Breaking Math Podcast

By Autumn Phaneuf & Noah GiansiracusaScience Natural Sciences Mathematics

Breaking Math Podcast episodes

February 18, 2020 RR30: The Abyss (Part One; Black Holes; Rerun)
Sofia is still recovering from eye surgery, so this will be a rerun. We'll probably be back next week.
The idea of something that is inescapable, at first glance, seems to violate our sense of freedom. This sense of freedom, for many, seems so intrinsic to our way of seeing the universe that it seems as though such an idea would only beget horror in the human mind. And black holes, being objects from which not even light can escape, for many do beget that same existential horror. But these objects are not exotic: they form regularly in our universe, and their role in the intricate web of existence that is our universe is as valid as the laws that result in our own humanity. So what are black holes? How can they have information? And how does this relate to the edge of the universe?
[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]
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56 min
February 11, 2020 RR24: Language and Entropy (Information Theory in Language; Rerun)
Sofia is still recovering from eye surgery, so this will be a rerun.
Information theory was founded in 1948 by Claude Shannon, and is a way of both qualitatively and quantitatively describing the limits and processes involved in communication. Roughly speaking, when two entities communicate, they have a message, a medium, confusion, encoding, and decoding; and when two entities communicate, they transfer information between them. The amount of information that is possible to be transmitted can be increased or decreased by manipulating any of the aforementioned variables. One of the practical, and original, applications of information theory is to models of language. So what is entropy? How can we say language has it? And what structures within language with respect to information theory reveal deep insights about the nature of language itself?
[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]
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· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
48 min
February 03, 2020 P3: Radiativeforcenado (Radiative Forcing)
Learn more about radiative forcing, the environment, and how global temperature changes with atmospheric absorption with this Problem Episode about you walking your (perhaps fictional?) dog around a park. This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.

[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]

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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
40 min
January 20, 2020 46: Earth Irradiated (the Greenhouse Effect)
Since time immemorial, blacksmiths have known that the hotter metal gets, the more it glows: it starts out red, then gets yellower, and then eventually white. In 1900, Max Planck discovered the relationship between an ideal object's radiation of light and its temperature. A hundred and twenty years later, we're using the consequences of this discovery for many things, including (indirectly) LED TVs, but perhaps one of the most dangerously neglected (or at least ignored) applications of this theory is in climate science. So what is the greenhouse effect? How does blackbody radiation help us design factories? And what are the problems with this model?
This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.
[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]

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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
42 min
December 10, 2019 45: Climate Denialism and Cranky Uncles (Interview with John Cook of Skeptical Science)
Climate change is an issue that has become frighteningly more relevant in recent years, and because of special interests, the field has become muddied with climate change deniers who use dishonest tactics to try to get their message across. The website SkepticalScience.com is one line of defense against these messengers, and it was created and maintained by a research assistant professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, and both authored and co-authored two books about climate science with an emphasis on climate change. He also lead-authored a 2013 award-winning paper on the scientific consensus on climate change, and in 2015, he developed an open online course on climate change denial with the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. This person is John Cook.

This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.

[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch; John Cook]

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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
26 min
December 02, 2019 28: Bell's Infamous Theorem (RERUN; Bell's Theorem)
This is an older episode, but while we get our new studio up and running, please enjoy "Bell's Infamous Theorem"

The history of physics as a natural science is filled with examples of when an experiment will demonstrate something or another, but what is often forgotten is the fact that the experiment had to be thought up in the first place by someone who was aware of more than one plausible value for a property of the universe, and realized that there was a way to word a question in such a way that the universe could understand. Such a property was debated during the quantum revolution, and involved Einstein, Polodsky, Rosen, and Schrödinger. The question was 'do particles which are entangled "know" the state of one another from far away, or do they have a sort of "DNA" which infuses them with their properties?' The question was thought for a while to be purely philosophical one until John Stewart Bell found the right way to word a question, and proved it in a laboratory of thought. It was demonstrated to be valid in a laboratory of the universe. So how do particles speak to each other from far away? What do we mean when we say we observe something? And how is a pair of gloves like and unlike a pair of walkie talkies?

This episode is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
36 min
November 03, 2019 44: Vestigial Math (Math That Is Not Used like It Used to Be)
Mathematics, like any intellectual pursuit, is a constantly-evolving field; and, like any evolving field, there are both new beginnings and sudden unexpected twists, and things take on both new forms and new responsibilities. Today on the show, we're going to cover a few mathematical topics whose nature has changed over the centuries. So what does it mean for math to be extinct? How does this happen? And will it continue forever?
This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.
[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]

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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
37 min
October 30, 2019 P2: Walk the Dog (Calculus: Chain Rule)
Learn more about calculus, derivatives, and the chain rule with this Problem Episode about you walking your (perhaps fictional?) dog around a park.

This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more information, visit CreativeCommons.org.
[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]

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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
19 min
October 23, 2019 43: Interview II with Author Ben Orlin (Change is the Only Constant: the Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World)
Ben Orlin has been a guest on the show before. He got famous with a blog called 'Math With Bad Drawings", which is what it says on the tin: he teaches mathematics using his humble drawing skills. His last book was a smorgasbord of different mathematical topics, but he recently came out with a new book 'Change is the Only Constant: the Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World', which focuses more on calculus itself.
This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA license. For more info, visit creativecommons.org
43 min
September 29, 2019 P1: Peano Addition
On this problem episode, join Sofía and guest Diane Baca to learn about what an early attempt to formalize the natural numbers has to say about whether or not m+n equals n+m.

This episode is distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
38 min

About Breaking Math Podcast

From the publisher's feed

Breaking Math is a deep-dive science, technology, engineering, AI, and mathematics podcast that explores the world through the lens of logic, patterns, and critical thinking.…

Hosted by Autumn Phaneuf, an expert in industrial engineering, operations research, and applied mathematics, and Noah Giansiracusa, a mathematician and leading voice in algorithmic literacy and technology ethics, the show is dedicated to uncovering the mathematical structures behind science, technology, and the systems shaping our future.

What began as a conversation about math as a pure and elegant discipline has evolved into a platform for bold, interdisciplinary dialogue. Each episode of Breaking Math takes listeners on an intellectual journey—into the strange beauty of chaos theory, the ethical dilemmas of AI and algorithms, the hidden math of biology and evolution, or the physics governing black holes and the cosmos. Along the way, Autumn and Noah speak with working scientists, researchers, and thinkers across fields: computer scientists, physicists, chemists, engineers, economists, philosophers, and more.

But this isn’t just a podcast about equations. It’s a show about how mathematics shapes the way we think, decide, build, and understand the world. Breaking Math pushes back against the idea that STEM belongs behind a paywall or an academic podium. It’s for the curious, the critical, and the creative—for anyone who believes that ideas should be rigorous, accessible, and infused with wonder.

If you’ve ever wondered:

What’s the math behind machine learning and modern algorithms?
How do we quantify uncertainty in climate and economic models?
Can intelligence or consciousness be meaningfully described in AI?
Why does beauty matter in an equation?

You’re in the right place.

At its heart, Breaking Math is about building bridges—between disciplines, between experts and the public, and between abstract mathematics and the messy, magnificent reality we live in. With humor, clarity, and deep respect for complexity, Autumn and Noah invite you to rethink what math can be—and how it can help us shape a better future.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Website: https://breakingmath.io

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/breakingmathmedia

Email: [email protected]