Mathematics episodes
11 episodes so far
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24 min
The Limits of Proof: How Mathematics Discovered What It Could Never Know
The strange century-long war over whether math could ever truly know what it claimed to know
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Free
23 min
Pure Chance: How Randomness Defines Our Universe
From cosmic noise to quantum dice rolls, why the unpredictable may be the most fundamental force in existence
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16 min
Sixty Seconds, Ten Fingers: Origin of Counting Systems and Their Impact
From tally bones to binary code, the numeral systems we use to count
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20 min
Right Numbers, Wrong Answers: Statistics That Mislead Courts, Doctors and Scientists
A mother convicted on a one-in-73-million figure, a hospital that looks better while doing worse, and the famous psychology findings that vanished when tested again
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21 min
The Geometry of Chance: Gambling and the Birth of Probability
Two letter-writers dividing the pot of an unfinished game, a nobleman losing on a bet that felt certain, and the medical test result almost everyone misreads
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20 min
The Tyranny of the Normal: The Bell Curve and the Myth of the Average Person
Why jets built for the average pilot kept crashing, how an astronomer's method was turned on people, and what a 'normal range' really means
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16 min
The Mathematics of Voting: Why Democracy Is Harder Than It Looks
How a simple act of choosing reveals deep paradoxes at the heart of collective decision-making
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20 min
The Mathematics of Beauty: Golden Ratios, Fibonacci and the Brain's Taste for Pattern
Sunflowers that count in Fibonacci numbers, a ratio that keeps turning up, and the myths that grew up around it
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7 min
The Infinite in the Finite: Exploring Fractals in Nature and Art
How self-repeating patterns reveal the hidden complexity of our world, from coastlines to creativity.
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13 min
The Invention of Zero: The Long Road to a Number for Nothing
Why a symbol for nothing took thousands of years to accept, and why one city once banned it from its banks
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10 min
Codebreakers: The Unsung Heroes of World War II
Picture this: It's 1942, and deep beneath the English countryside, in a sprawling Victorian mansion called Bletchley ...
Hear any of them in full
Every episode is in the Compound app; Compound+ opens the whole library.