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Maths on the Move, the podcast from plus.maths.org, will bring you the latest news from the world of maths, plus interviews and discussions with leading mathematicians and scientists about the maths that is changing our lives. Hosted by Plus editors Rachel Thomas and Marianne Freiberger.
The podcast Maths on the Move is created by plus.maths.org. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
Last Wednesday, March 26, 2025, this year's Abel Prize was awarded to the Japanese mathematician Masaki Kashiwara. The Abel Prize is one of the most prestigious honours in mathematics. It is awarded every year by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and comes with a prize money of over £550,000.
In this episode of Maths on the Move we talk to Helge Holden, Chair of the Abel Prize Committee. Helge tells us about this year's winner, the history and purpose of the Prize, and how the winners are chosen. He also tells us why good mathematicians are needed in all sectors of science and beyond, and talks about the tragic story of the mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, after whom the Prize is named.
To find out more about some of the topics mentioned in this episode, see:
The UK government has recently pledged to put around £14 billion into supporting the development of artificial intelligence over the next few years. But because AI comes with perils as well as promises, careful policy decision are going to be crucial. In order to make such decision in an informed way, politicians need to interact with the mathematicians and scientist who develop AI.
In this episode of Maths on the Move we talk to mathematician Chris Budd who recently went to Parliament for something called Evidence Week, where he and other AI researchers talked with MPs and Peers from the House of Lords. Chris tells us about the discussions he had with politicians — about the worrying issue of bias in AI, its promising applications, for example in the medical arena, and also about the fact that AI is built on mathematics. A strong maths education, starting at primary school, is therefore essential if we're going to make the best of AI in the future.
Chris is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, co-lead of the research project Maths4DL, and Director of Knowledge Exchange for the Bath Institute for Mathematical Innovation. He attended Evidence week with a team of researchers which included Yolanne Lee, a Maths4DL PhD student who recently featured in another Maths on the Move episode. The image above shows, from left to right, Dáire O’Kane (Maths4DL), Jenny Power (IMI), Yolanne Lee (Maths4DL), and Alexandra Freeman, Baroness Freeman of Steventon.
To find out more about some of the topics discussed in this episode see
This podcast was produced as part of our collaboration with the Mathematics for Deep Learning (Maths4DL) research programme. Maths4DL brings together researchers from the universities of Bath and Cambridge, and University College London and aims to combine theory, modelling, data and computation to unlock the next generation of deep learning. You can see more content produced with Maths4DL here.
We kick off our latest series of podcasts with an episode of Living proof, produced jointly with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI).
This episode is all about the communication of mathematics to the wider world, which is becoming ever more recognised as a priority within the maths community. We talk to Sara Khan, Communications Manager at the INI, about how this renowned research institute supports mathematics communication. And we revisit our interview with Hannah Fry who has just taken up her new role as Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics here at the University of Cambridge
As Hannah puts it,
"It's really important that people feel that [mathematics] is being done with them, not to them."
We also find out about Hannah's own research in her previous role as Professor for the Mathematics of Cities at University College London, and hear about her favourite mathematical moment.
To find out more about organisations and events in support of mathematics communication mentioned in this episode, see the following links:
This content was produced as part of our collaborations with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) and the Newton Gateway to Mathematics.
The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. The Newton Gateway is the impact initiative of the INI, which engages with users of mathematics. You can find all the content from the collaboration here.
Last summer we were lucky enough to attend the European Congress of Mathematics (ECM) in Seville, Spain. The Congress sees the award of several prestigious prizes, including the Otto Neugebauer Prize for the History of Mathematics.
In this episode of Maths on the Move we talk to this year's winner of the Otto Neugebauer Prize, Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, who has worked on and written about mathematicians who fled Nazi Germany. Reinhard tells us about the motivation for his work, how the Nazi regime impacted mathematics and mathematicians, and what future historians might say about the mathematics of today.
This content was produced with kind support from the London Mathematical Society.
What is as hypnotising as a beautiful goldfish circling its bowl, but can help you understand the way a virus can spread? The answer is one of the beautiful interactive simulations produced by VisualPDE !
In this podcast we talk to Benjamin Walker from University College London, and to Adam Townsend and Andrew Krause from Durham University, who together created this online solver of partial differential equations. Such equations describe how quantities change over space and time and therefore used throughout science to describe processes that play out in the real world — from the transmission of airborne viruses to the flow of water during a flood. Ben, Andrew and Adam tell us about their motivation for building VisualPDE and what they can do with it.
We met Ben, Andrew and Adam through the Mathsci-comm network for people who communicate maths and data science to non-expert audiences. As you can see by playing with the simulation below, VisualPDE is a great tool for communicating maths research to non-experts, as well as allowing mathematicians to quickly simulate what their mathematical models can tell them.
Adam is also part of the team behind the brilliant Chalkdust, a magazine for the mathematically curious. Why not order the latest issue for a Christmas gift?
Play with the simulation!Suppose that lots of people are sitting in a sealed room and one of them is infectious. We'll assume that the infectious person is constantly producing virus-laden particles that spread out around them and lose their potency over time. The simulation below shows what this might look like. The colour corresponds to the concentration or amount of the virus in the air.
With VisualPDE, we're not just limited to watching a simulation: we can interact with it too. Clicking in the room will introduce some viral particles to the air, as if someone with an infection had coughed (coughing is actually a lot more complicated and is the focus of lots of research). Try clicking to see what difference a cough can make.
Though each cough introduces some virus to the room, it looks like it quickly decays away until we can't even tell it was there. So, does this mean we shouldn't be worried about a cough?
To explore this further, let's look at the probability (or chance) of getting an infection, which is related but not equal to the virus concentration. Specifically, we'll look at the chance of catching the virus assuming that you'd been in the same location for the duration of the simulation. With VisualPDE, we can do this by switching to the Probability View by pressing and choosing "Probability".
Now for the goldfish. People don't always stay still in the middle of rooms. Unsurprisingly, the movement of an infected individual can have a big impact on the spread of a virus. The next simulation is set up so that the source of the infection moves around the room, as if they were a waiter going between tables in a restaurant, perhaps. The air conditioner is turned off, so that the air in the room is still.
The Probability View shows the build-up of a ring of likely infections as the infectious person circles the room. A quick look at the Concentration View shows their circular path, leaving a trail of viral particles behind them.
To find out more about this simulation and how to explore it, go to the VisualPDE site.
The two scientific papers mentioned in the podcast are:
Predicting the spatio-temporal infection risk in indoor spaces using an efficient airborne transmission model by Zechariah Lau, Ian M. Griffiths, Aaron English and Katerina Kaouri
Turing Instabilities are Not Enough to Ensure Pattern Formation by Andrew L. Krause, Eamonn A. Gaffney, Thomas Jun Jewell, Václav Klika and Benjamin J. Walker
Are you thinking of doing a Masters or PhD in maths or another STEM subject but are worried about funding? Then the Martingale Foundation might be for you. The Foundation's mission is "to enable and nurture talented individuals from low-socioeconomic backgrounds to thrive within world-leading postgraduate study and become STEM leaders" by providing full scholarships as well as a development programme.
In this episode of Maths on the Move we talk to two current Martingale scholars, Alexandra Sorinca and Malachy Reynolds, who have both just started their PhD at King's College London. We met them this summer at Solve for X, a mathematical modelling retreat delivered by the Martingale Foundation in partnership with the Newton Gateway to Mathematics and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI), which challenged teams of students to solve real-life maths problems posed by industry. Solve for X is one of the activities the Martingale Foundation provides for its scholars. Alexandra and Malachy tell us about their challenges and also about what it's like being a Martingale scholar.
We also talk to Chloe Slevin, the Martingale Foundation's Communications Manager, who explains the Foundation's aims and gives useful advice for new applicants.
Alexandra Sorinca Malachy Reynolds Chloe SlevinAs a PhD student working with the Maths4DL research project, Yolanne Lee works on the mathematics that powers artificial intelligence. In this podcast she tells us about what she thinks AI will be able to do in the near future, what it has to do with cats and dogs, and how music provided her first experience of science. We also get to hear her play the piano!
To find out more about the topics discussed in this podcast see Artificial intelligence and deep learning: Your questions answered.
This content is part of our collaboration with the Mathematics for Deep Learning (Maths4DL) research programme, which brings together researchers from the universities of Bath and Cambridge, and University College London. Maths4DL aims to combine theory, modelling, data and computation to unlock the next generation of deep learning. You can see more content produced with Maths4DL here.
We're very excited that Hannah Fry is coming to join us in Cambridge in January 2025. Fry is a brilliant mathematician, best-selling author, award winning science presenter and host of popular podcasts and television shows. She'll be Cambridge's first Professor for the Public Understanding of Mathematics.
In this episode of Maths on the Move Hannah explains how her interest in public engagement grew directly out of her work as a mathematician, talks about how she got into maths in the first place, and shares one of her favourite mathematical moments.
