivia question during an episode? Send us question to the email: TrivialityPodcast@Gmail.com with the subject QUESTION 5 and a host's name (Ken, Matt, Neal, or Jeff). We will read one listener submitted question per round. Triviality is an Airwave Media podcast. www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales.trivialitypodcast@gmail.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Triviality is an Airwave Media podcast. [New Episodes Every Tuesday] © Triviality – 2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support me by becoming wiser and more knowledgeable – check out books by or related to these intellectuals for sale on Amazon: Terence Tao - https://amzn.to/4cACjHV Jacob Lurie - https://amzn.to/3U5NIZr Simon Donaldson - https://amzn.to/3x99r9w Maxim Kontsevich - https://amzn.to/3VxbPRL If you purchase a book through this link, I will earn a 4.5% commission and be extremely delighted. But if you just want to read and aren't ready to add a new book to your collection yet, I'd recommend checking out the ⁠⁠⁠Internet Archive⁠⁠⁠, the largest free digital library in the world. If you're really feeling benevolent you can buy me a coffee or donate over at ⁠https://ko-fi.com/theunadulteratedintellect⁠⁠. I would seriously appreciate it! __________________________________________________ Terence Chi-Shen Tao (born 17 July 1975) is an Australian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins chair. His research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing and analytic number theory. Tao was born to ethnic Chinese immigrant parents and raised in Adelaide. Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006 and won the Royal Medal and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014. He is also a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. Tao has been the author or co-author of over three hundred research papers. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians and has been referred to as the "Mozart of mathematics". Jacob Alexander Lurie (born December 7, 1977) is an American mathematician who is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. Lurie is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. Simon Kirwan Donaldson (born 20 August 1957) is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson–Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry. He is currently a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, and a Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London. Maxim Lvovich Kontsevich (born 25 August 1964) is a Russian and French mathematician and mathematical physicist. He is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and a distinguished professor at the University of Miami. He received the Henri Poincaré Prize in 1997, the Fields Medal in 1998, the Crafoord Prize in 2008, the Shaw Prize and Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2012, and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2015. Richard Lawrence Taylor (born 19 May 1962) is a British mathematician working in the field of number theory. He is currently the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Taylor received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics "for numerous breakthrough results in the theory of automorphic forms, including the Taniyama–Weil conjecture, the local Langlands conjecture for general linear groups, and the Sato–Tate conjecture." He also received the 2007 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences for his work on the Langlands program with Robert Langlands. He also served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2012 to 2014. Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner (born 11 November 1961) is a Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, investor, physicist and scientist . He is a cofounder and former chairperson of internet company Mail.Ru Group (now VK) and a founder of investment firm DST Global. Through DST Global, Milner is an investor in Byju's, Facebook, Wish, and many others. In 2012 Milner's personal investments included a stake in 23andMe, Habito, Planet Labs, minority stake in a real estate investments startup, Cadre in 2017. Audio source ⁠here⁠⁠ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theunadulteratedintellect/support

Support me by becoming wiser and more knowledgeable – check out books written by or about Edward Witten, Abdus Salam, Dennis Sciama, and Paolo Budinich for sale on Amazon here-https://amzn.to/3TxGCLH⁠, here-https://amzn.to/4ad6RxR⁠, here-https://amzn.to/3PEdFwm⁠, and here-https://amzn.to/4arhGwJ respectively. If you purchase a book through any of these links, I will earn a 4.5% commission and be extremely delighted. But if you just want to read and aren't ready to add a new book to your collection yet, I'd recommend checking out the ⁠⁠⁠⁠Internet Archive⁠⁠⁠⁠, the largest free digital library in the world. If you're really benevolent you can buy me a coffee or donate over at ⁠⁠https://ko-fi.com/theunadulteratedintellect⁠⁠⁠. I would seriously appreciate it! __________________________________________________ Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American mathematical and theoretical physicist. He is a professor emeritus in the school of natural sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories, and other areas of mathematical physics. Witten's work has also significantly impacted pure mathematics. In 1990, he became the first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union, for his mathematical insights in physics, such as his 1981 proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity, and his interpretation of the Jones invariants of knots as Feynman integrals. He is considered the practical founder of M-theory. Mohammad Abdus Salam (29 January 1926 – 21 November 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory. He was the first Pakistani and the first Muslim from an Islamic country to receive a Nobel Prize in science and the second from an Islamic country to receive any Nobel Prize, after Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Dennis William Siahou Sciama, (18 November 1926 – 18 December 1999) was an English physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. He was the PhD supervisor to many famous physicists and astrophysicists, including John D. Barrow, David Deutsch, George F. R. Ellis, Stephen Hawking, Adrian Melott and Martin Rees, among others; he is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology. Paolo Budinich (28 August 1916 – 14 November 2013) was an Italian theoretical physicist. Born in Lussingrande to a family of sailors, he grew up and studied in Trieste, where the family resided and his father Antonio Budini[1] taught in the local high school, which Paolo attended until 1934. He later began his studies at Università Degli Studi di Pisa graduating from the Scuola Normale Superiore in 1938, with a thesis written under the direction of Leonida Tonelli. Audio Source: here --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theunadulteratedintellect/support

Lactic Acid, dissolving our muscles and our souls from the inside out. Why don't parrots handout the Fields Medal? When endurance sports try to explain thresholds, they don't. Lactate Threshold and FTP are not the same thing. You're training harder then you need to, and we have proof. Your power meter is useless. There's a paradigm shift in her somewhere, if we can find it. Will we explain thresholds any better than anybody else? There's only one way to find out. Stop tipping cows in search of marginal gains and step into the light.

The Fields Medal is the top award in mathematics and for only the second time ever, a woman has won it. In this episode, we explore the problem that Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovksa solved and why it's so important.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joseph Bennish, Prof. Emeritus of CSULB, describes the field of Diophantine approximation, which started in the 19th Century with questions about how well irrational numbers can be approximated by rationals. It took Cantor and Lebesgue to develop new ways to talk about the sizes of infinite sets to give the 20th century new ways to think about it. This led up to the Duffin-Schaeffer conjecture and this year's Fields Medal for James Maynard. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-art-of-mathematics/message

You probably know that when a water bottle in a freezer reaches zero degrees, its volume changes, causing the bottle to explode. If you've studied thermodynamics, you may know that magnets gradually lose their magnetic charge when heated. These are both examples of phase transition, which athough seen in everyday life is very difficult to prove mathematically. Hugo Duminil-Copin won the prestigious Fields Medal in 2022 for his work on the topic. He joined us for Perspective. 

Great insights come from breaking free of your assumptions. Listen to hear how a high school dropout went on to win the Fields Medal. The post 160 – Challenge your assumptions appeared first on Anecdote.

