Jordan Ellenberg is the first official mathematician we’ve had on the show, but his work weaves through many different domains. Afterall, whether it's something like game theory or data science, it's all built on math.

Jordan Ellenberg is at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics. His research centers on the fields of number theory and algebraic geometry, the parts of mathematics which address fundamental questions about algebraic equations and their solutions in whole numbers. 

Jordan has also been writing for a general audience about math for more than fifteen years; including “How Not To Be Wrong: The Power Of Mathematical Thinking,” “Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else,” his novel “The Grasshopper King,” and his “Do the Math” column in Slate. 

Jordan joins Greg to talk about what makes math special, how published studies might not be reliable, and, the geometry of how we relate to the world.

Math & Intuition

Improbable things are very common. Like if you like open a book to a random page and look at it and you're like, wow, 432, what's the chance that I would've opened it to exactly the page 432, like pretty small, right? The book has a lot of pages. That's a very unlikely event. And yet something in you knows not to find that remarkable, even though it's definitely improbable. So you see how your intuition gets like a little weird and twisted around. You have to be very careful.

Math class is hard

We know that it's like one of the classes that creates a lot of stress for kids. And one reason is that it is a venue where we tell people they're wrong.

Math is fundamental

Math is like a fundamentally human activity. Every single human society that's ever existed does it. And if we sort of, slice off either our poetic side or our quantitative side, we're just like slicing off like part of our human nature. Why would we do that?

Resources:

•  Geometry by Rita Dove

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Wisconsin
• Jordan Ellenberg's Website
• Jordan Ellenberg on Twitter
• Jordan Ellenberg on Facebook

His Work:

• Articles on Slate
• Jordan Ellenberg on Google Scholar
• How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
• Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else
• The Grasshopper King