We were very proud that Hannah announced the news at an event we organised together with the Newton Gateway to Mathematics. It was called Communicating Mathematical and Data Sciences – What does Success Look Like? and took place at the Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) on November 21, 2024. The event was part of the mathsci-comm network which aims to connect those working in, and with a stake in, communicating complex mathematics and data science to a variety of non-expert audiences. The network is supported by the INI — find out more here.
Image above: Lloyd Mann.
This content was produced as part of our collaborations with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) and the Newton Gateway to Mathematics.
The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. The Newton Gateway is the impact initiative of the INI, which engages with users of mathematics. You can find all the content from the collaboration here.
We all know what data is: bits of information of which in this age of Big Data we have lots of. You might also know what topology is: the study of shapes that considers two shapes to be the same if you can deform one into the other without tearing them or gluing things together.
But what is topological data analysis? And how might it help to understand proteins or diseases such as cancer? We find out with Heather Harrington a mathematician we met at the European Congress of Mathematics (ECM) this summer. Heather tells us how topological data analysis can produce a so-called barcode for a given data set which gives deep insights into its structure. Below are a couple of images illustrating a barcode to illustrate what we talk about in the podcast.
We attended the ECM with kind support of the London Mathematical Society (LMS). Heather gave the LMS lecture at the ECM.
You might also want to listen to more episodes of our Euromaths series which reports on the ECM.
Circles drawn around 20 points in the plane. If the radius r is less than r0, the circles are small enough to not overlap (left). Once the radius exceeds r0, but is smaller than r1, the circles overlap and together form a ring-like structure (middle). One the radius is larger than r1 the circles join up in the centre of this ring-like structure. What you see now is a single blob without a hole.
The barcode captures this information. For r < r0 there are 20 red lines indicating there are twenty connected components without holes. For r0 < r < r1 there is one green line indicating there is one connected component with one hole (the colours red and green differentiate between no hole and one hole). For r > r1 there is one red line indicating there is one connected component without a hole.
This content was produced with kind support from the London Mathematical Society.
We love a game of billiards — or at least the mathematical version of it. It's a dynamical system that's just about basic enough to study but still poses lots of open questions. In this episode of Maths on the Move we talk to Giovanni Forni about chaos, periodicity and the many things we still hope to learn about billiards.
We met Giovanni at the European Congress of Mathematics (ECM) in summer this year, which we attended with kind support of the London Mathematical Society. See here for more episodes of our Euromaths series which reports on the ECM.
To find out more about mathematical billiards on Plus see
Here are a couple of academic papers by Forni and his collaborators:
This content was produced with kind support from the London Mathematical Society.
As the days in the UK get shorter and darker we continue remembering the brilliant time we had in Seville last summer at the European Congress of Mathematics (ECM). In this episode of Maths on the move we talk to one of the mathematicians we met at the ECM, Jessica Fintzen, who won a prestigious EMS Prize at the Congress.
Jessica tells us how to capture infinitely many snowflakes at the same time, the maths of symmetry and her work on representation theory, and why she likes doing handstands.
To find out a little more about Jessica's mathematics, as well as her gymnastics, see this video.
You might also like to look the following content relevant to topics discussed in the podcast:
This content was produced with kind support from the London Mathematical Society.
The world is full of networks. We're part of them, our infrastructure is full of them, and there are even networks within our bodies (e.g. made from neurons). This summer the mathematician Richard Montgomery won a prestigious EMS Prize at the European Congress of Mathematics (ECM) for his work on the pure maths of networks, also known as graph theory.
In this episode of Maths on the move Richard tells us about an amazing result he helped to prove to great acclaim, known as Ringel's conjecture, and why it's interesting to take graphs to the extreme.
You might also want to read this article about Richard's work. To find out more about the event at the Isaac Newton Institute in honour of Tim Gowers, which is mentioned in the podcast, see here.
This content was produced with kind support from the London Mathematical Society.
David Spiegelhalter, one of our favourite statisticians in the whole world, has a new book out. It's called The art of uncertainty: How to navigate chance, ignorance, risk and luck and published by Pelican Books.
In this episode of Maths on the Move we talk to David about the book, touching on a huge range of topics — from double yolked eggs and the bay of pigs, to why it's useful to disagree and why uncertainty is personal. Enjoy!
To find out more about some of the topics mentioned in this episode see,
We recently found out why pieces of toast tend to land butter side down. It' because the physical factors at play, including the typical height of breakfast tables and the strength of the Earth's gravity, are just right to allow a piece of toast to perform one flip on its way to the floor: from butter side up to butter side down.
The strength of the Earth's gravity is measured by the gravitational constant g, one of the constants of nature. These constants are special not just when it comes to toast. If their values were just a tiny bit different, life as we know it couldn't exist. This begs the question of why — why are the constants fine-tuned for our existence? Some people have taken this fine-tuning as evidence of the existence of a god who wanted us to be here, but there's also another explanation: perhaps our Universe is just one of many, all with different values for the constants of nature? If such a multiverse exists, then the existence of our Universe within it is no longer surprising. It's just one of many.
All this reminded us of an interview we did in 2016 with astrophysicist Fred Adams at the FQXi international conference in Banff, Canada. In this episode of Maths on the move we bring you this interview. Adam tells us all about the multiverse and how knowledge about our own Universe can help us to calculate how many of those other universes could be similar to our own. We hope you enjoy it, but if it's too mind-boggling, have a piece of toast.
Fred Adams
A Gömböc is a strange thing. It looks like an egg with sharp edges, and when you put it down it starts wriggling and rolling around as if it were alive. Until not so long ago no-one knew whether Gömböcs even existed. Gabor Domokos, one of their discoverers, reckons that in some sense they barely exists at all. So what are Gömböcs and what makes them special?
In this episode of Maths on the move we revisit an interview with Domokos from all the way back in 2009.
We were reminded of this interview when we thought about what makes a good mathematical story and the story of the Gömböc has it all: beautiful mathematics, an exciting discovery, a beach holiday, romance (sort of) and even turtles. We hope you enjoy it!
You can read the article that accompanies this this episode here.
Gábor Domokos
Over the summer we've been incredibly lucky to have been working with Justin Chen, a maths student at the University of Cambridge who is about to start his Masters. Justin has done some great work on how to explain the concept of a mathematical group, and group theory as a whole, to non-mathematicians. In this episode of Maths on the move he tells us how groups are collection of actions, akin to walking around on a field, and why group theory is often called the study of symmetry. He also marvels at the power of abstraction mathematics affords us, tells us about what it was like diving into the world of maths communication, and what his plans are for the future.
You can find out more about groups in the following two collections Justin has produced:
You might also want to read Justin's article Explaining AI with the help of philosophy mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. It is based on an interview with Hana Chockler, a professor at King's College London, conducted at a recent event organised by the Newton Gateway to Mathematics and the Alan Turing Institute.
This article was produced as part of our collaborations with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) and the Newton Gateway to Mathematics.
The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. The Newton Gateway is the impact initiative of the INI, which engages with users of mathematics. You can find all the content from the collaboration here.
This summer we were very pleased to attend the European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which took place in Seville, Spain, in July. We went to lots of fascinating talks and generally enjoyed the mathematical hustle and bustle. We also interviewed a range of interesting mathematicians about topics as diverse as mathematical billiards and topological data analysis, and we now bring you these interviews as part of our podcast.
First up is the eminent Avi Wigderson, who has won many prestigious mathematical prizes, including an Abel Prize in 2021. Avi gave a great talk at the ECM about the role of errors in mathematical proofs. Traditionally, mathematical proofs need to be absolutely waterproof and errors are anathema. But as Avi told us, if you allow a certain level of error to creep in, you can do amazing things. For example, you can construct zero knowledge proofs, which allow you to prove something without giving any information away about what you're proving. And you can construct proofs that even if they're very long, can be checked for correctness by just reading a few pages. Find out more in this episode of Maths on the move.
The photo of Avi Wigderson above is courtesy Cliff Moore/Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ USA/AbelPrize.
This content was produced with kind support from the London Mathematical Society.
Is there life elsewhere in the Universe? And how did life emerge here on Earth? These two questions are often considered separately, but answers to one shed important light on answers to the other. In their new book Is Earth exceptional: The quest for cosmic life, renowned astrophysicist Mario Livio and Nobel laureate Jack Szostak combine both these question and find fascinating answers.
In this episode of Maths on the move we talk to Livio about the new book. From creating life in the lab to searching for it on distant planets, Livio gives us a riveting whistelstop tour of research into the origin of life, here on Earth an elsewhere. Is Earth exceptional is out on September 10, 2024 in the US and on September 26, 2024 in the UK.