Writing ElsewhereRecently I have written for The Critic about how to find somewhere to live in London, solving the problem of modern architecture, and in praise of stupid politicians. I also produced some epigrams framed as advice for young people.Noah Smith is an economics blogger with his own Substack (highly recommended). We talked about late bloomers, motivation, modelling effects, peer effects, culture, and Anime. I'll leave you to decide what you believe about the disagreement half way through about whether we are morally obliged to work hard and use our abilities. Henry Oliver: Well, thanks for joining me. I appreciate your time and your willingness.Noah Smith: Absolutely.Henry Oliver: What I am interested in, I'm writing about late bloomers, so I'm interested in ideas to do with, your intelligence is flexible, it's not determined at birth, and you have lots of margin to improve yourself. And I saw your tweet, is he called June? Is it Huh, June Huh, the mathematician?Noah Smith: I don't know. I don't know who that is.Henry Oliver: Yeah, he won the Fields Medal, he dropped out of high school.Noah Smith: Oh, right. That's right, that guy.Henry Oliver: He wanted to be a poet and he didn't like maths. And then it was like six years into college, he went to a maths class and he got into it and then he got really obsessed with it and he dropped poetry and he got really... He only ate pizzas, 'cause he was just sitting there doing maths all the time. And then he wins the Fields Medal, so he's like a total late starter, and it defies all the stereotypes that you have to be good at maths when you're young. And he's everything that you're not supposed to be.Noah Smith: Right. Right.Henry Oliver: So what I'm interested in is your views on this whole area. Sorry.Noah Smith: Well, it's hard to say. You can definitely pick out lots of anecdotes like this, of people who come late to a subject and then just go really far in it. And then you're gonna get this infinite debate between people who say, "Well, he always had the talent, he just didn't wanna do it before." And people who say, "Well, you really... You can do anything you set your mind to." And blah, blah, blah. And there's no way you can really prove that. But I think that the better... It's cool to have a guy who dropped out of school to be a poet and then eventually became a Fields Medalist. That's eye-catching and neat, but I think the better examples are the more prosaic examples of people who are just middling students who go on to be math professors. And so for example, I had two classmates.When I was in school, we knew who the very best math people were. I was one of them. And but there were a handful. There were three or four kids each year who were the best people at math and who would go to the top schools and do technical subjects and blah, blah, blah. And one of those did become a math professor, but I think most of them just went to... Eventually became software engineers at Google or whatever, or just blew up their life and became an economics pundit like me. So almost none of them actually went into the field. And then when I look at the couple of people I know from my high school who became math professors, they were both fairly middling in math in high school. They didn't win the competitions. They weren't on the math team.Actually, so when I was in high school, what I liked was not math but physics. That's what I really liked. But I wasn't that interested in math because I felt like it wasn't real, physics felt more real to me. But then when I got to college, I started to really love math proofs, and so I started to like math a lot more in college. The people who ended up becoming math professors, they were on that sort of journey magnified several fold. And so now, they're teaching at some, at a college. And so I guess the point is that...Henry Oliver: What happens to them?Noah Smith: They get interested. Motivation is everything. When we talk about late bloomers, we have to talk about motivation, because kids aren't born motivated. And when kids are young, their parents provide them with motivation. Their parents hug them and tell them they're great, and then insist that in order to keep getting that approval, they've got to ace a bunch of math tests. Or some parents take a more harsh approach where they say, "If you don't ace your math test, I'll beat you with this belt."[laughter]But I think that's kind of going out, that approach, which is definitely what my grandmother had to deal with, with her immigrant parents immigrating from what's now Ukraine. If she didn't get perfect scores on math, they would hit her with a belt.And that is just... That seems very harsh. It is very harsh. It's a world... [laughter] That's the world of the depression and the World Wars, and that old world that was very harsh, and you still get a few immigrant parents who try to take that extremely harsh attack. But I think that in America, we're moving away from that toward something that can be just as emotionally damaging, which is, "You had better get 100 on this math test or I won't love you." And that's the alternative way. But then when people are young, they get all this motivation from their parents, and the people that we call nerds are really just people who are closer to their parents. People who are less close to their parents, we don't call nerds. And no matter how much they are talented at math or good at math...One of my best friends was incredibly smart as a kid. He could ace the SAT as a little kid or whatever and could do a bunch of math stuff. He didn't care at all. He just wanted to play rock music, play rock guitar, and... I don't know, play Dungeons & Dragons, and hook up with girls, and get in fights. And he was very good at all of those things.[laughter]And now he's a physicist in Europe. His parents are both math professors. If there's any natural talent to be had, he obviously had it. And then he just... When he was ready, he just effortlessly went and became a physicist. And so you could argue that there's both talent and motivation here, but the motivation component was key. He had to feel like he no longer felt like... He would go and get in bare-knuckled boxing competitions in Germany or something, which he won. [chuckle] And then... Or just do the craziest combinations of drugs you'd ever not wanna do. And he just did that kind of stuff, and then when he felt like, "Oh, I guess it's time for me to get a job," he just went and did physics. And then he got interested in it, and he got really interested in the physics that he was doing. And it became this... Just like when he was a kid, he used to pour over Dungeons & Dragons manuals, crafting the perfect adventure, he would now just pour over physics, like experiments, and he worked at CERN, and etcetera.And so that's an interesting journey right there. Because motivation changes over life, he was not a nerd as a kid, but he got motivated later in life. And I think that with a lot of nerds, with a lot of the kids that you see who are very close to their parents, and who are motivated by parental involvement, you see burnout, because then those kids are like, "Yeah, I do what my parents want." Blah, blah, blah. And then they get to age 17, 18, and they're like, "Wait a second, why am I not getting laid? Why am I not partying with the other party kids?" And then when they get to college, when they get out of their... Out from under their mother's wing, out to the world where you live in a dorm and you're around all the other young people and no one's really supervising you. I seen... I went to a fancy school and saw this happen again and again and again and again. And so these people just... These people lose motivation and they run off the rails. And they say, "Why did I not get to party?" And often, they regain motivation later in life. The most common pattern is that they party, they figure out how to hook up with people, they find romance, they get married. And then they get their motivation back to be really serious, and then they...So I have a friend who's a mathematician who when he was in college, he was just very down because he had always been so motivated by his parents, and now he was away from them. And now he was like, "Why do I not have a social life?" And we were his friends and always trying to promote him to get a social life. And then he started working out, dating girls, whatever. I went to his wedding, his wedding was a math wedding where a bunch of math people came and made really elaborate esoteric math puns on PowerPoint at his wedding. [laughter] And it was a great wedding.Henry Oliver: That's a good wedding. Yeah.Noah Smith: It was a really good wedding, it was great. And then we all played board games and stuff like that. Now he's a mathematician, but anyway, but the point is that he went through that period where he lost motivation, and some people never get it back. Some people really... And so I think motivation is the key, life motivation. Yeah.Henry Oliver: Right. And then some people talk about... Some people are very fixated on the prefrontal cortex doesn't mature until you're 25, and so you don't get executive making decision abilities. And that's why people in their 20s run around and they don't work hard, and then in your mid-20s, you kind of get your life together. But that seems like a very pat... It's like a Just So story like, “Don't worry when you're 25, it'll just happen and you'll just wake up and your prefrontal cortex will have turned on.” That's a very inadequate explanation. What is motivation? Where can we get it? How can we explain this to people?Noah Smith: I can tell you what I think, and I can pull in various psychology papers to support this thesis. But I can tell you my thesis, that it's all about human approval, it's all about... Motivation is social, there is some intrinsic motivation that you get from nothing, just from curiosity. And we over emphasize this. It's fun to tinker with stuff, and it's fun to play with stuff. There's certainly, like mathematicians out there like Terence Tao, who just from a very early age, were just intrinsically motivated by the fun of tinkering with stuff and have never stopped. That's real, that's a thing that exists. But I think that for most people in most cases, motivation is social. It has to do with the people around you saying attaboy, attagirl, atta non-binary person, [laughter] and patting you on the back and saying... What do you say for atta with a non-binary person? I don't know that. But anyway, so then the point is that people give you congratulations and approval and they say, “You done did good kid.” [chuckle] And that's really what it is, it's... I don't know what the British idioms are here. What do you tell someone you did something good?Henry Oliver: We would just say, “Well done.”Noah Smith: Oh, got that.Henry Oliver: You don't wanna over do it. You say, “Well done.” That's pretty big, right?Noah Smith: Yes, well done. Henry Oliver: If they speak, that's approval. Speaking is approval.[laughter]Noah Smith: Got it, got it. [laughter] That reminds me of a guy, the software engineer in Japan, who was very briefly my roommate for two months. And then we took him to a tattoo piercing bar, which freaked him out so much that he moved out of our apartment. [laughter] He was very... [laughter] Alright, but that's where motivation is, it's social and parental motivation is important, but it doesn't last forever.Henry Oliver: So you're saying it's like status seeking, you want to be seen in a positive way by your peers, you want to have the status of someone who's done whatever these things are, and if we took that away, you would lose interest in the thing itself, the substance.Noah Smith: Well, maybe... So I would be a little more subtle than that. So status, I think, which we pronounce with a short A, sorry. But yeah, status is like...Henry Oliver: No, it's good. It's good.Noah Smith: It's a public thing, it's a public facing thing, like you get the top score in the competition, so your name is up on a board, or you get a medal or something. It's something that everyone... It's something of common knowledge that everyone can see, that everyone else can see, but approval is more general. So that is one sort of approval, yes. But approval can also just be your friend saying, I think you did a good job, and then no one sees. And that's not status, you don't actually get status for having one friend who likes you, and yet that one friend who likes you can often be more important approval. And I think that the most important form of approval for most people is romantic, it's your romantic partner is who gives you the most important approval in your life. That's the person whose approval you seek the most, in fact, achieving romance itself is a form of approval for people, like, “I was good enough that this person liked me and wanted to exclusively dedicate there, whatever to me.” Blah, blah, blah. And so I think that in itself is a powerful form of approval for people who want to... I don't wanna be crude here, but for people who wanna go around and get laid. The getting of laid, it is approval from someone. It's not status necessarily. You can go brag about how much you get laid, but people just don't like you when you do that. Unless they're on a sports team or something. But generally, people don't like that, but you get the approval privately from someone… you know you are attractive. You know you could attract people. And to be honest, I think that's a bigger motivation for a lot of people than the actual enjoyment of sex, is just the knowledge that you're attractive, the... I'm asexual, so I can observe this from an outside vantage point. Yeah, so people get that approval and then romance is that magnifier, because someone approves of you not just to spend a night with you, but to actually dedicate their life to you, or at least some large portion of their life. And so that's an important part of approval. So romance, friends, parents, community. The community approval is status, but it's only one type.Henry Oliver: How far can we take this?Noah Smith: Colleagues….Henry Oliver: But in some ways, this sounds a bit like you're saying people do difficult work for the same reason that the peacock grows a heavy tail, because people will look at that work and go, “I like you. That's a nice tail. Maybe I'll sleep with you.”Noah Smith: [laughter] Well, I don't know about that. I don't think people would...Henry Oliver: Have like...Noah Smith: I don't know about that. But some people are doing that.Henry Oliver: There must be more to it. There must be more to it than, “I want people to like me, so I will study Physics.” Studying Physics is hard. There are other ways to get people to say, “Dude, good job.”Noah Smith: Well, okay, studying Physics isn't always hard.Henry Oliver: No, but you see my point, like you could...Noah Smith: It was a lot easier for me than Computer Science. And then I can't...Henry Oliver: But you could paint the fence and someone would say, “That was really good. Well done.” You don't have to get a... You don't have... People do some impressive things, especially late bloomers. Late bloomers often, it's like, “I haven't done this thing with my life, I'm gonna bloody well go and do it.”Noah Smith: Right. But so it gets pretty subtle because I think that some people have internalized... So here, there is a lot of psych research, actually. My dad's a psychologist, so I learned about a lot of this. But people have internalized motivation that comes from sort of imagining modeling of the people who might approve them. So you think even if your mom is long dead, you might think, “What would... My mom would be so proud that I did this.” Or even if your mom doesn't actually care or even is alive, but just doesn't give a s**t. You could imagine that.And so often, this sort of imagined approval from this ghost of someone hovering over your shoulder is so subtle that you don't even think about it unless you stop to think about it, like, “Why do I think that getting married by 28 is important? Why do I think that?” Someone thinks like, this is a conversation I had with someone the other day, “Why do I think getting married is important?” Their mom never actually called them up and gave them the sort of call, which every female lead gets at the beginning of every rom-com of the mom calling you at your... You wake up in your urban apartment and in your sloppy bed and then your mom calls you and your mom's like, “Why haven't you gotten married and settled down?”Henry Oliver: “Where are my grandchildren?” Yes.Noah Smith: “Where are my grandchildren?” It's like the beginning of every rom-com. I don't know, Bridget Jones or whatever. And so then that scene is just again and again, and so... [laughter] Yeah, so basically, your mom doesn't actually have to call you up. You have an imaginary emulation of your mom in your mind, that may or may not be accurate, that tells you... That calls you up in your mind and tells you need to get married by 28 or whatever, or that you need to succeed in some career. So maybe you choose a career out of interest, or you choose a career out of aptitude or both, but then what drives you to succeed in that career instead of just sitting around and tinkering around. So often...Interestingly, often we think of people who are on the autism spectrum as people who are more intrinsically motivated by curiosity and stuff like that. Those people don't always end up being very high achievers, because I know a guy who's definitely on the autism spectrum who is a professor who just likes to just do his research and never worry about self-promotion or prestige. And so didn't get that prestigious until later in life when people started urging him to become more prestigious and then he started sort of promoting... He's like, “Oh, maybe I should.” And started promoting his stuff, and then got very well known. But for many years, he just wanted to do his own thing in his own lab.And so, intrinsic motivation doesn't always lead to what... To “success.” Because remember, when we're talking about success, there's an automatic selection bias filter there, because we, the public, have decided what is success. So when you're asking what causes success, you're asking what causes people to do things that the public recognizes as success? And so, it's not just public recognition, but the fact that we're filtering by public recognition when we're looking for a thing to explain means that we start out with the kind of thing that could get recognition. You know, we... Like, Fields Medal instead of just, “What if you just did math because you were really into anime and you sat around figuring out all the different ways you could re-watch your favorite show?” Someone did that and he proved...[laughter]He got the core of a very important math result on hyper-permutations from sitting around figuring out how many ways he could re-watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which is a boring cartoon, sorry, [chuckle] that you can re-watch a bunch of different ways? And so, he was figuring out like, “How many ways could I re-watch this?” And so he was posting about it in some forum, and someone relayed it to the sci-fi author, Greg Egan, who also works as a mathematician. And so, Greg Egan came in and partnered with this guy and they published this important paper, but the anime guy just wanted to watch some dumb cartoons. [laughter] That's all he wanted to do and he came up with this result. So...Henry Oliver: What is your best guess for how many people like...Noah Smith: It's just he did it by accident.Henry Oliver: Like how many people are there, like the anime guy, where if we could pair them up with someone or if we could discover them or if we could be like, “Dude, lift your head up and look at the world for 10 minutes, you're actually doing something.” Like, how much talent could we uncover like that? Or are there just not that... Most of them are just watching cartoons, they're not that many of them?Noah Smith: Well, okay, there's not that many of them, but more importantly, if you did discover them, why would they care? How would you get them to care?Henry Oliver: Well, how did Greg Egan do it? I mean, he got this guy to publish a paper.Noah Smith: Well, Greg Egan published the paper.Henry Oliver: Okay.Noah Smith: He's a mathematician who cared. [chuckle] Like, he... He took... This guy would never have published the paper. So, you know, another... The most famous example of this is Grigori Perelman, right? Do you know who that is?Henry Oliver: No.Noah Smith: He's a wacky Russian mathematician who... I hope he's okay now. He's very... Anyway, he came to the United States and was studying, and then while he was here, he figured out how to solve the Poincaré conjecture, which was one of the older, more difficult open problems in mathematics. He figured that out. He wrote it up in a very sloppy way, he just enjoyed it, he wrote it up in a sloppy way and just posted it on the archive. And then he just posted this pre-print and then people are like, “Oh, hey, this guy solved the Poincaré conjecture,” and then some other mathematicians from Princeton went through it and they're like, “Okay, yes, this works.” [chuckle] And so, then... But then they were like, “Okay, publish this paper,” and he was like, “No, I don't wanna publish the paper,” and they were like, “Come on, you're gonna be famous, you're gonna be so important and famous of a mathematician, blah, blah, blah,” and he disliked it so much that he moved away.Moved to St. Petersburg, moved back to Russia to live with his mom, on his mom's pension instead of having a job. He could have gotten a job at any university. And then the Clay Mathematics Institute offered him a million dollar prize for solving this open problem, 'cause they had a million dollar prize for this, he turned the million dollars down, didn't take it. He got a Fields Medal, he refused the Fields Medal.[laughter]Henry Oliver: Oh my God.Noah Smith: He refused... Look up Grigori Perelman, he refused the Fields Medal. This guy's nuts, he just like... He has a beard that looks like a 19th century Russian guy beard, really. And he like... What he likes to do is... His pastimes apparently include breaking into the opera to watch from the janitor seats or whatever, and hopping rooftops...Henry Oliver: Okay.Noah Smith: In St. Petersburg, he lives on his mother's pension. And so this guy solved one of the most important problems in math, obviously has a lot of talent, what is he doing? [laughter] Like, he didn't even care. He was like, “No,” he just... “I quit”, and he's never done any math again, because the social... The stress of getting so much attention kinda broke him. And so, that's... And so the question is...Henry Oliver: But yeah.Noah Smith: Would the anime guy or this guy, who's like anime guy times 20, would [chuckle] they actually want that. When we look at... If you talk to VCs a lot, I think they just generally will tell you that Founder is a personality type, and you're not gonna change people's personality types by discovering hidden talent, they're gonna have the same personality. So you can harvest their ideas, but turning them into the person who wants to be an Elon Musk type...Henry Oliver: Right.Noah Smith: Or a Jeff Bezos type, is just not going to happen. And so I think that we have to understand that there are people whose personality types... So, I think that it's more important to discover the people with the right motivations directing it in the wrong directions, than it is to discover the people with the hidden talent. Somewhere, there is a guy who is extremely good at organizing people and at improving operations and at incorporating new technological ideas, blah, blah, blah, who is using that to sell drugs, and who is basically part of a mafia, drug cartel kind of thing, who is a respected gang leader, and who is using his talents to sell drugs and organize a drug gang, right? And then find that guy and tell that guy, “Why don't you start a tech company instead, it's like a drug gang, but nobody gets shot, hopefully.”[laughter]Unless it's Anduril, in which case somebody gets shot. [laughter] But then like... Yeah, so then nobody... Why don't you start a company instead of a drug gang? And so, there's people who are just... Whose motivations are pointed in the wrong direction. If you want people to apply their motivation to creating value in the corporate world, you should find people who have the motivation to build organizations, to implement new technologies to solve problems, to get money, etcetera. Find those people. Those are the missing entrepreneurs, the people who are leading drug gangs instead of being entrepreneurs.Henry Oliver: How can we change someone's motivation? That seems like the most difficult thing.Noah Smith: Different friends, different romantic partner: that's how you change someone's motivation.Henry Oliver: Right, but anyone who's got a friend who's in a bad friendship group or who knows someone who's made a bad choice of romantic partner or... Like, this is a cliche thing, right? You can't... There's nothing you can do once someone gets into that, like, there's nothing you can do.Noah Smith: Yes, you can, different friends. Go find them, invite them to some hangouts. You don't tell them to stop hanging out with your hoodlum friends or whatever, you don't do that, you don't police who they currently hang out with, you just give them an alternative, you introduce them to some new people and then they can get approval from the new people. And so, I will give you an example.Henry Oliver: Okay.Noah Smith: The example is my brother-in-law, who gave me permission to use this example.[chuckle]Henry Oliver: Okay.Noah Smith: My brother-in-law has never met his father, his mother had him when she was 16, he grew up in a trailer park, very classic. No one in his family had ever been to college. His sister was pregnant at 15, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.Henry Oliver: Yeah. Yeah.Noah Smith: Zero people in his family had ever been to college, but he liked Japanese cartoons, he liked anime, and so he went in the high school anime club where he met my sister. They ended up getting married. She convinced him to go to college. He went to a mediocre college. He's like, “Okay, fine, I'll... My family aren't the college type.” [chuckle] But she convinced him to do that and he was like, “Oh, you know, it was okay, I met some nice people. That was kind of fun.” And then they moved to DC where she's a lawyer. And then she just kept telling him about the work that she did and introducing him to her lawyer friends, you know, and then he met... He started hanging out with all the lawyer friends because his own motivation... Like, his own impulse would just be to like, make friends with a bunch of like, bums he knew from high school who like to play table-top role playing games and watch anime, and yet she's here introducing him to all these lawyers. And he's like, “Well, there's all this cool stuff,” you know? And so he decided to go get a law degree and he got into a top law school. [chuckle] And then he...Henry Oliver: Wow.Noah Smith: Yeah, and so then... Now he just graduated from the top law school and now he's like... He's not a practicing lawyer, he does like, legal consulting work or whatever, but then... But yeah, he graduated from a top law school, and then, no one in his family had ever been to college. They were just hanging out in a trailer park getting pregnant too early. And what happened... No one harshly said, “Don't hang out with the trailer park people, no more of that. Cut off those people.” No one did that. He just met a group of people who inculcated him with this different perspective, you know? He realized he could do different things, he got interested in law, but it wasn't just that... I mean, yes, he got intrinsically motivated, he thought law is cool, right? But also the people around him, his friends who were my sister's friends, were people who did law, and he could get engaged in interesting discussions by talking about legal stuff with them and turned out to be just as naturally smart as any of they were... As any of them were.But then he never would have been discovered by the system had he not met my sister in the Anime Club. So, I guess my real answer to this question of how do we discover the hidden gems of talent is Anime.