The Function Room

This week I do some basic drills, some shuttling runs on the massive world of statistics in sport. Former accountant Paul McDonald has many hats, but he is now a sports stat specialist, company founder and originator of the expected transfer values algorithm, trying to bring some sense back to crazy world and numbers of football transfers fees.

He talks me through xG – the expected goals phenomenon that you may have heard thown around, expected Threat and expected Transfer Value.

Along the way we discuss players as different as Juan Riquelme and Denis Irwin and whether stats will kill football.

This week I’m joined by another returnee to the function Room, a lecturer at the Maynooth University Department of Geography and we’re talking about voting systems and the numbers they generate. We catch an STV, - single transferrable vote, FPTP -first past the post and the second chance of the French system.

We find out why Eurovision is a giant democratic experiment and ultimately why a vote in Ireland goes on an adventure.

This week in the function room, the hole shebang. A bit about Black Holes with Dr John Regan. Royal Society - SFI University Research Fellow in the Department of Theoretical Physics. we caefully scrape the surface of the topic of black holes without hopefully getting sucked in and destroyed by the weight of the topic.

John tells me how he got into black holes why he can't really get out, how Einstein nearly got it wrong and then got it right with a little help from his friends, what the LIGO saw, what it's like as a black hole expert to look at the first photo and is there a black hole in the room with us right now? There's the usual whiteboard nosing and of course I ask about time travel.

My guest is Katie Steckles, Mathematician, presenter and communicator. She has written seven books about mathematics, hosts the brilliant Mathemetical Objects podcast where she and her co presenter Peter Rowlatt discuss with their guests, very ordinary objects, and sometimes weird ones, and the mathematics behind and because of that object.

The kind of podcast I would love to have made if i were cleverer and had thought of it. It's a very interesting chat about the arbelos, kalaidocycles, bringing the stories of mathematics to light, the skill of not knowing what you are doing, Euclid's brother, Pythagoras's very existence, Jeff Goldblum, and a global maths communications hub built on a submarine in Katie's long term plans.

Again apologies for the aperiodical nature of these podcasts - pretend it's another era and post gets held up in winter storms. ANyway it's fitting as Katie's website is call Aperiodical.com and describes that lack of pattern in her blogposts.

Things you can look up afterwards - the kaleidocycle, the tetrahedron, Andrew Wyles - the man who solved Fermat's last theorem. Tim Gowers, an expert in combinatorics, Terence Tao, childhood genius who kept getting better, and the late Maryam Mirzakhani. Jurassic Park dragon curve and chaos theory. It's all to do with fractals. And I'm going to do lots more on that.

Matt Kenzie is one of the Science advisors on the hit Netflix show Three Body Problem.

The show and the book is about what happens when aliens want to say hi. Aliens called the San Ti, from a planet in a system of three Suns orbiting each other. They are a three body problem and chaos ensues for the San-Ti.

3BP is made by Weiss and Benioff, so we talk about Game of Thrones naturally, the three body problem, nano-slicing, quantum tunnelling and just how close to life the life of the phd student is the image of being young, hot and ready to save the world.

Warning contains spoilers about the series if you've started it. If you haven't they mightn't mean much to you unless you've seen the show. So I don't know whether it's a spoiler or not but look just be careful. Also contains references to elephants, dimensions and boring a hole in your head with a proton beam.

This week in the function room, Census Sensibility with . A glimpse into the work of Ireland's Central Statistic office, the CSO with Statistician Jess Coyne. Yes it's been a little while since the last one. The Easter break and childminding and whatnot intervened and I took a count and there wasn't enough hours in the day. But I'm back now and this time we're talking about what questions you ask and how you ask them to get the numbers that represent what's going on in a country.

Another episode title Im jealous of becuase I didn't pick it, it's the work of Keith Houston a writer and software engineer who has made a habit of writing about things that are there in plain sight. He has written about the history of punctuation, a book about the book and last year a book about the history of the pocket calculator.

There's lots of interesting nuggets in this episode including how an ant counts, who counts with their genitals, the unlikely role a Tea company played in making calculators, what happens when there's an actual bug in your computer, and when it comes to calculators, what does Keith think is the fairest of them all.

My first replay! Given what we've been hearing about Google and their Gemini code disaster and bias and all sorts, time to revisit one of my favourite episodes, with Cathy O'Neil author of Weapons of Math destruction and has a company that audits algorithms.

At some stage in a futurstic world when you're in trouble with the Algo Cops you'll wish you listened to Cathy.

Eagle-eyed or maybe that should be bat-eared listeners may note that I used to do a lot more preamble with the podcast and lean more heavily on my daughters for 'content' but as I've tried to put a podcast out every weekish, I can't be getting the children on board all the time. They've their own stuff to do. And are understandably less inclined to help out on Daddy's speculative projects.

This week my guest is Hannah Daly, Professor of Sustainable Energy at University College Cork. It's the third of a trilogy about energy - a sort of trilogy there was another episode in between (a sort of Rogue One of maths/energy episodes)
While the other two talk about where we get energy -magical molecules- or store them -stone batteries- this one focuses on working out how much we'll need using mathematical models.

My guest is John Fardy, presenter of Newstalk's Radio (and GoLoud's) movie show ScreenTime. He has watched a lot of movies which means, statistically he's seen a lot of mathematics in movies. Therefore a lot of tall blackboards, a lot of troubled geniuses who struggle to talk to people but speak to numbers with ease, a lot of running around with pieces of paper that have the Eureka moment on them. We chat about his favourite mathematical movies and also what movies would we like to see made.