To get a taster of Livio's writing (which we think is very good) see a list of his Plus articles. We have also reviewed six of Livio's books:
We're getting excited for the summer here but before we all head off on holidays we catch up with Marianne in Spain at the European Congress of Mathematics, and Justin and Rachel in the UK having just attended some fascinating events in London and Cambridge held by the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Newton Gateway.
Marianne told us about her recent interview with Avi Widgerson – winner of the Abel Prize in 2021 and the most recent Turing Prize. Justin told us about how the philosophical concept of causality can help us understand AI. And Rachel tells us about the surprising phenomena of anti-diffusion and how it links the patterns we see on Juniper, staircases in our oceans and fusion reactors of the future.
We'll be back with more podcasts in the Autumn, but here are some of our recommendations for your summer reading and listening pleasure!
Articles:
Podcasts:
Books:
This content was produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society, the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the Newton Gateway to Mathematics.
How we behave can have far greater impacts than just on our own daily lives. For example who we interact with and whether we get vaccinated affects how diseases spread through the community. So if we are going to use maths to try to understand such a challenge facing society, we need to make sure we include human behaviour in our mathematical models. But how do you mathematically describe the messiness of human behaviour?
To find out we talk to mathematicians Kirsty Bolton, Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham, and Ed Hill, a Warwick Zeeman Lecturer at the University of Warwick. Kirsty and Ed organised a recent workshop bringing together experts from across maths, data science, life sciences and social sciences to explore how mathematical models can be made more realistic by including human behaviour. They tell us about both the mathematical and the communication challenges this brings, from the difficulty of learning the languages of other disciplines to the excitement of finding the sweet spot where experts from such different areas can work together to make progress.
Kirsty and Ed are both part of JUNIPER, a collaborative network of researchers from across the UK who work at the interface between mathematical modelling, infectious disease control and public health policy, and JUNIPER supported the workshop.
This podcast is part of our collaboration with JUNIPER, the Joint UNIversities Pandemic and Epidemiological Research network. JUNIPER is a collaborative network of researchers from across the UK who work at the interface between mathematical modelling, infectious disease control and public health policy. You can see more content produced with JUNIPER here.
We're very excited to be going to this year's European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which will take place in Seville, Spain, in July! We noticed that mathematicians who win one of the prizes awarded at the ECM by the European Mathematical Society quite often go on to win a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics.
So to celebrate the run-up to the ECM we've launched Euromaths, a miniseries of podcasts revisiting interviews with Fields Medallists who previously won an EMS prize. This week we hear from Maryna Viazovska who won a Fields Medal in 2022 and an EMS prize in 2020, talking about the theory of optimal transport and how it applies to a wide range of things, from crystals to clouds.
You can read about Maryna's work in this article. To listen to previous episodes of Euromaths click here.
This content was originally produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.
We're very excited to be going to this year's European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which will take place in Seville, Spain, in July! We noticed that mathematicians who win one of the prizes awarded at the ECM by the European Mathematical Society quite often go on to win a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics.
So to celebrate the run-up to the ECM we've launched Euromaths, a miniseries of podcasts revisiting interviews with Fields Medallists who previously won an EMS prize. This week we hear from Artur Avila who won a Fields Medal in 2014 and an EMS prize in 2012, talking about the theory of optimal transport and how it applies to a wide range of things, from crystals to clouds.
You can read about Artur's work in this article. To listen to previous episodes of Euromaths click here.
This content was originally produced as part of our collaboration with the London Mathematical Society. You can find all our content on the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians here.
We're very excited to be going to this year's European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which will take place in Seville, Spain, in July! We noticed that mathematicians who win one the prizes awarded at the ECM by the European Mathematical Society quite often go on to win a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics.
So to celebrate the run-up to the ECM we've launched Euromaths, a miniseries of podcasts revisiting interviews with Fields Medallists who previously won an EMS prize. This week we hear from Alessio Figalli who won a Fields Medal in 2018 and an EMS prize in 2012, talking about the theory of optimal transport and how it applies to a wide range of things, from crystals to clouds.
You can read about Alessio's work in this article. To listen to previous episodes of Euromaths click here.
This content was originally produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians here.
We're very excited to be going to this year's European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which will take place in Seville, Spain, in July! And we noticed that mathematicians who win one the prizes awarded at the ECM by the European Mathematical Society quite often go on to win a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics.
So to celebrate the run-up to the ECM we've launched Euromaths, a miniseries of podcasts revisiting interviews with Fields Medallists who previously won an EMS prize. This week we hear from James Maynard who won a Fields Medal in 2022 and an EMS prize in 2016, talking about is work on the fabled twin prime conjecture.
You can read about James's work in this short introduction and this in-depth article.
Click here to listen to last week's episode of Euromaths featuring Fields Medallist Hugo Duminil-Copin.
This content was originally produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.
We're very excited to be going to this year's European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which will take place in Seville, Spain, in July!
One of the interesting things that happens at an ECM is that the European Mathematical Society (EMS) awards ten prizes to mathematicians who are under the age of 35 at the start of the year the prizes are awarded. When looking through previous winners we noticed that quite a few winners of EMS prizes later go on to win a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics, awarded every four years at the International Congress of mathematicians.
To celebrate the run-up to this year's ECM, we launch our Euromaths miniseries of podcasts, which revisits interviews with Fields Medallists from years past, who previously also won an EMS prize. We start the series by revisiting our interview with Hugo Duminil-Copin in 2022, when won a Fields Medal for his work transforming the mathematical theory of phase transitions in statistical physics. Hugo first won an EMS prize in 2016. We hope you enjoy the interview!
Hugo Duminil-Copin (Photo Matteo Fieni)
You can read about Hugo's work in this short introduction and this in-depth article.
This content was originally produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.
Artificial intelligence is changing our lives. Many of us use the voice activated features on our phones to recognise, understand and fairly complex speech. Students use ChatGPT to do their homework. And doctors use AI algorithms to help diagnose many diseases from medical data. But how is AI changing the lives of mathematicians?
In this podcast we speak to Yang-Hui He from the London Institute of Mathematical Sciences about his recent work on the evocatively titled murmuration conjecture. This exciting new conjecture came about due to both artificial and human intelligence, and reveals patterns in the prime numbers that look like flocks of birds. (You can also read more in the article that accompanies this podcast.)
A murmuration of starlings. Photo: Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0.
We were speaking to Yang as part of our coverage of the research programme, Black holes: bridges between number theory and holographic quantum information, held at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge. The programme brought together a fascinating array of experts in black holes and quantum theory, with mathematicians and computer scientists. You can read more in our coverage of the programme here.
This content was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
"The 20th century was the interaction of geometry and physics, and the 21st century is the interaction of number theory with physics." This intriguing insight comes from our recent discussion with Yang-Hui He from the London Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Yang told us an amazing story about the flow of ideas between mathematics and physics, that involves some of the most celebrated achievements in the last century.
Yang-Hui He (Photo Rajarshi Maiti – CC BY-SA 4.0)
You can find out more about the ideas we discussed with Yang in this podcast in the accompanying articles String theory: A promise from physics and String theory: Convincing mathematics. And stay tuned for the second part of our conversation with Yang in the next episode!
We were speaking to Yang about a research programme, Black holes: bridges between number theory and holographic quantum information, held at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge. The programme brought together a fascinating array of experts in black holes and quantum theory, with mathematicians and computer scientists. You can read more in our coverage of the programme here.
This content was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
Mathematics is a creative pursuit so it's not surprising that there are communalities between maths and art in all its forms. In this episode we explore the intersection between maths and art with physicist Andrzej Herczyński and mathematician Paul Glendinning.
Andrzej Herczyński
Andrzej and Paul were two of the organisers of the workshop Space, scale and scaling in art, which recently took place at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge. We find out about the rich dialogue that can ensue between artists and mathematicians, how maths and physics can help us understand the power of art and how we perceive it, and provide insights into how a particular piece of art was made.
The Space, scale and scaling in art workshop was part of a larger research programme funded by the National Science Foundation on the intersection of science and art.
You can see Agnes Martin's painting Morning, which is mentioned in this episode, here (though the digital version does not do it justice). To see Jackson Pollock's works, which are also discussed in this episode, go to the Jackson Pollock website. The image above has been generated by AI.
Paul Glendinning
To find out more about some of the topics mentioned in this episode, see the following articles:
To see all our content on maths and art see here, and for everything on maths and music see here.
This content was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
One of the most fascinating figures in the history of mathematics was Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught Indian genius who formed a remarkable relationship with the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy. Ramanujan was interested in problems in number theory, which are often easy to state, but incredibly difficult to prove. One amazing thing about Ramanujan's work is that it still finds applications today, in areas you'd never imagine are linked to number theory. An example is the study of black holes, those gravitational monstrosities that lie at the centres of galaxies.
