Want to hear me talking about something other than chess?<\/p>\n
Last week the Irish radio station, RT\u00c9 Lyric FM<\/a>, broadcast a three-part interview with me on a program called The Culture File<\/a>, hosted by Luke Clancy. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to record this interview about my book, The Universe in Zero Words<\/a>, because one of my main objectives in the book is to show how mathematics interacts with our culture.<\/p>\n I enjoyed talking with Luke, because he really “got it.” He had obviously read The Universe in Zero Words<\/em> carefully, and asked many incisive questions. Luke, too, had a great time in our interview! He had intended just to record just a five-minute segment for the radio, but our conversation ended up lasting almost an hour. Out of this he distilled three five-minute segments that played on the air, plus a fourth “bonus” segment that is only available online.<\/p>\n Even if you don’t live in Ireland, you can hear what I had to say by clicking on the following links:<\/p>\n Podcast 1:<\/a> I talk about Henri Poincar\u00e9’s discovery of chaos in the 1890s, why the culture of that era was not prepared to assimilate such a discovery, and why it was much easier for mathematicians to make sense of it in the 1970s and 1980s.<\/p>\n Podcast 2:<\/a> Here Luke asked me to talk about the simplest of all equations, 1+1 = 2, and why it is not as simple as it looks. Also, I talked about the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry. In my book (and in the podcast) I argue that if whales had developed geometry, they would see non-Euclidean geometry as natural, and our Euclidean geometry as strange.<\/p>\n