The Function Room

John Butler is a mathematician turned computational neuroscientist, a professor of maths and statistics at TU Dublin who looks at the brain mathematically and tries to figure out why the brain does what it does

We talk about the senses, why it’s good to get your questions from a child, what an neural network ‘cares about’, lots of stuff but first of all, what is a computational neuroscientist.

Find out more about John and his work here: https://johnsbutler.netlify.app/

Normally I try and come up with an apt pun but I couldn’t possibly come up with anything better than the title of my guest Sarah Hart’s book. She has written Once Upon A Prime, a very enjoyable read and listen about the many links between maths and literature and myth and poetry.

We talk about why giants as we know them can’t exist, the 19th century obsession with statistics, the maths of Ulysses and Moby Dick and taking an idea for a walk.

The mathematics of art or the art of mathematics whichever. My guest is teacher, artist, mathematician,m tiktok star, Ayliean MacDonald the only one with that name in the world we think. We talk about the usual things people talk about: aperiodic tiles, Japanese Hitomezashi stitching, L-chair triominals, toilet paper, cozy-gaming and the meditative power of drawing lots of straight lines in a bullet journal. She’s fascinating. Give it a play.

This week Robert Boyle, born in Ireland in the 17th century was one of the world's great scientists. I'm talking about him with Eoin Gill, Eoin Gill is a director of Calmast STEM Engagement Centre at South East Technological University, who likes Robert Boyle so much he made an entire summer school about him. Boyle was a massive deal in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and his work laid the groundwork for modern chemistry, a founder of the Royal Society, part of a list of big scientific cheeses like Newton and Kepler who discovered the universe was a mathematical and not just a miraculous place.

But for all his science, dabbled in alchemy and sometimes he still just wanted a miracle.

My guest is Alan O’Reilly, about his hobby weather forecasting. I first met him when he was on my RTE Radio Show Colm O’Regan Wants A Word. But time constraints meant I don’t think we got to talk for the recommended daily weather talk intake of two hours.

Alan lives in County Carlow, in the southern midlands of Ireland from where he observes all the weather that the weather can throw at him.

We talk about the hot topic at the moment which is of course snow-drizzle called graupel, we talk about not-hearing-the-weather-forecast-anxiety, being lost in the snow, the unbearable lightness of solar panels, and some of the small numbers that make a big difference in the massive maths of weather, and why it all comes down to dew point.

Welcome back to the function room with me Colm O’Regan. This week, it's ChatGPT. The latest thing that makes people starting dropping the phrase AI into small talk.

ChatGPT and all the Ais are of huge interest to my guest. Conrad Wolfram. He’s kind of a big deal. Strategic and international director of Wolfram Research which makes Mathematica the computational software and nearly 4 decades in the area of computational education, Conrad has written The maths fix, about how AI will, or should make the maths we study in school very different. We talk steam engines, democracy and poems about lightbulb filaments. You know, the standard stuff.

Find him at conradwolfram.com, find chatGPT at chat.openai.com

My guest is Rob Eastaway. Author of many books which make maths more interesting and accessible. He also has a podcast called Puzzling Maths with Andrew Jeffrey which you should check out if by some miracle you’re not getting all your maths vitamins from here.

His most recent book is Maths on the back of an Envelope and it’s about the surprising power of mental arithmetic. Along the way, finding out,how to tell the height of a tree using the remains of a savoury snack, estimating crowds, dividing restaurant bills, counting weddings, getting a rough idea of what’s going on using Rob’s favourite word: -ish

And generally hopefully, giving us all a bit of confidence to get the answer wrong but close enough.

At the very end Ruby takes his advice on board and just start adding stuff up out of the blue. Well not out of the blue, off the milk carton.

Follow me on twitter @colmoregan, the podcast @functionroompod.

Rob is at https://robeastaway.com/

This week on the function room, my guest is Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered a NEW TYPE OF STAR.

That’s like discovering A NEW TYPE OF STAR

Jocelyn was a postgraduate student at the time and famously her supervisor was awarded the Nobel Prize for radio pulsars, and there was no mention of Jocelyn. Even though she helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array – the thing that found it- over two years and she was the one who first noticed the weird data the was the radio pulsar, sometimes reviewing nearly 100ft of paper.

That is just one part of a long career and distinguished career. We talk about that and sexism in science, religion in science, and the perils of managing big data 1960s style and at the end inspired by Jocelyn, my daughters and I look up at the stars.

After a long hiatus, the function room is back and for the first episode, comedian and erstwhile mathsy type Dara O'Briain is the guest. We chat about all sorts, hard sums, looking at the stars, the fantasy of one day going back to learn 'just for the sake of it' and then agreeing that idea might need a bit more thought. And no he didn't do a masters but I make no apologies for embellishments for the sake of a pun.

In this episode after Ruby makes up her mind, we’re talking about the mathematics of free will. It's recorded at the Cat Laughs Comedy Summer Series in Kilkenny, Ireland. A special series of shows to reintroduce everyone to the vague concept of Going To Stuff Again.My guest is Dr Kevin Mitchell. He’s a neuroscientist a professor at Trinity College Dublin and author of a book called Innate which goes right into the heart of the brain…well not the heart, confusing terminology, but right into the cells. And as he got to the smallest bits of the brain, Kevin started to wonder about free will and whether we have any choice in any matter. The notion of free will has been debated by the finest minds for thousands of years. So naturally I felt qualified to join in.And what has it to do with maths. Well…buckle up because we’re in for a bit of a head melt as we tackle topics like quantum physics, a smidge of chaos theory, WHAT IS A NUMBER ANYWAY and where annoying phantom traffic jams come from on the motorway. (apart from over reliance on cars obvs)You can Kevin at https://www.kjmitchell.com/ and on twitter at https://twitter.com/WiringTheBrain and of course me at www.colmoregan.com and on twitter the podcast is at https://twitter.com/functionroompod