We will explore this surprising link in an upcoming episode, but for now we revisit a 2018 interview with mathematician Ken Ono (pictured above), who was an advisor and associate producer on the well-known film about Ramanujan, The man who knew infinity. Talking to Plus Editor Rachel Thomas, Ken explores just what made Ramanujan's work so special and the piece of mathematics that is relevant to black holes. Rachel talked to Ken at the Royal Society's celebration of the centenary of Ramanujan's election as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
You can also read an article accompanying this podcast, which looks at the mathematics relevant to black holes. For more about Ramanujan's mathematics, and Ken's research into it, see Ramanujan surprises again. To find out more about the Spirit of Ramanujan project, which Ken mentions in this episode, see here.
In this episode of Maths on the move we look at some favourite pieces of maths we have worked on so far this year. From a revolutionary new tile to new insights in topology, and from fooling cancer cells to bringing mathematical research into the classroom, we hope there's something interesting there for everyone.
To find out more about the topics mentioned in this episode see the following articles:
To find out more about our work with the JUNIPER network of disease modellers see here and to find out more about our work with the maths4DL research project see here.
You can listen to the podcast using the player above, and you can listen and subscribe to our podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify and through most other podcast providers via podbean.It's always exciting to have a glimpse at new mathematics and technology as they take shape. In this podcast we talk to Georg Maierhofer, from the University of Oxford, about an exciting new idea that is only just emerging – physics informed neural networks (PINNs for short) – where you add in the laws of physics to machine learning methods.
We have been able to sit in on a number of meetings of our colleagues from Maths4DL (the Mathematics for Deep Learning research group) as they explore this idea. Georg explains why PINNs are a bit like learning golf, tells us about the exciting opportunities and challenges, and why the key part to developing new ideas is getting the right people together at the right time.
You can find more about the machine learning and the some of the work that Maths4DL is doing at https://plus.maths.org/maths4dl, including our recent podcast How does AI work? and our collection Predicting the weather with artificial intelligence.
This content is part of our collaboration with the Mathematics for Deep Learning (Maths4DL) research programme, which brings together researchers from the universities of Bath and Cambridge, and University College London. Maths4DL aims to combine theory, modelling, data and computation to unlock the next generation of deep learning. You can see more content produced with Maths4DL here.
Last weekend our friends and neighbours at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge put on a great event: the Mathematics Discovery Day, part of the Cambridge Festival. Among the may hands-on activities, games and pop-up explorations were the hugely popular, and well-attended, workshops for students delivered by our colleagues Liz and Charlie from NRICH. Our brilliant colleague Julia Hawkins herded academics and volunteers, juggled props and generally made sure that everything went smoothly.
At the same time our partners at the Isaac Newton Institute next door hosted one of our favourite physicists: Ben Allanach, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Ben gave a talk called The force awakens: Quantum collisions, in which he explored experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), particle physics, as well as recent research results which suggested there may be a fifth force of nature, hitherto unknown to science.
For those who weren't able to attend Ben's talk we revisit an interview with him from last year, in which he explains this intriguing (and if true sensational) result about a potential new force.
The image above illustrates particle collisions at the LHC and is courtesy CMS.
This content now forms part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI). The INI is an international research centre in Cambridge which attracts leading mathematicians from all over the world. You can find all the content from the collaboration here.
Artificial intelligence has made astonishing progress in the last few years. Perhaps surprisingly, all of the amazing things we've seen, from ChatGPT to generative AI, are powered by same mathematical technique: machine learning, and in particular deep learning.
In this episode of Maths on the move we talk to Kweku Abraham, member of Maths4DL, a research project which investigates deep learning, and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge. Kweku explains how machine learning works, why it's so powerful and whether there are any limits to what it can achieve, and the kind of maths he works on every day.
To find out more about the topics discussed in this episode, see Artificial intelligence and deep learning: Your questions answered.
This content is part of our collaboration with the Mathematics for Deep Learning (Maths4DL) research programme, which brings together researchers from the universities of Bath and Cambridge, and University College London. Maths4DL aims to combine theory, modelling, data and computation to unlock the next generation of deep learning. You can see more content produced with Maths4DL here.
We’re now all very aware that climate change is not just a problem for the future – 2023 was officially the hottest year on record ever. And as well as impacting our lives through food security, flooding and drought, climate change can also impact our health by the impact it can have on the spread of diseases.
A very interesting group of people came together to discuss this in January 2024. Policy makers, climate scientists, epidemiologists and mathematicians met at a workshop at the University of Oxford to discuss the impact of climate change on epidemics. We spoke to one of the organisers, Helena Stage, from the University of Bristol, about how exactly climate change impacts the spread of diseases, how maths can help and why it's so important to think globally.
Helena Stage
You can find out more about disease modelling and epidemiology in our library for beginners, or our work with JUNIPER (the Joint UNIversities Pandemic and Epidemiological Research network). And you can find out more about climate change and how maths can help in these articles and podcasts.
This podcast was produced as part of our collaborations with JUNIPER, the Joint UNIversity Pandemic and Epidemic Response modelling consortium, and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI), both of whom funded the workshop discussed in this episode.
JUNIPER comprises academics from the universities of Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol, Exeter, Oxford, Manchester, and Lancaster, who are using a range of mathematical and statistical techniques to address pressing question about the control of COVID-19. You can see more content produced with JUNIPER here.
The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
Could we make the clouds brighter so they reflect more of the Sun's warming rays back into space to keep us cooler? Or make Arctic ice thicker so it lasts longer over the summer? These ideas might sound slightly fantastical, but they're active research areas at the Centre for Climate Repair which has recently become our neighbour here at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
In this episode of Maths on the move the Centre's Director of Research, Shaun Fitzgerald, tells us more about the Centre's work and its three-fold mission: to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, to remove excess green house gases from the atmosphere, and to refreeze the Arctic.
You may also want to read the article accompanying this episode of Maths on the move. For more about mathematics and climate change, see here.
In this, the last episode of Maths on the move for this year, we look back on 2023 and forward to 2024. We talk about some highlights in our coverage of this year's mathematics, and some of the exciting things to come next year. It's a crazy journey featuring breakthroughs in pure maths, the maths of music and Ed Sheeran, renewable energy sources, the maths of justice, and the epidemiology of climate change.
We hope you enjoy this final episode of the year and wish you all the best for next year! And remember: no matter how hard a piece of mathematics might be, there's always something in it that everyone can relate to!
To find out more about the topics mentioned in this episode see
To find out more about our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute see here, about our collaboration with the JUNIPER network see here, and about our collaboration with Maths4DL see here.
To help mitigate climate change the UK government has pledged to decarbonised UK electricity supply by 2035. That's a huge science and engineering challenge on a very tight deadline. In this episode we talk to two people who know all about the challenges involved: Chris Dent, Professor of Industrial Mathematics, and Lars Schewe, Reader in Operational Research, both of the University of Edinburgh. Both helped to organise an intensive two week "deep dive" workshop on the Mathematics and statistics for low carbon energy systems earlier this year as part of a longer research programme at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) in Cambridge.
Chris and Lars tell us why decarbonising the energy network also resents huge mathematical challenges — and why the effort isn't unlike the Apollo mission that got people to the Moon in the 1960s.
You can read more about the topic discussed in this episode in this article.
This content was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from the collaboration here.
The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
We continue our series about bringing maths to the stage and screen by going back to 2012 when we were lucky enough to host the UK premiere of the Travelling Salesman, here at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, our home. It is an unusual movie: despite almost every character being a mathematician there's not a mad person in sight. Moreover, the plot centres on one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics, does P = NP? Timothy Lanzone, the writer and director, tells us about creating drama from mathematics, and we discuss the maths behind the movie.
(The sound effects used in this podcast are by jlozano and nemoDaedalus.)
You can read more about the travelling salesman problem, P versus NP, and cryptography on plus.maths.org
When you think of Alan Turing you might think of his work breaking the Enigma code in World War II. Or you might think of his work that helped build the foundations of computer science and mathematical logic. Or you might even think of his groundbreaking work in mathematical biology on morphogensis which helps explain animal patterns.
One thing we hadn't thought of, until 2013 that is, was that he could be the emotional centerpoint of a musical. The universal machine is a musical about Alan Turing's life and work that was staged in London in 2013. As part of our series about putting maths on stage and screen, we revisit our 2013 interview with the writer and director David Byrne, actor Richard Delaney, who played Turing, and assistant director Natalie York, to find out how you turn such a story, and the maths in it, into a musical.
We are very grateful to Dominic Brennan, who wrote the music for The universal machine, for giving us permission to use the track Building The Bombe Part Two from the show.
The universal machine poster detail.
For more information:
This is the second part of our mini series focussing on mathematics coming to life on stage and in film. We revisit our 2008 interview with mathematician and actor Victoria Gould and mathematician Marcus DuSautoy, who were both involved in the development of the play A disappearing number produced by Complicité. The play explores the fascinating collaboration between the mathematicians GH Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. Find out how theatre can embody, not just the story of the people involved, but also the mathematics itself.
