Jeanne Lazzarini looks for math in the real world and finds the Fibonacci sequence and the closely related Golden Ratio. These appear as we examine plants, bees, rabbits, flowers, fruit, and the human body. These natural patterns and pleasing symmetries find their way into the arts. Does nature understand math better than we do?

Brian Katz, from California State University Long Beach, invites us to explore the various layers of ordinary sounds, informed by a little calculus. The limited frequencies that come out of the wave equation are what separates sounds that communicate (voice, music) from noise. These higher notes are in the sound itself and you can hear them (but alas, not on this compressed podcast audio). Brian has provided links to hear these layers of pitches at theartofmathematicspodcast.com

Jeanne Lazzarini, who has visited us before to talk about tessellations, discusses a new mathematical discovery that even earned a mention on Jimmy Kimmel. It's a shape that can be used to fill the plane with no gaps and no overlaps and, most remarkably, no repeating patterns.

Lawrence Udeigwe, associate professor of mathematics at Manhattan College and an MLK Visiting Associate Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, is both a mathematician and a musician. We discuss his recent opinion piece in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society calling for "A Case for More Engagement" between the two areas, and even get a little "Misty." He's working on music that both jazz and math folks will enjoy. We talk about "hearing" math in jazz and the life of a mathematician among neuroscientists.

Joseph Bennish returns to dig into the math behind the Fourier Analysis we discussed last time. Specifically, it allows us to express any function in terms of sines and cosines. Fourier analysis appears in nature--our eyes and ears do it. It's used to study the distribution of primes, build JPEG files, read the structure of complicated molecules and more.

Joseph Bennish, Professor Emeritus of California State University, Long Beach, joins us for an excursion into physics and some of the mathematics it inspired. Joseph Fourier straddled mathematics and physics. Here we focus on his heat equation, based on partial differential equations. Partial differential equations have broad applications. Fourier developed not only the heat equation but also a way to solve it. This equation was used to answer, among other questions, the issue of the age of the earth. Was the earth too young to make Darwin's theory credible?

Jim Stein, Professor Emeritus of CSULS, returns to complete his (admittedly subjective) list of the ten greatest math theorems of all time, with fascinating insights and anecdotes for each. Last time he did the runners up and numbers 8, 9 and 10. Here he completes numbers 1 through 7, again ranging over geometry, trig, calculus, probability, statistics, primes and more.

Jim Stein, Professor Emeritus of California State University Long Beach, discusses some bets that appear to be 50-50, but can have better odds with a tiny amount of seemingly useless information. Blackwell's Bet involves two envelopes of money. You can open only one. Which one do you choose? We learn about David Blackwell and his mathematical journey amid blatant racism. Another seeming 50-50 bet is guessing which of two unrelated events that you know nothing about is more likely; you can do better than 50-50 by taking just one sample of one of the events. Dr. Stein then discusses how mathematics shows up in some surprising places. Mathematics studied for the pure joy of it often finds surprising uses. He gives some examples from G. H. Hardy as well as his own research.