[chuckle]Henry Oliver: There's a report today in the New York Times of a Raj Chetty study, I think, showing that people of lower socioeconomic status families, the people who move into a higher income bracket, I think tend to have made friends across class divides. So the areas of the country where there are more people making friends across class divides tend to have this... This is exactly what you're describing, that they...Noah Smith: Oh wow, so... Well, I was b**********g based on anecdote, Raj Chetty was doing the systematic study, so that's why Raj Chetty is the greatest.Henry Oliver: He's got a big... Yeah, he's got a big scatter plot that I think suggests what you're saying.Noah Smith: Hold on. So actually, yeah, send me that. I know he's done work on Lost Einstein's modeling effects, neighbourhood effects, things like that. This is a follow-up to that. This is great.Henry Oliver: I believe so.Noah Smith: I love that. Raj Chetty is so good, and anyway...Henry Oliver: Yeah, no, it's very interesting. It's very interesting.Noah Smith: Yeah.Henry Oliver: So you're saying we need to leverage that a lot more, that's the way we match smart people with better motivations, better, better incentives.Noah Smith: Right. Right. Find the people and find something that doesn't require them to immediately jump into Math competition or do a bunch of hard work in the service of something...Henry Oliver: Right.Noah Smith: That they've never been interested in. So that's... You know what, I just invented the Anime theory of motivation. Anime theory of talent discovery. [laughter] How about that?Henry Oliver: So here's my follow-up...Noah Smith: Why Anime? Because it is something that engages your mind a little bit, but it's 99 parts fun, one part thinking about stuff.Henry Oliver: So low barriers to entry.Noah Smith: It's low barrier to entry. That's why a person who is a bum, which is... I use the word bum and it's pejorative, but I think it's absolutely fine to be a bum, if you wanna just sit around and play Dungeons & Dragons, and work in McDonalds your whole life, do that! Fine, I don't need you to work hard for the nation, be a McDonalds Dungeons & Dragons bum, but if you'd also like some... [chuckle] If you'd also like to graduate from a top law school, cool. Okay. So really... So Anime and Dungeons & Dragons, those things are things that... Dungeons & Dragons engages your mind a little more than Anime because you have to calculate a few probabilities and you don't know that's what you're doing, you're like, how likely it is that I'm gonna be able to make this role in Dungeons & Dragons?You're calculating a probability from a uniform distribution, but you don't know that. Also, you just learn a little baby statistics just playing D&D by accident. You learn about fat-tailed versus thin-tailed distributions too, because fat-tailed distributions are the ones that make you die a lot. [chuckle] And so, anyway...Henry Oliver: So we should have Dungeons & Dragons in every school.Noah Smith: We should have Dungeons & Dragons in every school, we should have Anime in every school.Henry Oliver: Okay.Noah Smith: And so... Or the option to do this, and we should have a club where people watch Anime and then write essays about it or something. I don't know, I just made that up, but Dungeons & Dragons should be an extra-curricular activity because it teaches creativity better than anything else. All the Asian countries that are trying to revamp their educational system to teach creativity, should have Dungeons & Dragons classes, and then they're there, that's it, that's all you do. Anyway...Henry Oliver: Okay. I want to follow up on the thing about your brother-in-law.Noah Smith: Yeah. Very cool dude.Henry Oliver: He is a very cool dude, and that's a great story and it's a great outcome, but it's very contingent, because he met your sister, he ended up being a lawyer, if he'd met someone else's sister, he might have done something else.Noah Smith: Correct. He could be an engineer, entrepreneur, who knows.Henry Oliver: Who knows, right? Because smart people can do this whole range of stuff.Noah Smith: Right.Henry Oliver: Is there a problem of like, a lot of people who are smart and who come from a middle class family and they go to university and then they do all become lawyers and consultants and whatevers. And actually, if we're gonna start pulling other people in and re-motivating them, we don't need more lawyers, like, we're fine for consultants, we would prefer you to be engineers and computer scientists and poets and whatever, how does that work?Noah Smith: That's at the policy level. So that's... The government is what does that. And you change the incentives. You can do in a stupid way, like Xi Jinping, where you just basically take people who are doing all the stuff you don't wanna do and then just find them and arrest them. [chuckle] That is stupid and that will fail, because... [chuckle] But instead, we use positive promotion. So, right now we're finding a need to do this with semiconductor engineers...Henry Oliver: Right.Noah Smith: Which China also does, 'cause we're in this race of semiconductors, right? And so China is doing it by basically kicking your ass if you do anything but semiconductors and that's not gonna work. It's gonna work, but not well. But then what we can do is we can promote, we can, of course, subsidize money because people do care about money. Money matters, especially if you have kids. Kids are very expensive. Kids are a huge source of motivation for people to make money.Henry Oliver: Oh, you don't need to tell me.Noah Smith: Oh, you have kids?Henry Oliver: Yeah.Noah Smith: Nice. And so, there is pressure on you to always get some money.Henry Oliver: Yeah. [laughter] Yeah.Noah Smith: Whereas me, there's no pressure on me to get money except to just like, buy my... Like I've bought my rabbits like all the treats that money can buy, and now it's just like, more money just means like line go up for me, right?Henry Oliver: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Noah Smith: But if you have kids, then you need the money. And so, yeah, of course, if you're like super rich, if you're like Elon Musk, then you're back to line go up, because you don't need that money or [chuckle] any of that. You know? You just wanna make the line go up, but then, so... That's government policy. We can promote STEM through stuff in school where we like do... I don't know, MacArthur Genius, blah, blah, blah. I don't even know what that is.Henry Oliver: Yeah, yeah.Noah Smith: And then we can pay money so that Intel will go out and hire a million people and they'll do a job fair and they'll do like, summer internships and they'll be like, “Hey, college kid, how would you like to come do an internship at Intel?” And they're all like, “Oh, sure.” [laughter] And then like, nerd goes and does his internship at Intel and then, “Wow, like that's cool. I'd like to do that after I graduate,” or whatever. Although I guess they mostly hire PhDs. But anyway, you can do that. And so, policy can put their thumb on the scale for whether people become lawyers. In fact, there's been a big sort of crash in the legal field. My brother-in-law went into it, but in fact, the number of people going to law school is like way down.Henry Oliver: Oh, really?Noah Smith: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And the sort of billable hour model collapsed, so basically like, lawyer ran to the end of its... The lawyer boom ran to the end of its life.Henry Oliver: Okay.Noah Smith: There was a big lawyer boom for various reasons. Their underlying drivers were things like the changes in patent law that allow you to patent business process and software drove a need for IP lawyers, which drove up the wages for other lawyers. There was like expanding federal regulation in a number of areas, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My sister's a human rights lawyer. She works for the Equal Opportunity Employer Commission, so like, she's not in that world. But there was just a general expansion, kind of like business school expansion drove the demand for Economics profs and raised salaries even in traditional Econ. departments. You get the supply... Or, I'm sorry, demand affect bleeds through the whole industry. And you had that in law for about, I don't know, like half a century, and then it just ended one day [chuckle] in the 2010s, it ended.And then like... And to be perfectly honest, I think this is one of many causes of increased unrest in the 2010s is the fact that the legal profession became much more closed off as a sort of like a high-earning kind of out for people who study the humanities. I'm gonna write about that soon. How the drying up of opportunities for humanities majors led to a bunch of pissed off humanities majors who instead were like... They're like, "Now I'm a socialist. I'm gonna rebel. Marxism!" And like... Really it's just because no one would let you be like a fancy lawyer that you expected to be, because we need fewer fancy lawyers. So like, demand plays a huge role here and the government can put its thumb on the scale for demand. And finance can too. You know, like VC...When the second tech boom drew... When finance crashed on the East Coast, a second tech boom, like suddenly everybody was giving their money to Andres and Horowitz and whoever or... I don't know, Soft, I think. Tiger Global. These people were just showering money on entrepreneurs, and so all these smart people who used to go into investment banking, trading, hedge funds, whatever, flowed to the west, and they all started starting companies, tech companies. And so, for a few years in the 2010s, the VCs really had their pick of all this talent because of this massive amount of money they were throwing at it. And I think the recent crash is kind of the end of that rainbow. There's still gonna be some of that going on, but I think that the days of easy money are temporarily over.Henry Oliver: One of the questions on policy that I think is relevant here is like... It's kind of about policy, but it starts with, “What is the status of stuff like STEM generally in the culture?” And one of the problems I think we have... We certainly have this problem in Britain, I think you have it in America, is that to be a scientist is just not cool enough relative to like the number of people we need to study like Physics or Maths at A level. But if you look at Eastern Europe... So this is one reason given why fewer women study STEM subjects. And if you look at Eastern Europe, there's a much higher percentage enrollment of women in STEM subjects. And one of the main explanations for this is that under Communism like you had to be a scientist to help the country and this, “Why would you wanna do something else? We need these scientists. Get on with it.” And so this has left them with a culture that says, “Well, of course, it's good to be a scientist. Why shouldn't you be a scientist?” Whereas in the West, it's more like, “Science, that's hard. You're a nerd. It's boring.” So policy... Policy that's not...Noah Smith: Maybe so...Henry Oliver: As far as China has gone, but that worked better than our thing worked. So how can we split the difference on this?Noah Smith: Well, and I think that it's just role modeling effects are important here. With women in science, I think what you're interestingly seeing is that in Bioscience fields, the women are kind of taking over, and that's really interesting. So if you look at... And I don't wanna attribute it to a modeling effect but you can note that, who are the most popular biologists. The most famous popular biologists of the last like decade, that would be Katalin Karikó who invented mRNA vaccines, and Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, who were the discoverers of CRISPR. And so those people have really gotten... And you've got a lot of... And there's a lot of other very prestigious like role models for women in Bioscience right here. And it was just... I don't know if there's any deep reason. People are gonna look for deep reasons why electrical engineering is still like the most male-dominated thing in biosciences, like getting increasingly... Not female-dominated, the top tenured professors because that takes many decades to filter through.Henry Oliver: Yeah, sure.Noah Smith: But in terms of who's going to grad school and who's getting, etcetera, that's... Women are just surging and I predict will eventually take over like they did in psychology. And so when you look at these fields, you ask why women in this one field, people come up with all these ridiculous Ev. Psych. explanations, like, “Women like things that are alive.” I'm like, “Come on.” [laughter] They're like a f*****g bacterium or a piece of RNA versus flow of electrons in a device that's... One's not more alive. You can't pet it. It's not a cute little bunny. That's b******t. It's like... And I know because I spend most of my day petting cute little bunnies. But... [laughter] So, no, what's really happening is that you happen to get some women in the bioscience field first and they provided the modeling effects for other women to look at them and be like, “Oh well, that famous scientist is a woman, I could be a women too. And... “ I can be a woman too? I could be a woman, no, I could be scientist too. That's something else. [laughter] Then I can be a scientist too, and put on a lab coat and be just like this person. And I think that you see another thing in the theoretical fields, you see that Theoretical Physics is still extremely male-dominated, but you see that Math...A lot more women are going into Math, and certain segments of Math are getting a whole lot of women, like certain sub-fields of Math are getting a whole lot of women, and Math majors are now about half women. And so Math, I would argue that the skill set required to Math and versus Theoretical Physics is not so incredibly different. It's a little different, Physics has a little more intuition in some areas, and Math a little more rigor, but it's not so different. And the fact that women are going a lot into one field and not into the other field, don't b******t me with some Ev. Psych. explanation of why women like Math instead of Theoretical Physics. Shut up! To the imaginary Ev. Psych. person who's gonna yell at me on Twitter. No, no, it's not. It's modeling effects. It's founder effects and modeling effects, it's like... You get some... And like TV, I'm sure has to do with this, there's probably some effects of media, like media shows women, some famous woman doing bioscience stuff, but not electrical engineering stuff. I don't know. And there's probably that, I don't know, I can't prove that, I don't have any evidence.Henry Oliver: Do we prioritize too young, getting people to sort themselves and decide what they're gonna do, and therefore cut off like range and sampling? And one of the reasons why being a late bloomer is kind of like a slightly weird thing is because we say to people, “Well, you gotta pick something and you gotta go and do it”, and we don't let them just... We don't encourage this thing where actually you might just bum around for a bit and try different stuff and...Noah Smith: Honestly, no. America is really good about that. Other countries do that, and they're trying to do it less. So for example, the most famous example I know of this is a guy named Kim Ung-yong in South Korea, who was... He had the highest IQ ever measured, blah, blah, blah. And they were like, “Well, you've got to...” I don't know, there was this whole national thing where, “He's this great genius, and we've gotta make him...” And the most genius-y thing they thought they can make him do is go work for NASA. They were like “NASA!” And then he was just like, “You know what? I don't wanna do this, I just wanna be a middle manager at like some company and just have a job and have a life, I don't really wanna do hard intellectual stuff. I have like a 210 IQ or whatever, like off the charts.” That's... 210 means nothing. It means our test isn't good enough to measure how well you do these things. And so then he's just like, “I'm just gonna go do my thing.” And so now he's just like some middle manager somewhere and everyone was, got real upset at him, they were like, “You were supposed to be this ass-kicker”, he's a baby boomer, I think, and he's just like, “Yeah, no. I wanna have a life, I just wanna have some kids.”And the other famous example of this is a guy named William Sidis, who was an American guy who had the other highest IQ ever measured, similar kind of situation, who like everyone in the early 20th century just went crazy over this kid, they're like, “Ah! Smartest kid ever.” Blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, “No, what I wanna be is a Communist.” [chuckle] And so he became like a revolutionary, he just went to protests and stuff like that, and I think ended up getting killed or something. But I actually don't remember what happened to that guy, so don't quote me on that, but William Sidis was this guy's name. He was just the earlier version of Kim Ung-yong. And so now I think if you look at how society treated Kim Ung-yong, pushing him into this thing, versus how it treated Joon Hu, the poet guy, just letting him do something first in Korea, then in America, you see a big evolution, you see this evolution toward letting people discover what they're gonna do. And I think we do let people have time to play around and discover what they wanna do.I think there's more we could do on this front, and I think that... I don't wanna go on a tangent, but I think that the most important thing we could do to provide people with a perspective that we don't currently do is pay Americans, especially, to go on overseas trips when they're young to get some perspective by actually seeing another country, 'cause Americans really get out of their country, especially disadvantaged kids. Imagine you take some disadvantaged kid who's never been more than 20 miles from where he grew up, and suddenly he's doing three months in Vietnam. That'd be pretty cool. That would be a big perspective expander. But, so anyway, I think that would be a big one. But in the old days, how would you... If you just grew up on the farm and never left your hometown, how would you get out, see the world, and meet new kinds of people? Well, the army. It would be the army. What do they say? “Meet fascinating new people from foreign cultures, and shoot them.” [chuckle] “Join the army!” But, I...Henry Oliver: That's kind of what happened to Chris Gardner. Do you know him? The guy... He's a stock broker. He wrote a really good book called The Pursuit of Happyness, that Will Smith turned into a movie.Noah Smith: Oh, I didn't know that.Henry Oliver: He basically had a really bad childhood, lived with a violent step-father, his mother went to jail because of social services problems, and he got out by joining the Navy, and the Navy was the only educational credential he really had. So he's a smart guy, but he didn't have the degree and whatever, and ended up selling medical equipment, and working all the time, and he had... Single father and it was just not working, and he sees a guy with a Ferrari and he's like, “Dude, I need to get me a Ferrari. What do I do?” And got an interview at a stock brokers firm and just... He's like 27, he's African American, he has no degree, he's none of the things that the 1980s stockbrokers firms are looking for.Noah Smith: That were looking for, right.Henry Oliver: Right. But he's been in the Navy and he's obviously like, he's obviously got some smarts and some perspective, and he just claws his way up and now he owns his own firm and he is a multi-millionaire and he's a big success.Noah Smith: Perspective, so I would say that motivation is really important, and motivation comes from friends, friend groups, and then I would say that... And by the way, the person to really talk about this is... But insufferably in a French way is René Girard. He talks about mimetic desire, and this is just the approval thing I'm talking about, but said in a Frenchier way, and... But it is good, it's good, it's good, you should read it. But, yes, like venture capitalists and people in the tech world love to talk about, "Girardian and blah, blah, blah," and yes, okay. [chuckle] So then... Yeah, so motivation is one, but perspective is the other, perspective is exposing your mind to things that you had never thought of before, because when people optimize, they optimize within the choice set that they're aware of, expand that choice set and they will land on some other optimum, they'll find it...Henry Oliver: Do we have to send people abroad though, could we not just give them more anime, more novels, more movies, like different... 'Cause western movies are kind of bad, but if you gave them...Noah Smith: It's worth trying all these things, I think of anime and Dungeons and Dragons, the fantasy geek, the discovery method, I think of that as more about bringing people together, a social... That's a social thing. So you... The DnD group that you play with will be a bunch of nerds, the anime group that you watch with will be a bunch of nerds, and then it'll be nerds reinforcing nerds, so that's more about... Even if other times you're going out and getting into fights and stealing cars or whatever people do now, I guess you can't steal cars anymore, because of new technology, but you can do other... I don't know. I don't know how people steal things anymore, but then... I don't keep up with these things, I'm old. How do hoodlum kids hoodlum now? But the point is that not that you squash that, you give people like this nerd land that they can then... And there's more things than just anime, and Dungeons and Dragons, there's like a million things like that, but basically get nucleus-es of where nerds will pat you on the back for being nerdy, in someway.Henry Oliver: You've said a couple of times that like you don't... If you wanna work at McDonald's, that's fine, you don't have to work hard for the nation, and, but is that true? If someone has a talent or an aptitude, or someone is smart, is there not some sort of moral obligation to use... Like people used to say, “God gave you, God gave you your head, you should use it. It's wrong not to use it.” Is there not something in that? Otherwise, what would happen to us all?Noah Smith: Look, God also gave us prostates that enlarge at age like 55. So God can just shut up, I don't know. [laughter]Henry Oliver: But you know what I'm saying?Noah Smith: No, no.Henry Oliver: If you're born lucky enough to be good at something, you're somewhat obliged to practice what you're good at.Noah Smith: Not at all.Henry Oliver: Why?Noah Smith: Not at all, because the simplest answer is because if your heart isn't in it, you won't be good at it. That's the simple answer, if your heart isn't in it, then all the talent in the world won't make a damn bit of difference because motivation is the key.Henry Oliver: Are you not worried that the easiness of Netflix and all the other stuff that Netflix is, the whole Netflix culture, means that this has become a very different problem now, because... It's... The motivation is too easily...Noah Smith: Leisure is just so fun, that no one wants to work hard anymore.Henry Oliver: It's so easy... It's more than it's so easy to turn it on and so easy to then just not turn it off. It used to be, if you had to go to the movies, you had to get up, you had to go there, you had to get to yourself home, whatever. Now you get home, you turn on Netflix and the next thing you know, it's bed time and nothing's happened. Right?Noah Smith: I don't know, when I was a kid, all I did was pick up a fantasy book, it's like, it's low tech, but I could just escape all day.Henry Oliver: But that's reading. That's different.Noah Smith: I know. Well, is it? My parents were like, and they said, “Don't play video games, don't watch TV, period.” They'd only allow me to watch Star Trek, and they'd allow me to play video games like just like four hours a week, and this is the same... I think four hours a week is the same amount allowed by Xi Jinping, so you're, basically, right now, you're recapitulating ideas of Xi Jinping, who is cracking down... Is limiting the amount that kids can play video games by federal government law. He is cracking down on fandoms, he's saying you can't be part of these pop fandoms, cracking down on pop idols, cracking down on all these fun things that kids do, so that kids won't have fun things to do, so they will use their abilities for the national geopolitical martial power of the great Chinese nation state. The only reason for us to do the same thing is if it would somehow help us compete with Xi Jinping, because Xi Jinping has a giant army, backed by massive amounts of industry and whatever, and if we are just sitting around watching Netflix while they take over the world, then we're not gonna be able to watch Netflix for long.Henry Oliver: Right, and I'm not saying that so much, I'm asking...Noah Smith: And war is a real motivation, war is a thing.Henry Oliver: We have a lot of people... We have a lot of people who are smart, but maybe less aspirational than they should be given how smart they are, or how capable they are. It's not just smartness. And do we have a cultural problem where we're not encouraged to be as aspirational as we could be, and we're two lax with ourselves about, “Well, you did your seven hours today, don't worry about it,” whereas we should say, “Look, let's all use the talents we've got, because this is... It's immoral to just spend your life on the surface...”Noah Smith: So okay, so about the moral obligation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I just like, That's a matter of opinion, as David Hume would say, This is like a, this is just a matter of opinion. He'd say it better than that. But that's the point of it.Henry Oliver: Yeah, but he would also work quite hard. [chuckle] He didn't waste his talents.Noah Smith: No, but he wanted to, but he would also go and hang out with Andrew Lord Kames, and get drunk as hell and...Henry Oliver: I'm not... No, yeah, I'm not against fun, I'm just, I'm asking if we reached a cultural point where...Noah Smith: We have Netflix. They had alcohol. Right? When you went to Lord Kames's dinners, you would be called either a one-bottle man, or a two-bottle man, which represented the number of bottles of wine you would consume in one dinner.Henry Oliver: Sure.Noah Smith: That's just nuts. In terms of leisure, that's like nuts. That's so much more leisure than we now have. With the time people work hard, the time people really put their nose to the grindstone and work, work, work, work, work, is during rapid industrialization. If you look at any rapidly developing country, rapidly industrializing nation, then you see this pattern of extreme work, and there's a very good reason for that, because of the opportunities, because instead of living in a shack, your kids could... The opportunities are just wide open, and every, it's a scramble. But scrambles don't last forever. We're not gonna be scrambling forever. And if we had only one country in the world, that country would get rich, and then we'd watch Netflix, and then we'd think, “Wait, should we be doing something more important? No, because our ancestors scrambled and struggled, and starved, and blah, blah, blah, so that we could watch Netflix.” If we had only one country in the world and it just got rich, and then we would be like, “Party time! Thanks, Gramps. Thank you for working hard, now we get to party and watch Netflix all the time.”And so that's the one country thing, and so when we talk about economic growth, we're like, “Well, we're rich and happy, why did our grandparents work so hard, except for us to be rich and happy? They... Why did all this stuff... Why did my grandfather walk to work with cardboard in the soles of his shoes that he couldn't afford to replace for like, I don't know, cents per hour? A few cents an hour, whatever he made in the Depression. Why did he do that? Why did my grandparents make sure to always turn off the lights whenever they left every room to save on their electricity bill, and blah, blah, blah? Why did my great-grandfather beat my grandmother with a belt if she didn't get A's on her test, if she didn't perfect her Math tests? Why did he do that? Why do they do all that horrible stuff, except so that I can watch Netflix? They did that for me. They did that, well, I mean they did that for my mom, but they did that for... But they did this for me, and my parents didn't like...Weren't really poor, but they... But we grew up in a one bathroom house with no garage, and we... And my parents worked hard. And why did they do that if not for me? Why... If we just had one country and we didn't have the possibility of war, then I think that that would be the end of it. It would just be like, “Leisure is the goal. Now have fun.” Dr. Seuss in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, wrote the most profound line, the fundamental statement of utilitarianism when he said, “If you have not tried these things, you should. These things are fun, and fun is good.” But then, so that's just utilitarianism. That's just like, “Kick back and enjoy it, man. Consumption, leisure, complementarities,” as we say in economics. But...Henry Oliver: It's difficult to think of any prominent utilitarians who have just kicked back and enjoyed it, though, isn't it?Noah Smith: Well, but they did what they liked. Like Jeremy Bentham, or whoever was like, he was writing stuff, because he liked writing. Like I do my hobby. Actually, I'm a perfect kind of example of this, because now I'm doing my hobby as a job. I wrote, I blogged every day, because I liked it. Before I got paid for it, and then when I needed some extra money, I started charging people for it, and now I can just do that as a job and it works pretty well, as a job. And yeah, and so that's great, right? But Jeremy Bentham could have gone to work at some industrial corporation. He didn't. He did what he wanted.Obviously, in a leisure, in a rich leisure society, you're not gonna be able to motivate people to work as hard. And but I would argue that the only problem with that, that there's no moral problem with that at all. There's no increased wealth is not its own justification. That's just line go up, that's just making a line go up. There's no reason to make that line go up. The reason is the consumption that you get, and this is deeply baked into the philosophy of economics, right? Working your whole life and slaving away your whole life and socking away your pennies, and never consuming anything, and leaving your kids with millions and millions of dollars, as I have a great uncle who did that. He made a bunch of money but never spent a dime. Then died and left it to his kids, who then, of course, wasted it all, at being complete bums. He did this. That's not morality, that is obsessive compulsive order. The only reason you do that, is OCD. OCD with anxiety, that is why you save all your money and make all the money and never spend any of it, you do it because you're anxious, you're...Henry Oliver: And are you saying under the framework you're lining out that those people who spent that inheritance, and just like blow through it, you're saying there's nothing wrong with that, that's fine.Noah Smith: I might think those people are losers, as I do, those people are losers, they could have done a lot more stuff, they...Henry Oliver: But that's what I'm saying, I'm saying people should... We should be careful about this culture that says, “It's okay to kick back,” because actually people could do more stuff. What's the difference... What's the real difference between blowing through an inheritance and working at McDonald's...Noah Smith: But who am I to tell people to do stuff? Who am I? I am just some blogger. Who am I to tell my loser...Henry Oliver: Bloggers are the people who tell other people what to do.Noah Smith: I know, but I'm saying like, my loser cousins are just wasting all their inherited money, and I'm just like, “Okay, you do you. I'm not gonna make you stop that,” like do I want you to build some rich dynasty? No, give your money to someone else, let someone else do something with that money.Henry Oliver: Okay. If there are... No, it's good. If there are people, like there's some way through their life, they're in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, whatever, and they feel like they haven't reached their potential, they haven't done what they want to do, they took the wrong track, like whatever, these things happen.Noah Smith: Right.Henry Oliver: They think they could be a late bloomer, right? What's your best advice for these people?Noah Smith: Meet people, it's all about the people that you meet. Meet people who are the kind of people who do the kind of things you wanna do. Then you will do it too, and if you don't know what you wanna do, which is a lot of people, meet interesting people, meet people who do kind of neat stuff that you don't know what you'd wanna do, meet scientists, meet coders, meet lawyers, like my brother-in-law did, meet people who... Like if you're thinking, you know what, I had fun, I partied, I did a bunch of drugs, I rode a motorcycle around... Yeah, that reminds me of my other friend who he led a dissipate youth, rode with motorcycle gangs, did a bunch of drugs, I don't know, dated European models or something like that, and that was his deal. And then went to Berkeley, naturally smart guy, but then some time in his 20s, he decided, you know what, enough with that, I'm gonna get serious and I'm gonna become a movie director, now he directs documentaries, that's his thing, he's really good at it. Yeah, he just sort of... He gave up drugs, gave up motorcycle whatever-ing.And then now he's just super into it, he's very artistic guy, but, anyway, he does some great movies. He just released a movie about Cuba, that's like a documentary about the opening of Cuba. It is very cool. Which is just called, Cuba, you can look it up.Henry Oliver: Yeah, yeah.Noah Smith: But yeah, anyway, so then he's just another example, he's like, he wanted to party, and then he decided he wanted to do something else, but social connections are the thing. He knew people in the movie world that worked on films, social connections are the key, that friendship connections are the magical elixir through which everything else happens.Henry Oliver: Okay, so people need to sample the world.Noah Smith: Sample the world, get that perspective, get those friend groups.Henry Oliver: Can they do this online, or do they have to go out and actually, and actually find these people in real life?Noah Smith: That's an incredibly important good question that I have no idea about the answer to, and that I would like to know the answer to it, 'Cause that's one I don't have an answer to...Henry Oliver: 'Cause I have known people, like I knew a woman who was a really, or is a really good social media manager, and she came to this career in her own words because she said she had no friends as a child, and she made friends on the internet, and then by doing this, she kind of spiraled up into being a proficient social media curator and whatever else, it's not really my thing, and it's like she developed not only like a life and some friends and whatever, but she developed a career out of this, quite unexpectedly. Like how viable do you... If you wanna be a lawyer or physicist or a poet or a director, is it viable or do you have to be in the room? Do you have to see that person, not only for you to get inspired, but for them to take you seriously.Noah Smith: I don't know.Henry Oliver: Okay. All right.Noah Smith: Yeah, I don't, I honestly don't know the answer to that, and that's an, but that's an important question, the question of how much offline can substitute for online, that's a question for Raj Chetty.Henry Oliver: Great. Noah Smith. Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't?Noah Smith: What's the best Anime on TV right now?Henry Oliver: [laughter] What is the best Anime?Noah Smith: Spy X Family.Henry Oliver: Okay. It's on Netflix?Noah Smith: It's not on Netflix. You have to look somewhere else to... It'll be on Crunchyroll after it's run finishes, but it's still airing, if you didn't wanna settle down and have a family