You can also read about A disappearing number in this article. To find out more about Victoria Gould's career as an actor and mathematician, see this article or listen to last week's episode of Maths on the move.
In the summer we came across news coverage claiming that scientist were on the verge of discovering a fundamental force of nature they hadn't previously known about. This would be a fifth force, in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.
Such a discovery would be quite a revolution, so we went to talk to our friend Ben Allanach, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, to find out more. Ben explained the science, gave us his personal hunch regarding the experimental results, and provided a fascinating glimpse into life at the cutting edge of physics.
Ben Allanach
To find out more about the topics explored in this podcast, see The physics of elementary particles and A brief introduction to quantum field theory. Click here to see all our content featuring Ben Allanach.
Victoria Gould has always known she would be an actor, and went straight from studying arts at school to running her own theatre company. But she eventually had to come clean about her guilty secret - she loves maths - and has since managed to combine a career as a research mathematician and teacher with a successful acting career on television and in theatre. For this episode of Maths on the move, which was recorded in 2008, Victoria told us what it's like being an actor and a mathematician and how those two, at first sight very different, areas overlap.
You can also read the article accompanying this podcast, and find out more about the play A disappearing number here.
We were inspired to revisit this episode when we met mathematical film maker Ekaterina Eremenko at this year's Heidelberg Laureate Forum. Eremenko's latest film, Solving the Bonnet problem, really gets across that mathematics is a dynamic, and sometimes dramatic, pursuit that can be well suited for the stage and screen. You can watch the trailer here.
How many dimensions are there? We might not be aware, but we are actually used to living in a curved, multidimensional Universe. In this episode theoretical physicist David Berman explains how, and he also dives into the world of string theory which predicts that the Universe has ten dimensions, some of which are hidden from our view. We first published this episode back in 2012, as part of our Science fiction, science fact project.
David Berman
You can also read the articles that accompany this podcast: Kaluza, Klein and their story of a fifth dimension and The ten dimensions of string theory.
n this podcast we bring you breaking news from the world of topology! Four mathematicians, all in earlier stages of their career, have resolved the long-standing telescope conjecture which explores holes in spheres – of any dimension!
The result was announced this summer at a conference organised by Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge (INI).
We talk to two of these mathematicians, Tomer Schlank and Jeremy Hahn, to get a gist of this high-powered result in pure mathematics, which is nevertheless wonderfully intuitive. So fasten your seatbelt and join us on a trip into the wonderful world of homotopy theory!
Jeremy Hahn Tomer Schlank
To read an article exploring the telescope conjecture and for some background reading, see here.
This content was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI). The INI is an international research centre in Cambridge which attracts leading mathematicians from all over the world. You can find all the content from the collaboration here.
How is mathematics related to frequency related to pitch? We found out from our favourite music correspondent, Oli Freke! In this podcast you can hear how the music we love emerges from pure mathematical beats.
This podcast was originally released earlier this year when musician Ed Sheeran was in the news as he was being sued for similarities between his song Thinking out loud from 2014, and Marvin Gaye's song Get it on from 1973. But, given the way we write music to fit into specific genres, is it possible to write unique music with the limited quantity of notes and chords available?
After first answering this question in this podcast, Oli has now written a brilliant article, From clicks to chords, where you can see some of the connections between maths and music come to life.
You can find out more about the maths in music in Oli's articles other – How many melodies are there? and Sine language. And you can find more of Oli's music, and his book "Synthesizer Evolution", here!
The music in this podcast comes from, of course, Oli Freke! The track is called Funk Off.
We humans have many rules and regulations surrounding noise — because we recognise that noise disruption is annoying, stressful, and ultimately robs us of our health.
Spare a thought for whales then, who have to put up with the constant noise caused by shipping and the construction of oil rigs and wind farms in the oceans. There are concerns that the noise pollution we cause bothers and confused the whales so much, it may even disrupt their ability to go on their annual migrations.
In this episode we talk to Stuart Johnston of the University of Melbourne in Australia who uses mathematics to understand the migration of whales and how it might be impacted by human generated noise. The ultimate aim is to figure out what we can do to mitigate the disruption we cause.
We met Stuart at a workshop on collective behaviour, which took place at the Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) in Cambridge in August 2023. The workshop was part of a 6-month research programme on the mathematics of movement which is currently taking place at the INI.
This content was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI). The INI is an international research centre in Cambridge which attracts leading mathematicians from all over the world. You can find all the content from the collaboration here.
This week we co-host a fascinating episode of the Isaac Newton Institute's Living Proof podcast. In the episode Dan Aspel speaks to Coralie Colmez, author of the young adult novel The irrational diary of Clara Valentine, recently chosen as one of Chalkdust magazine's books of the year. Coralie’s ambition was to write a story rich in both mathematics and mystery, with the Chalkdust review highlighting that "the explanations of the solutions to these puzzles are blended into the story expertly". In this interview, Coralie explains further about the books origins, its intentions and what comes next.
Find out more about Coralie's writing, download a free PDF of the book, and find links to other online sellers here.
This podcast is part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
Did you do anything fun on your summer holidays? The mathematicians in this podcast spent some of their summer helping to create the perfect smoothie, getting the most sugar out of sugar cane, and attacking other important real-world problems.
They did all this attending the Graduate Modelling Camp, which is organised every year by the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in Cambridge. The camp gives early career mathematicians a chance to experience life as a mathematical modeller by challenging them to solve problems posed by industry.
We talk to Chris Breward, who has been helping to run the modelling camp for many years, to PhD students Emily Cook, Julian Glover, and Michael Smah, who attended this year's camp, and to Ashleigh Hutchinson who took part as a mentor. They all enjoyed the camp immensely — find out why in this podcast!
This content was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) and the Newton Gateway to Mathematics. The INI is an international research centre in Cambridge which attracts leading mathematicians from all over the world. The Newton Gateway is the impact initiative of the INI, which engages with users of mathematics. You can find all the content from the collaboration here.
There's been some huge news in the world of cosmology: for the first time scientists have detected a low frequency hum of gravitational waves. The new results were published by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, NANOGrav for short. The NANOGrav team were not alone — they coordinated with collaborations in Europe, India, Australia, and China, which released similar findings at the same time.
In this podcast we find out what these new results mean, and why they're so exciting, with Michalis Agathos, Amelia Drew, and Ulrich Sperhake of the Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Join us on this fascinating, and slightly mind-bending, cosmic ride!
To find out more about the topics discussed in this podcast see:
You might also want to listen to our recent podcast A new map of dark matter.
The illustration above is an artist's rendering of black hole binaries emitting gravitational waves, produced by Olena Shmahalo for NANOGrav and reproduced here under CC BY 4.0.
People don't usually think about maths and literature as related subjects, but it turns out that there are plenty of connections between the two. In this podcast we talk to mathematician Sarah Hart about her brilliant book Once upon a time: The wondrous connections between mathematics and literature.
Sarah tells us about the links between poetry and mathematical proof, the maths of Moby dick and the The luminaries, and why mathematical patterns and references can enhance your enjoyment of a book even when you're not aware of them.
To find out more about the problem of squaring the circle, which is mentioned in this podcast, see Mathematical mysteries: Transcendental meditation. To find out more about conic sections, see here.
"I think I'll stop here." This is how, on 23rd June 1993, Andrew Wiles ended his series of lectures at the Isaac Newton Institute (INI), our neighbour here at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. The applause, so witnesses report, was thunderous. Wiles had just announced a proof that had eluded mathematicians for over 350 years: the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
Wiles' announcement, 30 years ago today, was a thrilling moment in mathematical history. But Fermat's Last Theorem is not just the story of one person. Jack Thorne, who works on new mathematics that builds on Wiles' proof, told us that it is actually a story of people talking to each other over a period of centuries.
To celebrate 30 years since that exciting moment, we were lucky enough to speak with Andrew Wiles and Jack Thorne, and also to Tom Körner, who was there the day Wiles announced the proof.
This is a special joint episode with the INI's Living Proof podcast, made in collaboration with our friend Dan Aspel, from the INI.
You can find out more about Fermat's Last Theorem in the article that accompanies this podcast, and in this collection of further reading.
This podcast was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from the collaboration here.
The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
Chocolate and mayonnaise are two of our all time favourite foods, so we were very happy to get the chance to talk to Valerie Pinfield, Professor of Engineering at Loughborough University, who has used maths to work on both chocolate and mayonnaise.
We talked to Valerie at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge where Valerie is currently co-organising a research programme on the mathematical theory and applications of multiple wave scattering. As we will find out, this has a huge range of applications, from understanding mayonnaise to making invisibility cloaks.
While Valerie is a professor at the University of Loughborough now, her career path has also involved work in industry and time out for kids, so we also asked her for some advice for women mathematicians and scientists wondering how to build their career.
This podcast was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from the collaboration here.
