The 3 Best The Joy of x Podcast Episodes
1) Charlie Marcus Knows That Quantum Facts Aren’t Complicated
The quantum physicist Charlie Marcus - a principal researcher at Microsoft Quantum Research and a professor at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen - is engaged in one of the most ...Show More
2) Alex Kontorovich on the Absolute Truth of Pure Math
Alex Kontorovich, professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, speaks with host Steven Strogatz about the intellectual satisfactions of spherical geometry and about finding his creative freedom dur...Show More
3) Brian Keating’s Quest for the Origin of the Universe
Imagine knowing that a discovery you've made will bring you a Nobel Prize … only to suddenly learn that it was based on an error. In 2014, Brian Keating, a professor at the Center for Astrophysics and...Show More
4) Eve Marder on the Crucial Resilience of Neurons
Behaviors are sometimes described as being "hardwired," but the work of the celebrated neuroscientist Eve Marder of Brandeis University has explored a crucial difference between neural circuits and en...Show More
5) Amie Wilkinson Sees the Dynamic Chaos in Puff Pastry
Amie Wilkinson of the University of Chicago works in the rarefied area of mathematics called pure dynamics, studying how complex systems transform under the influence of simple rules. In this episode,...Show More
6) Emery Brown and the Truth About Anesthesia
Anesthetics transformed surgical medicine, but even a century and a half after their introduction, much of the science behind them is still not well understood, especially by the public. In this episo...Show More
7) Melanie Mitchell Takes AI Research Back to Its Roots
Melanie Mitchell, a professor of complexity at the Santa Fe Institute and a professor of computer science at Portland State University, acknowledges the powerful accomplishments of "black box" deep le...Show More
8) Trachette Jackson Fights Cancer With Math
The term "mathematical biology" might have been considered an oxymoron more than a few decades ago: How could mathematics enrich the largely descriptive disciplines of biology? But Trachette Jackson o...Show More
9) Rediet Abebe on Using Algorithms for Social Justice
Can algorithms make society more equitable? Rediet Abebe, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that data-driven machine learning can help to optimize the results o...Show More
10) Federico Ardila on Math, Music and the Space of Possibilities
Federico Ardila, born in Colombia and now a professor mathematics at San Francisco State University, is an expert in the field of combinatorics, the study of all the possible configurations of finite ...Show More