Episode: 3139 Maryam Mirzakhani: A life in Mathematics.  Today, let's talk about the Iranian-American mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani.

Glad to announce that this Sun Aug 7, 11AM ET, we, Prof. Peter Shor of MIT, recipient of prestigious Nevanlinna prize (Fields Medal of TCS), MacArthur Fellowship, Godel, Dirac Medal and Silver Medal in International Math Olympiad (IMO) (see his wiki page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Shor) and Prof. Mohammad Hajiaghayi of UMD plan to have a YouTube Live @hajiaghayi, and simultaneously Live events on Instagram at @mhajiaghayi, LinkedIn @Mohammad Hajiaghayi, Twitter @MTHajiaghayi, and Facebook Mohammad Hajiaghayi of life, research on Quantum Algorithms and Computation, Shor's Pioneering Quantum Algorithm for Factorization, Quantum Supremacy, Future of Quantum, among other topics. Please join us on our simultaneous Lives at YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook and ask questions you may have.#QuantumComputation#ShorAlgorithm#Factorization#QuantumSupremacy#QuantumFuture#PhDAdvising#MIT#ATT#BellLabs#Nevanlinna#Godel#MacArthur#IMO#MathOlympiad

Glad to announce that this Sun Jul 31, 11AM ET, we, Prof. Madhu Sudan of Harvard and previously of MIT (also previously a scientist at IBM and Microsoft), recipient of prestigious Nevanlinna prize (Fields Medal of TCS), the Infosys Prize in Mathematics and the Hamming Medal (see his wiki page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhu_Sudan and his homepage at https://madhu.seas.harvard.edu/ for other awards and info) and Prof. Mohammad Hajiaghayi of UMD plan to have a YouTube Live @hajiaghayi, and simultaneously Live events on Instagram at @mhajiaghayi, LinkedIn @Mohammad Hajiaghayi, Twitter @MTHajiaghayi, and Facebook Mohammad Hajiaghayi of life, research on Communication, Coding Theory, Hardness of Approximation Algorithms, Randomness, and Property Testing among other topics (in a simple language). Please join us on our simultaneous Lives at YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook and ask questions you may have from him.#CommunicationComplexity#Coding#Hardness#ApproximationAlgorithms#Randomness#PropertyTesting#PhDAdvising#Harvard#MIT#Berkeley#IITD#Nevanlinna#Godel

June Huh has won one of this year's Fields Medals at the International Congress of Mathematicians. The Fields Medal is one of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics. It is awarded every four years "to recognise outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement". Up to four mathematicians up to the age of 40 are awarded a Fields Medal each time. June Huh. Photo: Lance Murphey. In this podcast, which comes to you from the opening days of the ICM 2022 in Helsinki, we talk to Huh about is relatively late start in mathematics, about maths you can "feel and touch", and why maths mirrors who we are as a species. You can read about Huh's work in this short introduction and this in-depth article. See here for all our coverage of the prizes awarded at the ICM 2022. This content was produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.  