The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
You might have heard in the news recently that musician Ed Sheeran was being sued for similarities between his song Thinking out loud from 2014, and Marvin Gaye's song Get it on from 1973. But, given the way we write music to fit into specific genres, is it possible to write unique music with the limited quantity of notes and chords available? In this podcast Oli Freke, our favourite music correspondent, answers this question and plays us real examples of the connections between maths and music.
You can find out more about the maths in music in Oli's articles – How many melodies are there? and Sine language. And you can find more of Oli's music, and his book "Synthesizer Evolution", here!
The music in this podcast comes from, of course, Oli Freke! The track is called Funk Off.
Did you know that we don't know what 85% of the stuff in our Universe is made of? This mysterious 85% is known as dark matter. We can't see it because it doesn't emit or reflect light, but we know it's there because it exerts a gravitational pull on stars and galaxies, and also bends the path of light.
In this podcast we talk to Blake Sherwin about a brand new map of dark matter that has been produced by a consortium of scientists using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope which sits high up in the Chilean Andes. Sherwin is part of that consortium, and he is also Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics the University of Cambridge and a member of the Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge.
Sherwin tells us how you go about producing a map of something you can't see, in how far the new map solves the so-called crisis of cosmology, and whether we will ever find out what dark matter is made of.
To find out more about dark matter, read Maths in a minute: Dark matter and What is dark matter? And you can find all the details about the research by Blake, his PhD student Frank Qu, and their colleagues in their series of papers here, here and here.
The music in this podcast is by eusa and the track is called Plankton. you can find their music on Soundcloud.
Was the mathematical modelling projecting the course of the pandemic too pessimistic, or were the projections justified? Matt Keeling tells our colleagues Ed Hill and Laura Guzmán-Rincón from SBIDER about some of the COVID models that fed into public policy.----more----
Matt Keeling
----more----We're very pleased to host this episode of SBIDER Presents, one of the podcasts produced by the Zeeman Institute for Systems Biology & Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research (SBIDER). You can find out more about the work Matt Keeling is discussing in this podcast in our article Shining a light on COVID modelling. And you can hear more from Ed and Laura in our previous podcasts On the mathematical frontline: Ed Hill and Climate change and ready meals: Challenges for epidemiologists.
This podcast is part of our collaboration with JUNIPER, the Joint UNIversity Pandemic and Epidemic Response modelling consortium. JUNIPER comprises academics from the universities of Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol, Exeter, Oxford, Manchester, and Lancaster, who are using a range of mathematical and statistical techniques to address pressing questions about the control of COVID-19. You can see more content produced with JUNIPER here.
In a tank in an underground laboratory in Cambridge a little green alga is executing a powerful breaststroke. It belongs to a group of algae called volvocales and it doesn't have a brain. So how can it coordinate its tiny little "arms" to perform motions worthy of an Olympic swimmer?
Algae going through their paces. (Movies: Kirsty Wan and Raymond E. Goldstein, for more information see this paper)
In 2019 we visited Ray Goldstein, Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems at Cambridge, and he explained how algae manage to synchronise their so-called flagella, what this means for human physiology, and how it sheds light on the evolution of multi-cellular organisms from single-celled ones.
You can also read our article on Goldstein's work with volvocales, or watch an interview with Goldstein in this video.
Sound effects in this podcast are from Robinhood76 and 16HPanskaKanclirova_Victoria on freesound.org.
This podcast was partially funded by the European Mathematical Society.
What is infinity? What is infinity plus 100? What is infinity plus infinity?
Today's podcast was inspired by questions sent in by our friend Ash. To answer Ash's questions we take a trip to our favourite hotel, and we revisit our 2012 interview with our late boss, John D. Barrow, when we asked him – does infinity exist? Listen to the podcast to find out how infinity can corrupt the youth, why subtracting infinities can give you the right answer, and the weirdness that might be lurking out there in the cosmos...
Image created by FAVIO.
You can read more about infinity on plus.maths.org. And if you have a question about life, the universe and everything you'd like us to answer – email us as [email protected] or contact us on twitter.
During the pandemic we all learnt to value the work of epidemiologists, whose mathematical models are essential in giving us an idea of where an epidemic might be heading. But just as there's a wide range of infectious diseases apart from COVID, so there's also a wide range of research questions epidemiologists ask.
In this podcast we talk to researchers Helena Stage and Laura Guzmán-Rincón about two such questions. One concerns the fact that a warming climate allows disease-carrying mosquitoes to live in places they previously found too cold. The other asks how you might detect a hidden outbreak of food poisoning coming, for example, from ready meals having been contaminated way back in the production chain. Both require clever mathematical ideas and ingenious detective work.
Helena and Laura are members of the JUNIPER modelling consortium. We met them at a JUNIPER research meeting which took place at the University of Warwick in March 2023.
This podcast is part of our collaboration with JUNIPER, the Joint UNIversity Pandemic and Epidemic Response modelling consortium.
JUNIPER comprises academics from the universities of Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol, Exeter, Oxford, Manchester, and Lancaster, who are using a range of mathematical and statistical techniques to address pressing question about the control of COVID-19. You can see more content produced with JUNIPER here.
"What's a statistician's favourite sandwich filling?..."
Timandra Harkness – presenter, writer, comedian and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society – told our friends Dan Aspel and Maha Kaouri her favourite maths joke in this episode of the Living Proof podcast from the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
Timandra Harkness
Timandra brilliantly chaired several sessions of the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics. In this podcast Timandra spoke about how to make maths funny, and how she came to fall in love with mathematics from an arts and humanities background.
Oh and the punchline to Timandra's favourite joke? You'll have to listen to the podcast to find out!
00:00 – Introduction
00:44 – Welcome, discussing Communicating mathematics for the public
03:38 – Origins of Timandra's interest in maths, understanding "enough to ask the right questions"
07:50 – Discussing Timandra's book Big Data – Does Size Matter?
11:10 – Other current projects and shows, writing another book about "why everything is personalised"
13:13 – Mingling an arts background with a mathematics focus, "coming out as a closet mathematician"
17:10 – How do you make maths funny as a comedian? … "What's a statistician's favourite sandwich filling?"
21:10 – Future projects
This podcast was inspired by the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in January 2023.
(If that joke tickles your funny bone – try this one!)
This podcast is part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
Having empathy with your audience – with all your audiences – is the first step for making your content accessible. Hannah Thomas of the Government Analysis Function explained this in her brilliant talk at the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics. Hannah's talk was full of insights and practical ideas on how to make all content published online easy to access and use for all users, regardless of impairment, medical condition or disability.
Our friends Dan Aspel and Maha Kaouri spoke to Hannah for this episode of the Living Proof podcast from the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. Hannah told them about her work helping to make government data more accessible, the common pitfalls of data accessibility and tips and tricks that can help. They also find our why more people used to get married at the end of the tax year...
Hannah Thomas speaking at the Communicating mathematics for the public event
00:00 – Introduction
00:44 – Welcome, discussing “Communicating Mathematics for the Public” (“as entertaining as Disneyland Paris and definitely more inspiring”)
04:20 – All about Government Analysis Function, a love of data journalism, career history
13:35 – Visualising data and making digital information accessible
21:40 – Common accessibility pitfalls
24:20 – Plans for the future… e-learning resources
This podcast was inspired by the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in January 2023. For more information we strongly recommend you watch Hannah's talk from that event, Data Visualisation and Digital Accessibility: What We Can Do to Help.
This podcast is part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
We are very happy to work closely with our neighbours, the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI), to help explain, celebrate and publicise the research that happens at the Institute. But what challenges does that present? And why should it happen in the first place?
Following on from the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics we spoke to the INI's Dan Aspel about our work in this episode of the Living Proof podcast. You can find all the content from our collaboration here.
Communicating from the mathematical frontiers - from plotting a path to the highest peak to exploring the hidden depths.
00:00 – Introduction
00:44 – Welcome, discussing Communicating Mathematics for the Public, the importance of trustworthiness
05:30 – Who you're speaking to vs what you're saying
07:38 – Making higher mathematics accessible to audiences: "any bit of mathematics either comes from somewhere, or is going somewhere, or both"
14:20 – Are there incommunicable subjects?
16:55 – The rarity of maths "headlines"
19:25 – The partnership between INI and Plus magazine – why is it important?
23:25 – Are some topics inherently more interesting?
25:26 – What is the end goal of maths communication? "I would love it if people could see how maths is everywhere… that maths is a language of rhythms and patterns"
30:00 – Looking to the future
This podcast was inspired by the Communicating mathematics for the public event at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in January 2023. You can watch our talk from that event, Trust, time and truth, that was about our collaboration with JUNIPER modelling consortium.
