I am slowly listening to more podcasts, but I am getting to them late and slowly. If I were to quantify my podcast listening as ratios, I’d guess that my podcast intake is 1:45 to reading words on the internet and 1:20 of the words in books that I read. So, I was intrigued when I heard about a mathematician dropping knowledge about maths in our lives, and how math is everywhere in this world. Sure enough, the just-over-an-hour interview and conversation from 2023 on Ologies with Alie Ward was stellar — as Cheng talks about our imaginations (which have become a titillating recurrence in my days this year) in terms of imaginary numbers in maths and physics.
Among the delights and intrigue and food-for-thought (as in the single meal of this blog post) and simultaneously food-for-future-nourishment (as a self-replenishing, renewable resource) are:
- the opposite of a mathematician is mathphobic (or maybe, a mathphobe)
- maths trauma are past experiences that cause people to feel bad and not like maths and tell themselves (and others) that they are not good at maths.
- someone good at maths is someone who recognizes patterns
- her lambasting what TF is 1 [as in the number]
- how contemporary humans can learn notions, concepts, equations that took centuries and millennia to create
- the push and pull factors behind the unconventional, if not defiant, choices for a mathematician to depart Cambridge for Chicago, to leave Cambridge University and affiliate with the Art Institute of Chicago instead.
I’ve already requested her book Is Math Real?, which is an ingeniously evocative title, from the library and will pick it up on Monday. I’m eager to read it, to simultaneously experience how accessible the prose is and also how her writing expands my imagination by inverting old ideas like a fraction.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 