Hugo Duminil-Copin has won a 2022 Fields Medal for his work transforming the mathematical theory of phase transitions in statistical physics. Fields Medals count among the highest honours in mathematics and are awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) to researchers up to the age of 40. Hugo Duminil-Copin (Photo Matteo Fieni, used with permission) In this podcast, which comes to you from a beautiful lake on day two of the ICM 2022 in Helsinki, we talk to Duminil-Copin about how his work in statistical physics brings together his two loves – maths and physics. You can read about Duminil-Copin's work in this short introduction and this in-depth article. See here for all our coverage of the prizes awarded at the ICM 2022. This content was produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.  

James Maynard has won a 2022 Fields Medal for "spectacular contributions to number theory". Fields Medals count among the highest honours in mathematics and are awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) to researchers up to the age of 40. James Maynard (Photo by Ryan Cowan, used with permission) In this podcast, which comes to you from the opening day of the ICM 2022 in Helsinki, we talk to Maynard about his love for numbers and groundbreaking progress towards something that has eluded mathematician for a very long time: a proof of the twin prime conjecture. You can read about Maynard's work in this short introduction and this in-depth article. See here for all our coverage of the prizes awarded at the ICM 2022. And to hear from the other Fields Medallists check out existing and upcoming podcast episodes. This content was produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.  

Pada episode ini kami membahas profil peraih Fields Medal tahun ini dan apa saja yang mereka kerjakan. Bahasan utama mulai dari 36:43

West Coast Cookbook & Speakeasy is Now Open! 8am-9am PT/ 11am-Noon ET for our especially special Daily Specials, Smothered Benedict Wednesdays!Starting off in the Bistro Cafe, the deputy press secretary in the Trump White House until resigning shortly after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, has been subpoenaed by the J6 Committee.On the rest of the menu, a Trump-endorsed Ohio GOP House nominee says the three hundred-eighty mass shootings so far this year are a fair trade for his Second Amendment rights; for the second time in the last nine years, the Department of Justice sued Arizona over requiring proof of citizenship to vote; and, West Coast dockworkers are still talking with management after their contract expired.After the break, we move to the Chef's Table where hackers claim to have obtained a trove of data on one billion Chinese from a Shanghai police database; and, Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska was named as one of four recipients of the prestigious Fields Medal, which is often described as the Nobel Prize in mathematics.All that and more, on West Coast Cookbook & Speakeasy with Chef de Cuisine Justice Putnam.Bon Appétit!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~"To those of us who believe that all of life is sacred every crumb of bread and sip of wine is a Eucharist, a remembrance, a call to awareness of holiness right where we are. I want all of the holiness of the Eucharist to spill out beyond church walls, out of the hands of priests and into the regular streets and sidewalks, into the hands of regular, grubby people like you and me, onto our tables, in our kitchens and dining rooms and backyards.” -- Shauna Niequist "Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes"~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Show Notes & Links:https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/6/2108712/-West-Coast-Cookbook-amp-Speakeasy-Daily-Special-Smothered-Benedict-WednesdaysNRR Deep Archive:https://archive.org/details/@netroots_radio

Hello from Helsinki! We are very pleased to be bringing you coverage direct from the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) – one of the highlights of the mathematical calendar. The ICM takes place every four years and it's usually the biggest maths conference of them all, attracting thousands of participants, and also sees the awards of some very prestigious prizes, including the famous Fields Medals. This year's Congress is a little different – it is being held as a fully virtual event with only the prize ceremonies and lectures taking place in-person in Helsinki, Finland on 5 and 6 July. The rest of the schedule fascinating talks from across the spectrum of maths will take place online over the coming week. In this podcast we tell you all the winners of all the prizes being announced today at the ICM and bring you an interview with one of them: Maryna Viazovska, who has won a Fields Medal for a ground-breaking result in the theory of sphere packings. Viazovska is only the second woman to receive a Fields Medal, following on from Maryam Mirzakhani, who won it in 2014. Maryna Viazovska. Photo: Matteo Fieni.   You can find out more about Viazovska's work in our short introduction or our more in-depth article. To read about the work of all the prize winners, see here. And to hear from the other Fields Medallists watch out for upcoming podcast episodes.    

This is a video from a Live on Sun May 22, 11AM ET (7:30PM Tehran Times), we, Prof. Ebad Mahmoodian of Sharif University (see his wiki at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebadollah_S._Mahmoodian and his homepage at http://sina.sharif.edu/~emahmood/ ) and Prof. Mohammad Hajiaghayi of UMD. The Live was in PERSIAN and it was simultaneously an Instagram Live at @mhajiaghayi and YouTube Live @hajiaghayi regarding Education Memories and Experiences in Computer Science and Mathematics (خاطرات و تجربیات آموزشی در ریاضی‌ و علوم کامپیوتر). Prof. Mahmoodian is 2010 Iran's eternal figure and Distinguished Professor of National Elites Foundation in 2011. He has been the president of Iranian Mathematical Society and also received Iranian Mathematical Society, Prize for "Best administrative activities for mathematics", 2018. He has also been among initial organizers of both Informatics Olympiad and Math Olympiad in Iran. He graduated 10 Ph.D. students as well as numerous B.Sc and M.Sc students. Last but not least, he has been the first research advisor of Prof. Maryam Mirzakhani, the only woman ever to win a Fields Medal, and she published her first publication with Dr. Mahmoodian. We talk about a lot Prof. Mirzakhani and the foundation named after her.#Sharif #education #computerscience #CS # Math #k12 #olympiad #FieldsMedal #Mirzakhani #Foundation #research #excercise

Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017) was an optimist and an innovator, contributing new points of view and new teachings to the fields of dynamics and geometry. She is the only woman to have won the coveted Fields Medal.History classes can get a bad rap, and sometimes for good reason. When we were students, we couldn't help wondering... where were all the ladies at? Why were so many incredible stories missing from the typical curriculum? Enter, Womanica. On this Wonder Media Network podcast we explore the lives of inspiring women in history you may not know about, but definitely should.Every weekday, listeners explore the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of groundbreaking women throughout history who have dramatically shaped the world around us. In each 5 minute episode, we'll dive into the story behind one woman listeners may or may not know–but definitely should. These diverse women from across space and time are grouped into easily accessible and engaging monthly themes like Educators, Villains, Indigenous Storytellers, Activists, and many more.  Womanica is hosted by WMN co-founder and award-winning journalist Jenny Kaplan. The bite-sized episodes pack painstakingly researched content into fun, entertaining, and addictive daily adventures. Womanica was created by Liz Kaplan and Jenny Kaplan, executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, and produced by Liz Smith, Grace Lynch, Maddy Foley, Brittany Martinez, Edie Allard, Lindsey Kratochwill, Adesuwa Agbonile, Carmen Borca-Carrillo, Taylor Williamson, and Ale Tejeda. Special thanks to Shira Atkins.Original theme music composed by Miles Moran.We are offering free ad space on Wonder Media Network shows to organizations working towards social justice. For more information, please email Jenny at pod@wondermedianetwork.com.Follow Wonder Media Network:WebsiteInstagramTwitterTo take the Womanica listener survey, please visit: https://wondermedianetwork.com/survey 

Episode: 2179 Science magazine's list of Breakthroughs in 2006.  Today, the big science news of 2006.

Le Olimpiadi della matematica allenano alla ricerca? Le risposte di Terence Tao, Medaglia Fields 2006

Pada episode kali ini kami membahas tentang berbagai penghargaan di bidang matematika, diantaranya Fields Medal, Abel Prize dan Wolf Prize. Bahasan utama mulai dari 26:25. Laurence menjawab pertanyaan-pertanyaan (kuis) Agama Islam mulai dari 19:06.

Leader of Israel's Labor Party Merav Michaeli talks to Christiane Amanpour about how she plans to revive her party and her push for equality. And as the news is dominated by violence against women from London to Istanbul, Turkish novelist and women’s rights activist Elif Shafak criticizes the Turkish government for not supporting women. Then turning to a spot of magic, our Michel Martin speaks to magician and writer Derek DelGaudio about card tricks, his new memoir and his show being taken to the small screen. And finally, the late Maryam Mirzakhani remains the only female winner of the prestigious Fields Medal – the highest honor in mathematics. Her lifelong friend Professor Roya Beheshti shares their shared passion for the subject and Maryam’s lasting impacting on women, both in Iran and around the world.To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/xu15ZbxxnUQ Richard Borcherds is a mathematician known for his work in lattices, group theory, Monstrous Moonshine, and infinite-dimensional algebras, for which he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998.  Richard Borcherd's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIyDqfi_cbkp-RU20aBF-MQ Patreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44 iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Discord Invite Code (as of Mar 04 2021): dmGgQ2dRzS Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything EDITED BY: Antonio Pastore 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:35 How Richard began to become interested in math 00:03:42 Unification in mathematics vs. unification in physics 00:04:38 Daily ritual (or non-ritual) 00:05:19 How much time spent working / studying? 00:07:22 Creativity of the old vs young 00:08:30 Greatest strength is obstinance 00:08:58 Working in isolation, with no collaborators (strength or a weakness?) 00:10:48 Starting mathematics in your 20's, 30's, or 40's 00:11:45 Why must you pick a problem you're interested in? What happens when you don't? 00:12:41 What do you during moments of non-creativity / writer's block? 00:14:40 Dealing with depression as a scientist 00:15:24 On Richard's IQ and nootropics 00:17:02 Richard's creative process 00:18:33 Does he think more pictorially, algebraically, analytically, verbally, etc.? 00:21:11 Not following "deep work" 00:22:00 Reading non-scientific books 00:22:48 Audience Q: What does Richard think of Jordan Peterson? 00:23:31 Audience Q: Have you experience madness, working in math in isolation? 00:23:56 Audience Q: Does he optimize his diet / fast? 00:24:37 How does he learn new mathematics 00:25:42 Solving problems by ignoring them 00:26:51 Audience Q: Advice for someone in their 20's trying to learn math who's not in the field 00:28:03 Why does Richard not like infinity categories? 00:28:44 Does Richard memorize proofs / theorems? 00:29:53 Happiness and meaning in life (math or relationships / marriage / kids?) 00:30:40 What would Richard do without math? 00:31:32 What was it like to win the Fields medal? 00:32:19 What is about math that's meaningful? 00:33:10 Math discovered vs invented 00:34:35 Why is the Monster Group interesting? 00:37:18 "Quantum Field Theory gives me a headache." 00:39:21 Free will? 00:41:17 God, Simulation Hypothesis, and Many Worlds 00:44:53 On the Hard Problem of Consciousness 00:46:28 Favorite mathematicians (Serre, Witten, Tao, Feynman, Weinberg, etc.) 00:48:22 "Ed Witten is terrifying" 00:49:05 The Monster Group and physics 00:52:55 How to contribute to math if you're an outsider (or a neophyte)? 00:55:44 Many Worlds (again) 00:56:15 Audience Q: Is set theory too unwieldy and can we base math off of something different? 01:00:03 Audience Q: Pluralism in the foundations of math or not? 01:02:48 Intuitionist / Finitism / Computational logic? 01:04:29 Audience Q: Can people in their 40's understand advanced math? 01:05:20 Audience Q: Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics 01:06:19 Audience Q: Does it puzzle him that some people don't understand math? 01:08:09 On Ramanujan 01:10:45 Lectures on Number Theory and the difficulty of QFT 01:14:56 On different learning styles, and philosophy of mathematics 01:17:48 Audience Q: How does one know when they're making progress on a solution? 01:19:11 Langland's program 01:21:45 Audience Q: How does one know what to learn when they don't know what they don't know? 01:24:02 Learning math and physics from YouTube 01:29:46 Audience Q: Goldbach's conjecture 01:31:53 On nervousness, performance anxiety, group theory, and chit-chat 01:38:49 "Secret" math techniques 01:39:56 Why "modular forms" are the most mesmeric of all fields of math 01:41:50 Discovered vs. invented (rebuttal from a famous mathematician) 01:47:17 Biology / Psychology / Philosophy is too confounding 01:49:08 On Grothendieck 01:52:09 How do you choose which topic to pursue in math? (and the ABC conjecture) 01:56:25 No Ghost Theorem, and string theory's connection to the Monster * * * Subscribe if you want more conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, God, and the mathematics / physics of each. * * * I'm producing an imminent documentary Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com on the topic of "when does the left go too far?" Visit that site if you'd like to contribute to getting the film distributed (early-2021).

As a little girl, Maryam Mirzakhani was spellbound by stories. She loved reading in Tehran's crowded bookstores, and at home she'd spend hours crafting her own tales on giant rolls of paper.Maryam loved school, especially her classes in reading and writing. But she did not like math. Numbers were nowhere near as interesting as the bold, adventurous characters she found in books. Until Maryam unexpectedly discovered a new genre of storytelling: In geometry, numbers became shapes, each with its own fascinating personality--making every equation a brilliant story waiting to be told .As an adult, Maryam became a professor, inventing new formulas to solve some of math's most complicated puzzles. And she made history by becoming the first woman--and the first Iranian--to win the Fields Medal, mathematics' highest award. Maryam's Magic is the true story of a girl whose creativity and love of stories helped her--and the world--to see math in a new and inspiring way.Book: Written by Megan Reid - Illustrated by Aaliya JaleelISBN: 9780062915962Publisher: HarperCollins PublishersPublication date: 01/19/2021Read By: Erin Yeschin with Special Guest, BryantPURCHASE BOOK HERE -> https://bookshop.org/a/18361/9780062915962Check out our new and improved #OneStopBookShop to find new titles for your family to love based on diversity, inclusion, emotional intelligence and growth mindset, while supporting small business and independent book stores alike! SHOP HERE -> https://bookshop.org/shop/HippocampusClubhouse

Professor Shing-Tung Yau is the first person of Chinese descent who has been awarded the Fields Medal, the top prize in mathematics. In 2009, he returned to China from the United States and founded the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University with an objective to make Tsinghua's academic level in mathematics the best in the world. Now more than a decade has passed, has this world-famous mathematician achieved his objective? Join us to find out.