This podcast is part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
Here at Plus, we were very grateful for Tom Irving's work during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was the Co-Head of the secretariat of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling group (otherwise known as SPI-M). One of his responsibilities was writing the consensus statements that came out of SPI-M, summarising current understanding of the mathematical advice to the UK government. We found these incredibly useful when reporting on the pandemic.
We finally met Tom when we were both speaking at the Communicating mathematics for the public event in January 2023 at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in Cambridge. In this podcast Tom tells us about providing a bridge between policy and mathematics, the importance of transparency, and the joy of the R number being discussed at the hairdressers.
This episode is part of On the mathematical frontline, a special series of the Plus podcast which explores the work of mathematicians grappling with the unprecedented challenge of studying a live pandemic unfolding in front of their eyes. In this series we interview our colleagues in the JUNIPER modelling consortium, whose research and insights have fed into SPI-M and SAGE - the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, both of whom advise the UK government on the scientific aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
You can watch Tom's talk on the Challenges in Communicating the Results of SAGE's Covid Modelling, and you can find all our work covering COVID-19 here.
This podcast is part of our collaboration with JUNIPER, the Joint UNIversity Pandemic and Epidemic Response modelling consortium.
JUNIPER comprises academics from the universities of Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol, Exeter, Oxford, Manchester, and Lancaster, who are using a range of mathematical and statistical techniques to address pressing question about the control of COVID-19. You can see more content produced with JUNIPER here.
If you've ever been lucky enough to meet David Spiegelhalter, or hear him talk in person or on TV or radio, you'll know he tells a great story. And the stories he told in his 2015 book Sex by numbers were fascinating and highly entertaining, as well giving us the tools to critically assess the statistics we read every day in the news. And sex is back in the news as the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles that featured in his book is being conducted again this year. Who knows what stories will come out of the next survey?
We were very happy to start 2023 with catching up with David (the first time in person since the pandemic!) at the Communicating mathematics for the public event that we were both speaking at in the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in Cambridge. We hope you enjoy this interview with him from 2015, where he gives us some of his favourite snippets from the book, and some easy ways you can think more critically about statistics. (You can also watch our interview as a video or read the associated article.)
The world needs to move to renewable energy sources, such as solar or wind. The problem with those is that they're intermittent. That's because the Sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. What we need, then, are efficient ways of storing energy: efficient batteries. Currently lithium ion batteries are being used but there are issues around their cost, how long they last, and their safety.
Donald Sadoway
Hope is on the horizon in the form of liquid metal batteries. At a recent event organised by the Newton Gateway to Mathematics in Cambridge we met Donald Sadoway who played a very important role in pioneering these batteries. In this podcast he talks to us what they are and why they are better, when they'll be commercially available, and why sometimes it's best to ignore the experts.
To watch a talk given by Sadoway at the Newton Gateway event go to the Newton Gateway website. And to find out more about magnetohydrodynamics, a theory that has been used to describe liquid metal batteries, go here.
Will climate change leave the region you live in hotter and drier, or wetter and stormier? It's a question of utmost importance in many areas of the world, yet it's one that climate scientists can't answer. This is why world-leading climate scientist Tim Palmer is calling for a high-performance supercomputing centre dedicated entirely to climate change.
Tim Palmer.
We were lucky enough to meet Palmer at a recent event organised by the Newton Gateway to Mathematics In Cambridge. In this podcast we talk to Palmer about this call for a "CERN for climate change" and why climate forecasting requires so much computing power in the first place. Palmer also tells us about a technique for dealing with uncertainty called ensemble forecasting, and what his work has taught him about uncertainty more generally, as it crops up in many areas of life and nature.
Tim Palmer's new book on the science of uncertainty, The primacy of doubt, is published by Oxford University Press. To learn more about climate models see this article. To learn about weather forecasting see this article, and to read about uncertainty more general click here.
This podcast was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
There are some numbers you can rely on. The speed of light, c, is 299,792,458 ms-1. The gravitational constant, G, is 6.674 x 10-11m3kg-1s-2. These are examples of what are often called the constants of nature – fundamental physical quantities that seem to be the same everywhere, and unchanging over time.
Or are they? Today would have been our wonderful boss, John D. Barrow's, 70th birthday. And to celebrate him and his work we look at the answer to this question in today's podcast.
John D. Barrow (Image credit: Tom Powell)
Over time, since these constants were discovered, people had hoped to find a theory, a great theory of everything, that would explain why these particular values had arisen. However, as John explains in this podcast, developments in recent decades, in areas such as string theory, have shown that these constants could take any value. And this provided the motivation for studying whether such constants might be changing in value.
John, together with the astronomer John Webb, initiated an observational programme looking at the light produced by quasars in the distant Universe. They developed new techniques to analyse the light to test if certain constants had the same value near a quasar as they did in laboratories here on Earth.
You can find out more about this aspect of John’s work in this podcast, and read more in his accompanying article: Are the constants of nature really constant? And you can find out more about some of John's other work and interests in his many Plus articles.
This interview was recorded in 2009 as part of our celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, where we tried to answer the questions everyone wanted to ask about the Universe
Amid much controversy, the 2022 World Cup has begun and the action has now moved onto the football pitches inside the many newly built stadiums in Qatar. But how are these stadiums turned from architectural sketches into real buildings?
For this week's episode we delve back far into our archive to hear from Paul Shepherd from the University of Bath, an expert in building football stadiums such as the famous Emirates stadium in London. In this interview, first recorded back in 2007, he tells us about what kind of things are important in building a stadium, how maths is an integral part of the design process, and why his work required him to listen to Belgian techno.
The Emirates Stadium, home of the Arsenal football club. (Photo Arne Müseler – CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
You can hear more about the maths behind famous sporting buildings in our recent podcast How the velodrome found its form. And you can find out much more about the maths behind football and sports, and behind engineering and architecture here on Plus.
Yuriy Semenov was forced to leave Ukraine, and his work at the Institute of Hydromechanics at the National Academy of Sciences, due to the Russian invasion of February 2022. He found sanctuary in Britain at the University of East Anglia. In part this was thanks to the Solidarity for mathematicians programme ran by the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI).
In this podcast Yuriy speaks to the INI's Dan Aspel and shares his experience of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and why the work of a mathematicians is always possible.
We are very pleased to host this episode of the Living Proof podcast as part of our collaboration with the wonderful INI.
Professor Nataliya Vaisfel'd was until recently a mathematician at Odesa I. I. Mechnykov National University. Forced to flee Ukraine after the Russian invasion of her home country in February of this year, Nataliya has since travelled across Europe with her wheelchair-bound mother and their dogs, eventually finding sanctuary in Britain. In part this was thanks to the Solidarity for mathematicians programme ran by the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. She is now a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London.
In this podcast Nataliya tells her story in conversation with the INI's Dan Aspel.
We are very pleased to host this episode of the Living Proof podcast as part of our collaboration with the wonderful INI.
This podcast was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.
Over the summer we were lucky enough to meet some young female mathematicians who were just finishing up their summer research projects with the Philippa Fawcett Internship Programme and the Cambridge Mathematics Placements programme.
On our way to the writing workshops we were running with these women, we walked past six inspiring portraits of female mathematicians from Cambridge. These form part of the Women of Mathematics photo exhibition, which celebrates female mathematicians from institutions throughout Europe. It's been a great pleasure revisiting our our 2017 Women of Mathematics interviews with these mathematicians about their work and their mathematical lives in this special series of podcasts.
Today's podcast is the final one of this series, and we are very pleased to revisit our interview with Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, now professor of applied mathematics and a very good friend of us here at plus.maths.org. Carola works on the interface between machine learning and the mathematics of image analysis.
You can read more about some of Carola's recent work, including how artificial intelligence can support medical doctors in their work, and the INTEGRAL project, a collaboration with Indian researchers on how machine learning can make sense of the vast amounts of remote sensing data that is available to help conserve forests and improve life in cities.
To find a transcript and video of this interview, meet the other female mathematicians, and find out more about the exhibition, see here.
In this podcast we are very happy to revisit our 2017 interview with Holly Krieger, one of the six Cambridge mathematicians whose portrait is included in the Women of Mathematics photo exhibition. Krieger works in dynamical systems theory, particularly on chaotic systems. In this interview she told us about the joys of learning and conversations with colleagues.
Holly Krieger (Photograph by Henry Kenyon)
You can find more about Krieger's prize winning work in Dynamic numbers and you see her talk about complex numbers and dynamical systems in our collection Complex numbers: Why do we love them?
To find a transcript and video of this interview, meet the other female mathematicians, and find out more about the exhibition, see here.
In this podcast we are very happy to revist our 2017 interview with Julia Gog - Professor of Mathematical Biology and a very good friend of us here at plus.maths.org. Over the last two years we've been working closely with Gog and her colleagues at the JUNIPER modelling consortium, communicating their work on the mathematical front-line of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this interview, first recorded to celebrate the addition of six portraits of Cambridge mathematicians to the Women of Mathematics photo exhibition, Gog told us about the buzz of mathematical research, and how maths can help you do good in the world.
