The 7th Avenue Project

Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg says numbers can provide extraordinary insight into the way the world works, but they're often misused and misunderstood by journalists, pundits, and even scientists.

Banjo phenom Béla Fleck discusses his nerve-racking foray into orchestral composition, the influence of Earl Scruggs and more. Then Dylan Mattingly, lauded by his mentor John Adams as “a hugely talented young composer who writes music of wild imagination and vigorous energy” discusses his emotionally-driven approach to music.

When he was 14, Persi Diaconis ran away from home to become one of the world's great magicians. Now he's a world-class mathematician, and his two professions have more in common than you might think. Persi and I had a very entertaining conversation about his careers in show biz and academe, covering topics such as:

-His friendships with other magicians, including Ricky Jay, Randi and Dai Vernon

-Some surprisingly profound mathematical card tricks

-Why science needs statisticians

-Duping others and being duped himself

-Why he's so secretive about his magic

Andrew Nemr has been tapping practically since he was out of diapers. He's studied and performed with some of the best, including Gregory Hines and Savion Glover. He's also a tap historian and co-founder of the Tap Legacy Foundation. Andrew told me about his life in tap and the tradition he's a part of as he retraced his own steps and those of his predecessors, occasionally letting his feet do the talking.

Anxious apes, depressed dolphins, parrots on prozac: we homo sapiens aren't the only ones with mental health issues, and animal psychiatry (and psychopharmacology) is booming. What does this new, broader understanding of mental illness reveal about our fellow creatures and us? We talk to Laurel Braitman about her new book “Animal Madness.”

Does science have all the answers? The answer is no, and the proof comes from science itself. Noson Yanofsky and I talked about his latest book, The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us. It's a treasury of insoluble problems, undecidable propositions and practical or theoretical barriers to understanding. We discussed Alan Turing's Halting Problem, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Heisenbergian uncertainty, the mathematics of infinity and the simultaneously simple and ridiculously difficult traveling salesman problem. Also quantum computing, the trouble with self-referentiality and the wondrous correspondence between math and the physical world.

Ever wondered what life is like for American basketball pros who leave the states to play overseas? Coleman Collins can tell you. He's played for teams from Germany to Ukraine to Bahrain. He's also a very perceptive writer, reporting on his travels for ESPN's TrueHoop blog. We talked about his cross-cultural experiences, what it's like to be a 6'9" African-American in places where that's a novelty, cutting through stereotypes, basketball culture abroad and more.

Maybe it's not so surprising that someone named after a hurricane and whose Shinnecock Indian grandfather taught her that “it's your sweat up there in the clouds” would have a special feeling for meteorological phenomena and the cycles of nature. But there were miles to go and a lot of serendipity before Camille Seaman found her calling as an acclaimed photographer of ice and storms. She was an at-risk teen when a teacher gave her her first camera. And then there was and impetuous trip to the arctic years later, and the emotional jolt of 9/11, and some mentoring from a National Geographic photographer… We spoke about her sinuous and chancy career path, the lives of icebergs and clouds, the allure of stormchasing, nature photography as portraiture and her next project, an ambitious experiment in urban reclamation. Plus a bonus online segment of photo-geekery: film vs digital, SLRs vs rangefinders, Photoshopping vs au naturel.

Computational Cosmologist Tom Abel of Stanford University is using some badass computers and sophisticated simulations to recreate a mysterious period of cosmic history called the "dark age," when the first stars and galaxies were formed. Tom shares some truly mind-boggling insights into how the universe got made, and made us.

In 2006, Fortune magazine estimated that 40 million Americans worked in cubicles. How did the office cubicle, "reviled by workers, demonized by designers, disowned by its creator" (as Fortune put it), conquer our workplace? And were things so much better before? What forces have shaped the evolution of offices? Nikil Saval pondered all these questions when he was trapped in a cubicle, and finding no comprehensive history, wrote one himself.