Dr Terence Tao was interviewed by our Social Media Lead, Preyasi Gaur. Dr Tao is an Australian-American mathematician. He is a Mathematics Professor at UCLA and has worked on a variety of topics in mathematics from probability theory to partial differential equations. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2006 “for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory.” Considered a prodigy, Dr Tao has a lot of feathers in his cap: youngest Mathematics Olympiad Medallist, youngest person to be made professor at UCLA at 24, and one of the youngest and first Australian Fields Medallist. He also maintains a Wordpress Blog: https://terrytao.wordpress.com Video produced & edited by: Harry Cordeaux Leave us a voice message at podcast.ysjournal.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stemz-perspectives/message

Historian of mathematics Michael Barany has a favorite definition, really, and it's about distributions. Also, we talk about the history of the Fields Medal and a well-thought-out pairing.

Get all links mentioned in the episode here: bit.ly/185-geordiewilliamsonSkip through the episode: 00:28 - Welcome to Uncommon01:09 - Guest introduction01:26 - Getting into climbing 05:58 - Growing up differently08:58 - Childhood aspirations & nostalgia11:29 - Childhood principles 12:47 - Creativity in science and maths 16:56 - Why Galois Theory?20:13 - Explaining the breadth of maths23:52 - Proving The Lusztig Conjecture in the shower30:36 - Polya & changing perspectives35:52 - Inspirations40:17 - Tackling maths communication43:09 - Choosing to stay in Australia48:07 - Collaboration in a pandemic52:11 - A mathematician's COVID-19 forecast57:14 - Maths & science: the communication issue01:00:25 - Career highs & lows01:03:41 - Go-to lockdown food01:04:03 - Best purchase under $20001:04:22 - Show recommendation 01:05:23 - Book recommendation

Australian mathematician Nalini Joshi pays a personal tribute to Maryam Mirzakhani. This episode first aired January 21, 2018.

Australian mathematician Nalini Joshi pays a personal tribute to Maryam Mirzakhani. This episode first aired January 21, 2018.

Australian mathematician Nalini Joshi pays a personal tribute to Maryam Mirzakhani. This episode first aired January 21, 2018.

In this electric conversation with Mel, we talk about her lightning fast pivot from closing down her first startup and launching her second. She shares how understanding her customer led to the creation of Mirza, and how she and her co-founder are working to close the gender pay gap through educating women about their bodies and providing essential financial planning tools. Mel offers invaluable tips for navigating the self-doubt, isolation, and external pressures that so many founders face, and her interview will leave you “ah-ha”-ing and “I didn't know that”-ing. Tune in and get ready to rethink the way you look at your body and your finances.You can check out Mirza at: https://www.heymirza.com/And for more great Entreprenora content, please follow us on Instagram at @Entreprenora_official or by signing up to our newsletter at www.entreprenora.co.uk.Let's do great things together.

Ryan Cummins is the Founder of Omaze, a charitable fundraising platform that partners talent and brands to create once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Since launching in 2012, Omaze has launched over 350 campaigns with the world’s biggest influencers, from Bono to Robert Downey Jr., Jennifer Lawrence, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Meryl Streep, President Clinton, Serena Williams, Star Wars and many more. Omaze has raised over $75 million from donors representing 175 countries. In addition to international expansion, Omaze is now convening global foundations and family offices with its celebrity and brand partners to radically amplify the funds and awareness raised through its civic engagement campaigns. Prior to Omaze, Ryan was an executive producer of “Decade of Difference”, the Clinton Foundation’s 10-year anniversary and globally-televised concert event. Prior to that he created Untitled Thinkers, a media property based on a series of intimate conversations filmed with over 120 Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners, MacArthur Geniuses, Pulitzers, Political Dignitaries and Internet Pioneers. Ryan received a BA in economics from Stanford University, and was awarded a fellowship to receive his MBA from UCLA Anderson. To stay connected with your host, follow @thomas.ma7 on Instagram

Crack and share. Until it is done. At least, if there's anything to crack. For the second time Bethesda have managed to release a game with a built-in crack for the Denuvo DRM. What's the story behind it? Incompetence, a rogue agent, or are Bethesda secretly the DRM free heroes we don't deserve? Doom Eternal is the latest casualty of Bethesda's DRM mistakes, and Professor wants to know why.DJ has a list of the newest anime to watch this spring, or autumn if you live in the south. Southern Hemisphere Best Hemisphere. Get the latest ridiculously long anime names here!Just when you thought it was safe to go outside after the fires, COVID-19 swept in. Where did it come from? A lab has dissected the DNA behind this threat and all signs point to COVID-19 not being a Chinese bioweapon. Keep the conspiracies coming, science knows what's what.This week, both nerds played a Doom related game. Professor plays an official series game, but DJ plays a parody.As usual, the Nerds discuss the latest shoutouts and events of interest. RIP Al Worden, Albert Uderzo and Kenny Rogers.We'll be back next week for another episode. We're not going anywhere, and by the looks of things, neither are you.DRM Eternal- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/03/bethesda-apparently-broke-its-own-denuvo-protection-for-doom-eternal/Upcoming Spring Anime Lineup and other anime news-https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-feature/2020/03/20-1/crunchyroll-announces-spring-2020-anime-lineupThe origin story of COVID-19-https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317175442.htm- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9Games PlayedProfessor- Doom 3 : BFG Edition - https://store.steampowered.com/app/208200/Doom_3_BFG_Edition/Rating – 3.5/5DJ– BDSM: Big Drunk Satanic Massacre Demo - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1209860/BDSM_Big_Drunk_Satanic_Massacre_Demo/Rating – 3/5Other topics discussedQueensland borders closed due to Coronavirus- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-26/coronavirus-threat-sparks-calls-to-close-nsw-border-with-qld/12091632MyGov is down due to a “cyber-attack” – Minister- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-23/mygov-website-down-centrelink-massive-queues-coronavirus/12080558Alcohol restrictions are now limited in Western Australia- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-25/coronavirus-covid-19-wa-alcohol-sales-from-bottle-shops-limited/12087974Panic buying in alcohol leads to more drinking- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-26/coronavirus-crisis-has-people-drinking-more-experts-say/12086790Rage 2 drops Denuvo DRM- https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/05/rage-2-drops-denuvo-drm-in-record-time/Rage (a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(video_game)- https://store.steampowered.com/app/9200/RAGE/Rime allegedly runs faster with Denuvo DRM stripped out- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/06/crackers-say-denuvo-drm-caused-slowdown-on-rime/Bleach Anime Returning With Thousand Year Blood War Adaptation- https://www.cbr.com/bleach-anime-return-thousand-year-blood-war/Bleach: The Thousand-Year Blood War, Explained- https://www.cbr.com/bleach-thousand-year-blood-war-explained/Fate/Grand Order Announces New Solomon Anime- https://comicbook.com/anime/2020/03/21/fate-grand-order-final-singularity-solomon-anime-announced/Fate/Grand Order: Camelot Film Confirms Release Date with New Trailer- https://comicbook.com/anime/2020/03/22/fate-grand-order-camelot-film-release-date-trailer/Definition of anime filler- https://www.quora.com/What-does-a-filler-mean-in-animeTite Kubo’s reaction to the new anime announcement- https://comicbook.com/anime/2020/03/22/bleach-anime-comeback-revival-tite-kubo-comment-manga/Fullmetal Alchemist (Japanese anime television series adapted from the mangaof the same name written and illustrated by Hiromu Arakawa. During production, Arakawa requested an original ending that differed from the manga, leading to the series deviating into an original plot halfway through.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullmetal_Alchemist_(TV_series)Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (Japanese anime television series adapted from the Fullmetal Alchemist manga by Hiromu Arakawa. Unlike the previous adaptation, Brotherhood is an almost 1:1 adaptation directly following the original events of the manga.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullmetal_Alchemist:_BrotherhoodPrince Charles tested positive for Coronavirus- https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52033845History of H.I.V/AIDS (AIDS is caused by a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which originated in non-human primates in Central and West Africa. While various sub-groups of the virus acquired human infectivity at different times, the global pandemic had its origins in the emergence of one specific strain – HIV-1 subgroup M – in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the 1920s)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDSPlague Inc.- https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/22-plague-incGetting Over It with Bennett Foddy- https://store.steampowered.com/app/240720/Getting_Over_It_with_Bennett_Foddy/Markiplier plays Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH9w9VlyNO4Cacodemon (Doom 3) (The Cacodemon in Doom 3, as compared to the original monster, is taupe in color, has a wider mouth, and has multiple green eyes, as well as some longer, thin tentacles hanging from the bottom of its body.)- https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Cacodemon/Doom_3Doom 3 (2004 horror first-person shooter video game, developed by id Software and published by Activision.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_3Rugby Football Union (The Rugby Football Union (RFU) is the governing body for rugby union in England. )- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_Football_UnionShout Outs18 March 2020 – Alfred Worden passes away - https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2020/03/20/apollo-15-astronaut-al-worden-has-died/#2315b43836c6Alfred Worden, American astronaut and engineer who was the Command Module Pilot for the Apollo 15 lunar mission in 1971. One of only 24 people to have flown to the Moon, he orbited it 74 times in the Command Module Endeavour. During Apollo 15's return flight to Earth, Worden performed an extravehicular activity to retrieve film cassettes from the exterior of the spacecraft, the Apollo command and service module. While orbiting the Moon alone, farther from other people than anyone has ever been, Worden mapped a quarter of the lunar surface, measured the composition of lunar rocks from space, picked out a landing site for the final Apollo mission, and launched a miniature satellite into lunar orbit to study the Moon’s gravity and magnetic field. It was the first "deep space" EVA in history, at great distance from any planetary body. As of 2020, it remains one of only three such EVAs that have taken place, all during the Apollo program's J-missions. He died from a stroke in Sugar Land, Texas at the age of 8818 March 2020 –The discovery of Asteriornis maastrichtensis, the oldest definitive species of modern bird, which lived at the end of the Mesozoic era.- https://www.newsweek.com/wonderchicken-oldest-known-modern-bird-dinosaur-1493000- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2096-0Researchers have discovered the remains of an extinct animal that may represent the oldest "modern" bird known to science. An international team of palaeontologists identified the near-complete fossil skull of the bird, which they have dated to between 66.8 and 66.7 million years ago. Dubbed Asteriornis maastrichtensis, the extinct bird—affectionately nicknamed the "wonderchicken"—shares some features that can be seen in modern-day ducks and chickens, according to a study published in the journal Nature. The palaeontologists say the find sheds new light on the evolution of modern birds and could help explain why these animals survived the mass-extinction event, while large dinosaurs did not. "We have discovered the oldest modern bird fossil yet identified," Daniel Field, an author of the study from the University of Cambridge in the U.K., told Newsweek. "Asteriornis maastrichtensis is an early fossil bird close to the origin of the group that today includes chicken-like birds and duck-like birds. Asteriornis lived 66.7 million years ago, at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, and provides new insights into what modern birds were like early in their evolutionary history."20 March 2020 – Kenny Rogers passes away - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/21/kenny-rogers-country-music-star-dies-aged-81Kenny Rogers, the American country music star with hits popular across the world, has died. His husky voice and down-home narrative style won him three Grammy awards and put him at the top of the American music business for more than four decades. He sold over 100 million records worldwide during his lifetime, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. His fame and career spanned multiple genres: jazz, folk, pop, rock, and country. He remade his career and was one of the most successful cross-over artists of all time. His signature song, 1978's "The Gambler", was a cross-over hit that won him a Grammy Award in 1980 and was selected in 2018 for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress. The singer, who has been mourned by fans this weekend on social media, once summed up his success with mainstream audiences by explaining that the traditional lyrics to his songs “say what every man wants to say and that every woman wants to hear”. He died from natural causes in Sandy Springs, Georgia at the age of 81.24 March 2020 – Albert Uderzo passes away - https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-52016721Albert Uderzo, one of the two creators of the beloved comic book character Asterix, who captured the spirit of the Gauls of yore and grew a reputation worldwide, has died. He created the famous stories - about the adventures of Gaulish warriors fighting the Roman Empire - with his friend René Goscinny in 1959. As well as illustrating the series, Urderzo took over the writing following Goscinny's death in 1977. The books have sold 370 million copies worldwide, in dozens of languages, and several stories have been turned into cartoons and feature films. The series continues to this day under new ownership, with the most recent book, Asterix and the Chieftain's Daughter, released last October. French Culture Minister Franck Riester said that Uderzo "found the magic potion", referring to his spirit, craftsmanship and long hours of work. He died from a heart attack in Neuilly-sur-Seine at the age of 92.Remembrances23 March 1981 - Beatrice Tinsley - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_TinsleyBeatrice Muriel Hill Tinsley, British-born New Zealand astronomer and cosmologist and professor of astronomy at Yale University, whose research made fundamental contributions to the astronomical understanding of how galaxies evolve, grow and die. Tinsley completed pioneering theoretical studies of how populations of stars age and affect the observable qualities of galaxies. She also collaborated on basic research into models investigating whether the universe is closed or open. Her galaxy models led to the first approximation of what protogalaxies should look like. In 1978, she became the first female professor of astronomy at Yale University. Her last scientific paper, submitted to the Astrophysical Journal ten days before her death, was published posthumously that November, without revision. She died from cancer at the age of 40 in New Haven, Connecticut.23 March 2001 - Margaret Ursula Jones - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Ursula_JonesEnglish archaeologist, best known for directing major excavations at Mucking, Essex. She worked at a number of sites, but is best known for her excavations at Mucking, a major Anglo-Saxon settlement and associated cemetery, with finds ranging from the Stone Age to the Medieval period. The Mucking excavation, which Jones directed from 1965 to 1978, became Britain's largest ever archaeological excavation. It produced an unprecedented volume of material, although some academic archaeologists have criticised the fact that the results did not appear in print until decades after the excavation had ended. Jones' work at Mucking, as well as her role in founding the campaign group Rescue, was influential in the establishment of modern commercial archaeology in Britain. Jones herself also gained a reputation as an eccentric and intimidating figure: "indomitable, formidable, disinclined to suffer fools but very kind to those she considered worth helping, dedicated and inventive". She died at the age of 84.23 March 2007 – Paul Cohen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_CohenAmerican mathematician. He is best known for his proofs that the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice are independent from Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, for which he was awarded a Fields Medal. Cohen is noted for developing a mathematical technique called forcing, which he used to prove that neither the continuum hypothesis (CH) nor the axiom of choice can be proved from the standard Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms (ZF) of set theory. In conjunction with the earlier work of Gödel, this showed that both of these statements are logically independent of the ZF axioms: these statements can be neither proved nor disproved from these axioms. In this sense, the continuum hypothesis is undecidable, and it is the most widely known example of a natural statement that is independent from the standard ZF axioms of set theory. While studying the continuum hypothesis, Cohen is quoted as saying in 1985 that he had "had the feeling that people thought the problem was hopeless, since there was no new way of constructing models of set theory. Indeed, they thought you had to be slightly crazy even to think about the problem." He died from lung disease at the age of 72 in Stanford, California, near Palo Alto.Famous Birthdays23 March 1890 – Cedric Gibbons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedric_GibbonsIrish-American art director and production designer for the film industry. He also made a significant contribution to motion picture theater architecture from the 1930s to 1950s. Gibbons designed the Oscar statuette in 1928, but tasked the sculpting to George Stanley, a Los Angeles artist. Gibbons was one of the original 36 founding members of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and designed the Academy Awards statuette in 1928. A trophy for which he himself would be nominated 39 times, winning 11. The last time for Best Art Direction for Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). Gibbons' set designs, particularly those in such films as Born to Dance (1936) and Rosalie (1937), heavily inspired motion picture theater architecture in the late 1930s through 1950s. In February 2005 Gibbons was inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame. He was born in New York City.23 March 1907 - Daniel Bovet - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_BovetSwiss-born Italian pharmacologist who won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of drugs that block the actions of specific neurotransmitters. He is best known for his discovery in 1937 of antihistamines, which block the neurotransmitter histamine and are used in allergy medication. His other research included work on chemotherapy,sulfa drugs, the sympathetic nervous system, the pharmacology of curare, and other neuropharmacological interests. In 1965, Bovet led a study team which concluded that smoking of tobacco cigarettes increased users' intelligence. He told The New York Times that the object was not to "create geniuses, but only [to] put the less-endowed individual in a position to reach a satisfactory mental and intellectual development". He was born in Fleurier.23 March 1924 - Bette Nesmith Graham - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bette_Nesmith_GrahamAmerican typist, commercial artist, and the inventor of the correction fluid Liquid Paper (not to be confused with competitor White-Out). She was the mother of musician and producer Michael Nesmith of The Monkees. To make extra money, she used her talent painting holiday windows at the bank. She realized as she said, "with lettering, an artist never corrects by erasing, but always paints over the error. So I decided to use what artists use. I put some tempera water-based paint in a bottle and took my watercolor brush to the office. I used to correct my mistakes." She eventually began marketing her typewriter correction fluid as "Mistake Out" in 1956. The name was later changed to Liquid Paper when she began her own company. She was born in Dallas, Texas.25 March 1920 - Patrick George Troughton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_TroughtonEnglish actor. He was classically trained for the stage but became most widely known for his roles in television and film. His work included appearances in several fantasy, science fiction and horror films, but he became best known for his role as the second incarnation of the Doctor in the long-running British science-fiction television series Doctor Who, which he played from 1966 to 1969; he reprised the role in 1973, 1983 and 1985. he was born in Mill Hill, Middlesex.Events of Interest23 March 1801 – Tsar Paul I of Russia is struck with a sword, then strangled, and finally trampled to death inside his bedroom at St. Michael's Castle. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_I_of_Russia#AssassinationOn the night of 23 March 1801, a band of dismissed officers murdered Paul in his bedroom in the newly-built St. Michael's Castle. The assassins included General Bennigsen, a Hanoverian in the Russian service, and General Yashvil, a Georgian. They charged into his bedroom, flushed with drink after dining together, and found Paul hiding behind some drapes in the corner. he conspirators pulled him out, forced him to the table, and tried to compel him to sign his abdication. Paul offered some resistance, and Nikolay Zubov struck him with a sword, after which the assassins strangled and trampled him to death. Paul's successor on the Russian throne, his son, the 23-year-old Alexander, was actually in the palace at the time of the killing. General Nikolay Zubov announced his accession to the heir, accompanied by the admonition, "Time to grow up! Go and rule!" Alexander I did not punish the assassins, and the court physician, James Wylie, declared apoplexy the official cause of death.23 March 1888 – In England, The Football League, the world's oldest professional association football league, meets for the first time. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Football_LeagueThe first meeting was held at Anderton's Hotel in London on 23 March 1888 on the eve of the FA Cup Final. The Football League was formally created and named in Manchester at a further meeting on 17 April at the Royal Hotel. The name "Association Football Union" was proposed by McGregor but this was felt too close to "Rugby Football Union". Instead, "The Football League" was proposed by Major William Sudell, representing Preston, and quickly agreed upon. Each club played the others twice, once at home and once away, and two points were awarded for a win and one for a draw. This points system was not agreed upon until after the season had started; the alternative proposal was one point for a win only. Preston won the first league title without losing a game, and completed the first league–cup double by also taking the FA Cup.23 March 1965 – NASA launches Gemini 3, the United States' first two-man space flight (crew: Gus Grissom and John Young). - https://www.nasa.gov/content/march-23-1965-launch-of-first-crewed-gemini-flightNASA's two-man Gemini spaceflights demonstrated that astronauts could change their capsule's orbit, remain in space for at least two weeks and work outside their spacecraft. They also pioneered rendezvous and docking with other spacecraft. All were essential skills to land on the moon and return safely to Earth. Veteran Mercury astronaut Grissom was selected as command pilot of Gemini III, making him the first person traveling into space twice. Joining Grissom was Young, the first member of the second group of NASA pilots to fly in space. Young would go on to become the first person to make six spaceflights, including commanding Apollo 16 during which he walked on the moon. He also commanded STS-1, the first shuttle mission. Gemini III's primary goal was to test the new, maneuverable spacecraft. In space, the crew members fired thrusters to change the shape of their orbit, shift their orbital plane slightly, and drop to a lower altitude. The revolutionary orbital maneuvering technology paved the way for rendezvous missions later in the Gemini Program and proved it was possible for a lunar module to lift off the moon and dock with the lunar orbiting command module for the trip home to Earth. It also meant spacecraft could be launched to rendezvous and dock with an orbiting space station.Follow us onFacebook- Page - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/- Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/440485136816406/Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamatedSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrSiTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rssInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/nerds_amalgamated/General EnquiriesEmail - Nerds.Amalgamated@gmail.comRate & Review us on Podchaser - https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/nerds-amalgamated-623195

Laura Messick gives a biography on Maryam Mirzakhani, the 21st century Iranian mathematician known for being the first female and first Iranian to be awarded a Fields Medal. Maryam is known for her contributions to string theory, Riemann surfaces, geodesics, her compassion, and her instruction at Stanford University. Dr. Mirzakhani passed away from cancer in 2017 and is survived by her daughter and husband. This podcast is part of Damien Adams' series Women in Math: The Limit Does Not Exist.

The Listener Par 3, Eli's first trip to River Ridge, and the Data Science team are discussed in what could be the most random episode we've ever released.  Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/chasingscratch0 MUSIC CREDITS: “Dangerous” by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-fre…isrc=USUAN1100414 Artist: incompetech.com/ “Chase - Scoring Action” by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-fre…isrc=USUAN1100399 Artist: incompetech.com/ “Decisions” by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-fre…isrc=USUAN1100414 Artist: incompetech.com/ “Agnus Dei X - Bitter Suite” by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: www.amazon.com/Agnus-Dei-X/dp/B00QGC7W3Y Artist: incompetech.com/ "News Theme" by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Artist: http://incompetech.com/ "Extinction Level Event" is by Jingle Punks "Weekend in Tattioine" is by Unicorn Heads "C Major Prelude" is by Bach "Funeral March" is by Chopin "Air to the Throne" is by Doug Maxwell    

Ai nostri microfoni Caucher Birkar, medaglia Fields 2018

Support these videos: http://pgbovine.net/support.htmhttp://pgbovine.net/PG-Podcast-47-Yang-Hong-returns.htmOn Social Capital:- [Status as a Service (StaaS)](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service) by Eugene Wei- [market for lemons tweet](https://twitter.com/wolfejosh/status/980546522919112704)- [Bowling Alone](http://bowlingalone.com/)On Funding Gaps (for non-unicorn businesses, SMBs):- [Indie VC](https://www.indie.vc/)- [Tiny Seed](https://tinyseed.com/)- [Wefunder](https://wefunder.com)- [Alibaba and the Future of Business](https://hbr.org/2018/09/alibaba-and-the-future-of-business) On Funding Gaps (for people and projects):- [CDFIs](https://www.cdfifund.gov/Pages/default.aspx)- [Lambda School](http://lambdaschool.com)- [Recurse Center: $10,000 Fellowships for women working on open source programming projects, research, and art](https://www.recurse.com/blog/145-fellowships-for-women-working-on-open-source-programming-projects-research-and-art)- [The Awesome Foundation](https://www.awesomefoundation.org/en)- [Pioneer: A home for the ambitious outsiders of the world](https://pioneer.app)- [AI Grant](https://aigrant.org)On Renaissance Concepts ("apprenticeship", "patronage", "interdisciplinary salons"):- [Gumroad helps creators do more of what they love](https://gumroad.com/)- [Fellowship.ai](https://fellowship.ai/)- [AI fellowships](https://github.com/dangkhoasdc/awesome-ai-residency)- [Suffering for Your Art? Maybe You Need a Patron](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/fashion/what-is-a-patron.html) (New York Times)- [MIT College of Computing](http://news.mit.edu/2019/founders-new-college-computing-human-element-reif-schwarzman-0301)- [House On Fire: The Fight To Eradicate Smallpox](https://www.amazon.com/House-Fire-Eradicate-Smallpox-California/dp/0520274474) (William Foege helps eradicate smallpox globally through massive coordination of interdisciplinary groups)- [Birth of a Theorem](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NS3174O/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) (Cedric Villani wins the Fields Medal for being interdisciplinary in math x physics)- [TCM wins the Nobel Prize](https://qz.com/india/517202/how-traditional-chinese-medicine-finally-won-its-nobel-prize/) (Youyou Tu wins the Nobel in Medicine by combining traditional chinese medicine and western scientific methodology)Other:- [PG Vlog #173 - Knowledge is Hyperlocal](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-173-knowledge-is-hyperlocal.htm)- [PG Vlog #277 - suburbs beyond high school](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-277-suburbs-beyond-high-school.htm)- [PG Podcast - Episode 36 - Yang Hong on alternative work lifestyles](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Podcast-36-Yang-Hong.htm)Recorded: 2019-03-05

Founding Omaze with his business partner Matt, CEO and co-founder Ryan Cummins is responsible for the online platform known for raising hundreds of millions of dollars for charity by raffling once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Today, Omaze is breaking the traditional model of charity and creating more good than ever before. Chances are you've seen an Omaze video, although you may not have realized what company was behind it. Whether it’s blowing up tanks with Arnold Schwarzenegger, watching the series finale of Breaking Bad with its stars, hanging out with Iron Man, or making a cameo appearance in the new Star Wars film, each campaign is making charity go viral — now responsible for working with 150 charities in 175 countries. In his lifetime, Ryan Cummins has worked with influential change-makers through Live Earth, talking with 120 Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners, MacArthur Genius Grant recipients, and Pulitzer Prize winners. In this conversation, Branden and Ryan dive deep into the origin of Omaze, the intersection of philanthropy and storytelling, and the power of living for something bigger than yourself. soundsgoodpodcast.com/ryancummins

Ryan Cummins has had an amazing path working with influential people through Live Earth, talking with 120 Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners, MacArthur Genius Grant recipients, and Pulitzer Prize winners. His work culminated in him having a new understanding of what he could do to allow us all to have life-changing, amazing, celebrity experiences, while also supporting massive charity efforts. This all gave birth to a company called Omaze.Omaze is an experience-driven fundraising platform that uses the power of storytelling and technology to radically change charitable giving. Through his work at Omaze, Ryan has engaged with top performers, influencers, and franchises including Bono, Robert Downey Jr., Serena Williams, George Clooney, Cristiano Ronaldo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and more.The work Ryan has done with 150 charities in 175 countries, is something that has disrupted the entire philanthropic space. Along with his partner Matt at Omaze, Ryan is breaking the traditional model of charity and creating more good than ever before.

Ryan Cummins has had an amazing path working with influential people through Live Earth, talking with 120 Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners, MacArthur Genius Grant recipients, and Pulitzer Prize winners. His work culminated in him having a new understanding of what he could do to allow us all to have life-changing, amazing, celebrity experiences, while also supporting massive charity efforts. This all gave birth to a company called Omaze.Omaze is an experience-driven fundraising platform that uses the power of storytelling and technology to radically change charitable giving. Through his work at Omaze, Ryan has engaged with top performers, influencers, and franchises including Bono, Robert Downey Jr., Serena Williams, George Clooney, Cristiano Ronaldo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and more.The work Ryan has done with 150 charities in 175 countries, is something that has disrupted the entire philanthropic space. Along with his partner Matt at Omaze, Ryan is breaking the traditional model of charity and creating more good than ever before.

The Fields Medals for 2018 have been announced, and Australian Mathematician, Professor Akshay Venkatesh was announced as one of the four recipients. Mathematics can seem like a group of different and diverse subjects, but Professor Venkatesh's work tied different areas of mathematics together to use one toolkit to solve problems in another area. We dive deep into the complex world of mathematics and look at the Fields Medals 2018.  References: Slezak, M. (2018). This Aussie genius has won the 'Nobel Prize of mathematics'. [online] ABC News. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-02/fields-medal-aussie-genius-akshay-venkatesh-mathematics-prize/10062218 [Accessed 4 Aug. 2018]. Jackson, A. (2018). [online] Mathunion.org. Available at: https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Prizes/Fields/2018/venkatesh-final.pdf [Accessed 4 Aug. 2018].

This week: A new study from the University of Bristol showing the way plants accumulate sugar helps them tell what time it is; scientists have successfully transplanted lab-grown lungs into pigs; and Caucher Birkar was awarded the Fields Medal—and then it was immediately stolen. Links:https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-08/uob-pct073118.phphttps://www.sciencenews.org/article/scientists-transplant-lab-grown-bioengineered-lungs-pigshttps://www.npr.org/2018/08/02/634889308/prestigious-mathematics-medal-stolen-minutes-after-it-was-awarded

Coles and the tale of the single use plastic bag; House prices continue downward; Chinese telco Huwaei overtakes Apple to become second highest seller of phone handsets worldwide; And an Aussie wins the Fields Medal. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Professor Maryam Mirzakhani was the first woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal. She died in 2017.

Australian mathematician Nalini Joshi pays a personal tribute to the life and legacy of Maryam Mirzakhani, the first female winner of the Fields Medal, who died in 2017.

Freelance science writer Michael Price talks with Sarah Crespi about recently revealed deliberations for a coveted mathematics prize: the Fields Medal. Unearthed letters suggest early award committees favored promise and youth over star power. Sarah also interviews Julia Dressel about her Science Advances paper on predicting recidivism—the likelihood that a criminal defendant will commit another crime. It turns out computers aren't better than people at these types of predictions, in fact—both are correct only about 65% of the time.   Jen Golbeck interviews Paul Shapiro about his book, Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, in our monthly books segment.   Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Greg Chiasson/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Freelance science writer Michael Price talks with Sarah Crespi about recently revealed deliberations for a coveted mathematics prize: the Fields Medal. Unearthed letters suggest early award committees favored promise and youth over star power. Sarah also interviews Julia Dressel about her Science Advances paper on predicting recidivism—the likelihood that a criminal defendant will commit another crime. It turns out computers aren’t better than people at these types of predictions, in fact—both are correct only about 65% of the time.   Jen Golbeck interviews Paul Shapiro about his book, Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, in our monthly books segment.   Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Greg Chiasson/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

One of the best kept secrets about mathematicians is that we are often at the tip of the spear in the struggle for social/political causes. We are inspired by the mathematical hell raisers of previous generations, but we are also shaped by their personal tragedies. In 1800 France, Sophie Germain had to publish her works using a male pseudonym. Only recently, Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian born mathematician, became the first female recipient of The Fields Medal, the highest honour in mathematics. In between lies a rich and poignant history of mathematical scientists confronting prejudices, injustices, and social stigmas, sometimes with tragic outcomes. Mathematics comes with its own stories of defeats and victories, not always brought about by its widely publicised intellectual challenges. SPEAKER: Nassif A Ghoussoub, Professor of Mathematics and a Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia. Held as part of the Sydney Ideas program on 31 October 2017: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2017/professor_nassif_ghoussoub.shtml

Since starting university level mathematics in Australia aged nine, Professor Terence 'Terry' Tao has gone on to win the Fields Medal (considered the Nobel Prize for mathematics) and is now regarded by many as the world's greatest living mathematician. Now based at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), we chatted about Terry's childhood experiences at Flinders University, his time as a teenage PhD candidate at Princeton, and the stories behind some of his biggest breakthroughs to date. © Australian Consulate-General Los Angeles, 2017 Music: 'RSPN', (c) Blank & Kytt, March 2012 (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blank__Kytt/Heavy_Crazy_Serious/)

The only woman to win the maths world’s biggest prize has died at the age of 40. As the only female winner of the Fields Medal – the maths equivalent to the Nobel Prize – Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani inspired a generation of female mathematicians. We look at her life and her legacy. The first of two special reports reveals a unique Chinese love story involving one of China's most well-known live streamers, and a fan who watches her on a screen every single day. Live streaming is big business in China, with half of the online Chinese community using livestreaming apps in 2016. And why do some people crave the limelight? Jordan Dunbar undergoes an experiment to find out what the limelight does to our bodies, to get a chemical answer. (Photo: Front pages of Iranian newspapers on 16 July 2017, bearing portraits of the top female mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani. Credit: Atta Kenare/Getty Images)

Matthew Bannister on Chuck Blazer who embezzled millions of dollars from the international football organisation FIFA, then turned whistle blower to incriminate his former colleagues. Maryam Mirzakhani, the Iranian mathematician who became the first woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal. The architect Bryan Avery who designed the drama school RADA and the London Imax cinema. Peter McHugh, the former Fleet Street journalist who helped to turn round the fortunes of TV-am and then became director of programmes at GMTV. And Martin Landau the versatile Hollywood actor who won an Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's film Ed Wood. Producer: Neil George.

Lucy was sick this morning, so Ted Dwyer filled in, and he and Alice talked all about how scientists have managed to store a piece of video within a section of DNA. Sticking with incredible achievements, they also discussed the amazing impact of Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician who passed away a few days ago at just 40 years of age. She was a ground-breaking mathematician who was the first woman to ever win the prestigious Fields Medal - maths’ Nobel Prize equivalent.

Mathematician Paul Erdős had no home, no job, and no hobbies. Instead, for 60 years he wandered the world, staying with each of hundreds of collaborators just long enough to finish a project, and then moving on. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll meet the "magician of Budapest," whose restless brilliance made him the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century. We'll also ponder Japanese cannibalism in World War II and puzzle over a senseless stabbing. Intro: Elbert Hubbard published 12 blank pages in 1905. A duck spent 18 months in the U.S. 2nd Marine Division in 1943. Sources for our feature on Paul Erdős: Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, 1999. The magisterial biography of Erdős. The first chapter is here. Bruce Schechter, My Brain Is Open, 2000. Béla Bollobás, "Paul Erdős (1913-96)," Nature, 383:6601 (Oct. 17, 1996), 584. Melvin Henriksen, "Reminiscences of Paul Erdős," Mathematical Association of America (accessed June 10, 2017). László Babai, Carl Pomerance, and Péter Vértesi, "The Mathematics of Paul Erdős," Notices of the AMS 45:1 (January 1998). László Babai and Joel Spencer, "Paul Erdős (1913–1996)," Notices of the AMS 45:1 (January 1998). Ronald L. Graham, Jaroslav Nesetril, Steve Butler, eds., The Mathematics of Paul Erdős, 2013. Rodrigo De Castro and Jerrold W. Grossman, "Famous Trails to Paul Erdős," Mathematical Intelligencer 21:3 (January 1999), 51–53. Bruce Torrence and Ron Graham, "The 100th Birthday of Paul Erdős/Remembering Erdős," Math Horizons 20:4 (April 2013), 10-12. Krishnaswami Alladi et al., "Reflections on Paul Erdős on His Birth Centenary," Parts I and II, Notices of the American Mathematical Society 62:2 and 62:3 (February and March 2015). Béla Bollobás, "To Prove and Conjecture: Paul Erdős and His Mathematics," American Mathematical Monthly 105:3 (March 1998), 209-237. "Information About Paul Erdős (1913-1996)," Oakland University (accessed June 13, 2017). Calla Cofield, "An Arbitrary Number of Years Since Mathematician Paul Erdős's Birth," Scientific American, March 26, 2013. Béla Bollobás, "Obituary: Paul Erdős," Independent, Oct. 2, 1996. N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős, Kanopy Streaming, 2014. "Paul Erdős," MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive (accessed June 10, 2017). Above: Erdős teaching 10-year-old Terence Tao in 1985. Tao is now recognized as one of the world's finest mathematicians; he received the Fields Medal in 2006. Listener mail: Wikipedia, "Chichijima Incident" (accessed June 23, 2017). Charles Laurence, "George HW Bush Narrowly Escaped Comrades' Fate of Being Killed and Eaten by Japanese Captors," Telegraph, Feb. 6, 2017. James Bradley, Flyboys, 2003. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Waldo van der Waal, who sent this corroborating link (warning -- this spoils the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website or buy merchandise in our store. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at podcast@futilitycloset.com. Thanks for listening!

Help support the show! - www.patreon.com/dailyinternet   #11 - Iranian Maryam Mirzakhani Becomes the first woman in history to win the Fields Medal   #10 - Virginia used to have an official groundhog; it killed itself on Groundhog Day   #9 - NYPD sergeant guilty of raping 13-year-old girl   #8 - Trump's Supreme Court pick founded and led club called 'Fascism Forever' at his elite all-boys Washington prep school   #7 - Schwarzenegger responds to Trump: 'Why don't we switch jobs?'   #6 - Donald Trump: 'I will totally destroy the Johnson amendment' and allow religious groups to endorse political candidates   #5 - Danish green energy giant Dong said on Thursday it was pulling out of coal use   #4 - Donald Trump lifts sanctions on Russia that were imposed by Obama in response to cyber-security concerns   #3 - Donald Trump threatens to withdraw federal funds from Berkeley University after Breitbart editor talk cancelled   #2 - Delaying school start times could help teenagers sleep better giving them a better chance for success.   #1 - Trump told Australian Prime Minister refugee agreement was the 'worst deal ever' and phone conversation was ‘worst call by far' he had had with world leaders.     Thanks Show contact E-mail: feedback.ireadit@gmail.com Twitter: @ireaditcast Facebook: iReadit Phone: (508)-738-2278   Michael Schwahn: @schwahnmichael Nathan Wood: @bimmenstein "Music" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This episode explores the Fields Medal, a prize that has been dubbed the Nobel Prize of mathematics. In particular, Huzefa […]

Hidden truths permeate our world; they're inaccessible to our senses, but math allows us to go beyond our intuition to uncover their mysteries. In this survey of mathematical breakthroughs, Fields Medal winner Cédric Villani speaks to the thrill of discovery and details the sometimes perplexing life of a mathematician. "Beautiful mathematical explanations are not only for our pleasure," he says. "They change our vision of the world."

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) was an English theoretical physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. In 1933, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Sir Michael Atiyah is one of the world's greatest living mathematicians and is well known throughout the mathematical world. He is a recipient of the Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize, as well as the Abel Prize—two of mathematics' highest honors—and is still at the peak of his career. Atiyah received a knighthood in 1983 and the Order of Merit in 1992. He also served as president of the Royal Society from 1990–1995. He joins us on Culture Insight to share his insight into the life and work of British physicist Paul Dirac. He joins us on Culture Insight to share his insight into the life and work of British physicist Paul Dirac.

What goes on inside the mind of a mathematician? Where does inspiration come from? Cedric Villani, winner of the most prestigious prize in mathematics, the Fields Medal, explains the process. Inaugural Titchmarsh Lecture 2015.

What goes on inside the mind of a mathematician? Where does inspiration come from? Cedric Villani, winner of the most prestigious prize in mathematics, the Fields Medal, explains the process. Inaugural Titchmarsh Lecture 2015.

On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe finds out what goes on inside the mind of a mathematician. Cédric Villani explains the obsession and inspiration which led him to being awarded the Fields Medal, 'the mathematicians' Nobel Prize' in 2010. Zia Haider Rahman combines pure maths, investment banking and human rights in his exploration of how abstract theory can impact on real life. Vicky Neale reveals the beauty of prime numbers, while the director Morgan Matthews finds love in his film x+y at the International Mathematics Olympiad. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Cédric Villani won the prestigious Fields Medal for his work in 2010.  He wrote a book about his experience called Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure. It is a book about where ideas come from. There is something spider like about Villani, and I say that not just because of the pins he is famous for always wearing. He knows how to catch ideas, and he wants to teach us how as well. We also talk with Maria Popova about another great Science book: The art of Scientific Investigation. I found this book thanks to the idea catching web that Maria Popova built:   brainpickings.org.    

Update on the strange but brilliant genius who refused the Fields Medal. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com)

WOW!  It has been a while.  Things have been busy here, and the monkeys won't let me podcast until I finish my homework!But we have a schedule again, and since they just went to sleep for the night, I decided to sneak a quick episode in to congratulate Maryam Mirzakhani, winner of this year's Field's Medal (and whose name I may or may not be mispronouncing.) Thank you for your patience and support.  Catch you all again on Monday!

Mathematician Vicky Neale, senior teaching associate in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics in the University of Cambridge and director of studies at Murray Edwards College, is excited. She’s been watching some recent breakthroughs that mathematicians around the world have been making in a huge and open collaboration on an ancient mathematical problem. Neale tells Adam Smith how she is now building the news into her work that aims to improve the ways maths is taught. This podcast is produced and presented by Adam Smith   Adam Smith: I’m listening to a story about a lightbulb moment. That second when a school pupil’s eyebrows soar and her head lifts up: she’s got it. In this case, she’s found a solution to an algebra problem. Vicky Neale ...She suddenly realised that this algebra, which she’d sort of been introduced to at school, that she sort of half understood, that she could see why these manipulations worked. We drew a little picture, we talked about it, but she also suddenly understood how that had helped her to answer a problem. She’d been trying some numerical patterns, which is really important, that’s a lot of what mathematicians do, but we were chatting about how the next stage is to try and come up with a convincing argument. I might use the word ‘proof’, that’s sort of technical jargon, and she said, “But I’m not going to be able to do that ‘cause I can’t check all of these examples.” And I said, “That’s right, you’re going to have to come up with some other kind of justification.” And via this algebra, by a little calculation, she was able to do that and see that it was always going to be true and for her, I could see, “Oh, this is something a bit different from what I’m used to, I’m quite excited by that, I can see how this algebra gives me the capacity to do something much more than I ever thought I was going to be able to do...” AS: I’m Adam Smith. Welcome to Pod Academy. Vicky spends most of her time on a project with researchers and teachers trying to improve the ways mathematics is taught. Running beneath all of this work, like an underground river, is the enterprise of mathematics itself—the questions and the problems are flowing and bouncing off rocks and pushing forwards constantly through university mathematics departments across the world. I met Vicky at the college and started by saying that it seems to me that maths is a bit like Marmite—people either love it or hate it... VN: That’s right and I find that very sad for two reasons. One is that I think very often the people who are saying that who don’t understand why I’m so excited about maths, that’s because they don’t know what it is that I’m excited about. They have this perception that’s very different from my perception. The other is that I think sometimes people have this perception that maths is an ability either you have or you don’t have. It just sort of depends how you were born. And I start from the perspective that everybody is capable of thinking as a mathematician, is everyone going to go and get a Fields Medal in mathematics—the equivalent of a Nobel Prize? No of course not, because not everybody is going to want to spend their time, immerse themselves in it, but I strongly believe that everybody has the capacity to make progress, to understand all sorts of things. And we see in schools, extraordinary examples where successful teachers, successful departments are able to have this impact, of course it's trying to help everybody to have a positive experience so that whatever they go on to do they don't feel that maths is not relevant to them, they don’t feel that they’re unable to engage with it. AS: One of the other funny perceptions that a lot of people have about mathematics, probably myself included, is that it’s static, that there is a set of rules, your teachers try and teach you and that there are just these rules and you’ve just got to learn it,

Since winning the Fields Medal (the closest thing in mathematics to the Nobel Prize) in 2010, Cédric Villani has become a roving ambassador for math and science. He's well-suited to the role: a patient explainer and broad-minded thinker, passionate about education and social engagement, with a seemingly limitless range of interests. We talked about Cédric's emergence as a math whiz, what it's like to spend years exploring a single equation, his fascination with statistical mechanics and entropy, whether math is "real" in some more-than-conceptual sense, what mathematicians do that computers can't, his love of comic books and his signature retro look.

A distinguished group came together in February 2012 in Oxford's Rhodes House to publicly debate 'The Scientific Evolution: Open Science and the Future of Publishing'. The diverse panel included publishers, funders, academics and entrepreneurs: Tim Gowers the Fields Medal winning mathematician, Victor Henning the co-founder and CEO of Mendeley, Robert Kiley from The Welcome Trust, Alison Mitchell from Nature Publishing Group, Cameron Neylon the open science activist and blogger, Lord Robert Winston the advocate of public engagement, and Alicia Wise from the publisher Elsevier. The event was organised by Victoria Watson and Simon Benjamin, and Simon also chaired it.