To find a transcript and video of this interview, meet the other female mathematicians, and find out more about the exhibition, see here. And you can read more about the work of Gog and her JUNIPER colleagues here.
In this podcast we revisit our 2017 interview with Anne-Christine Davis, Professor of Theoretical Physics. Anne was the first female professor in the Maths faculty at the University of Cambridge. In this interview, first recorded to celebrate the addition of six portraits of Cambridge mathematicians to the Women of Mathematics photo exhibition, Davis told us that over her long career she had seen attitudes towards women change for the better. But as you'll hear she had to put up with quite a lot at the start!
To find a transcript and video of this interview, meet the other female mathematicians, and find out more about the exhibition, see here. And you can read more about Davis' recent prize-winning research in our article On the road to dark energy (with chameleons).
Last week we started a special series of podcasts revisiting the Women of Mathematics photo exhibition, which celebrates female mathematicians from institutions throughout Europe. When the University of Cambridge hosted the exhibition in 2017, we had the opportunity to interview the six Cambridge mathematicians who's portraits appear in the exhibition about their work and their mathematical lives.
In this podcast we revisit our 2017 interview with Nilanjana Datta - now a professor in quantum information theory., who told us why she loves maths and also about some of the challenges she has faced as a female mathematician.
You can see all the Cambridge portraits and find out more about the work and mathematical lives of these women here. And stay tuned to this podcast for the rest of the interviews with these brilliant women of mathematics over the coming weeks.
The music in this podcast comes from the band eusa. The track is called Plankton.
This month we had the pleasure of meeting some young female mathematicians who were just finishing up their summer research projects with the Philippa Fawcett Internship Programme and the Cambridge Mathematics Placements programme.
On our way to the writing workshops we were running with these women, we walked past six inspiring portraits of female mathematicians from Cambridge. These form part of the Women of Mathematics photo exhibition, which celebrates female mathematicians from institutions throughout Europe. When the University of Cambridge hosted the exhibition in 2017, we had the opportunity to interview these Cambridge mathematicians about their work and their mathematical lives.
In this podcast we revisit our 2017 interview with Natalia Berloff, Professor of Applied Mathematics, who told us why maths is like a treasure hunt, and shared some of her adventures in the world of maths.
You can see all the Cambridge portraits and find out more about the work and mathematical lives of these women here. And stay tuned to this podcast for the rest of the interviews with these brilliant women of mathematics over the coming weeks.
The music in this podcast comes from the band eusa. The track is called Plankton.
In this podcast, first published in August 2020, we hear from machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, who believes that creating a true artificial intelligence will only be possible once machines have something that babies are born with: the ability to interact with the world, observe what happens, and adapt to the consequences of their actions.
Yoshua Bengio (Photo copyright: Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation)
We'll find out how such agency helps us learn, what it could mean for computers to have it too, and hear about Bengio's work introducing it into an area of machine learning called deep learning.
And, in honour of the mathematician Ron Graham who sadly passed away in July 2020, we celebrate our very favourite number, Graham's number, by telling you about it in just one minute.
You can find out more about Bengio's take on agency in this series of articles, about machine learning in this article, and about Graham's number in this article.
The music in the podcast is by Oli Freke and the track is called Line-1. You can listen to more of Oli's music on Soundcloud.
This podcast was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute (INI) – you can find out more of our work with the INI here.
Artificial intelligence and machines that train themselves might sound like a plot from a science fiction movie, but these things are already part of our everyday lives.
How can a machine learn to distinguish a picture of a cat from a picture of a dog?
At the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in 2019, Chris Budd, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, talked us through the basics of how these learning machines tick. While Raj Reddy, Turing Award winner and artificial intelligence pioneer, talked to us about his grand challenges in artificial intelligence, and why time travel and immortality might be easier to achieve than creating a machine that rivals human intelligence.
To find out more about machine learning, its history, and some of the moral questions it raises, read the series of articles based on Chris' Gresham College lectures.
The music in this podcast is from Oli Freke, and the track is called "Experimental 5". You can find his music at soundcloud.
This podcast, first published in August 2020, was partially funded by the European Mathematical Society.
To celebrate the Commonwealth Games happening this week in the UK we are visiting one of the venues, the velodrome in the Lee Valley VeloPark in London. The velodrome, with its striking curved shape, was built for the London 2012 Olympics. In the run up to the 2012 Olympics, we talked to structural engineers Andrew Weir and Pete Winslow from Expedition Engineering, who were part of the design team for the velodrome, about how mathematics helped create its iconic shape.
Sir Chris Hoy leads the GB Cycling Team during the official opening of the Velodrome (Photograph by David Poultney)
We hope you enjoy revisiting this conversation, and you can find out more in this accompanying article. Good luck to all the athletes completing in the 2022 Commonwealth Games!
June Huh has won one of this year's Fields Medals at the International Congress of Mathematicians. The Fields Medal is one of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics. It is awarded every four years "to recognise outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement". Up to four mathematicians up to the age of 40 are awarded a Fields Medal each time.
June Huh. Photo: Lance Murphey.
In this podcast, which comes to you from the opening days of the ICM 2022 in Helsinki, we talk to Huh about is relatively late start in mathematics, about maths you can "feel and touch", and why maths mirrors who we are as a species.
You can read about Huh's work in this short introduction and this in-depth article. See here for all our coverage of the prizes awarded at the ICM 2022.
This content was produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.
Hugo Duminil-Copin has won a 2022 Fields Medal for his work transforming the mathematical theory of phase transitions in statistical physics. Fields Medals count among the highest honours in mathematics and are awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) to researchers up to the age of 40.
Hugo Duminil-Copin (Photo Matteo Fieni, used with permission)
In this podcast, which comes to you from a beautiful lake on day two of the ICM 2022 in Helsinki, we talk to Duminil-Copin about how his work in statistical physics brings together his two loves – maths and physics.
You can read about Duminil-Copin's work in this short introduction and this in-depth article. See here for all our coverage of the prizes awarded at the ICM 2022.
This content was produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.
James Maynard has won a 2022 Fields Medal for "spectacular contributions to number theory". Fields Medals count among the highest honours in mathematics and are awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) to researchers up to the age of 40.
James Maynard (Photo by Ryan Cowan, used with permission)
In this podcast, which comes to you from the opening day of the ICM 2022 in Helsinki, we talk to Maynard about his love for numbers and groundbreaking progress towards something that has eluded mathematician for a very long time: a proof of the twin prime conjecture.
You can read about Maynard's work in this short introduction and this in-depth article. See here for all our coverage of the prizes awarded at the ICM 2022. And to hear from the other Fields Medallists check out existing and upcoming podcast episodes.
This content was produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.
Hello from Helsinki! We are very pleased to be bringing you coverage direct from the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) – one of the highlights of the mathematical calendar. The ICM takes place every four years and it's usually the biggest maths conference of them all, attracting thousands of participants, and also sees the awards of some very prestigious prizes, including the famous Fields Medals.
This year's Congress is a little different – it is being held as a fully virtual event with only the prize ceremonies and lectures taking place in-person in Helsinki, Finland on 5 and 6 July. The rest of the schedule fascinating talks from across the spectrum of maths will take place online over the coming week.
In this podcast we tell you all the winners of all the prizes being announced today at the ICM and bring you an interview with one of them: Maryna Viazovska, who has won a Fields Medal for a ground-breaking result in the theory of sphere packings. Viazovska is only the second woman to receive a Fields Medal, following on from Maryam Mirzakhani, who won it in 2014.
Maryna Viazovska. Photo: Matteo Fieni.
You can find out more about Viazovska's work in our short introduction or our more in-depth article.
To read about the work of all the prize winners, see here. And to hear from the other Fields Medallists watch out for upcoming podcast episodes.
This content was produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.
We are getting very excited - next week is the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM)- one of the highlights of the mathematical calendar! The ICM takes place every four years and it’s the biggest maths conference of them all, attracting thousands of participants, and also sees the awards of some very prestigious prizes, including the famous Fields medal.
We are fortunate to have been able to interview the prize winners in advance of the conference, but that’s top secret and we won’t be revealing the winners till they are announced publicly in Helsinki next week! We're really looking forward to sharing our interviews with you when we meet them in person in Helsinki next week, where we will also bring you all the news from the ICM itself.
But in the meantime, to get us in the mood, let's revisit the 2018 ICM that took place in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. It was a brilliant conference and the podcast you are about to hear was recorded on that very first days of the 2018 ICM, when all the big prizes were announced. You can find all our coverage of the past three ICM’s by going to plus.maths.org and searching for "ICM".
And stay tuned for our special series of podcasts, Maths on the Red Carpet, starting next week, that will bring you all our reporting from this years International Congress of Mathematicians. But for now - enjoy the sounds of the Brazilian forest in this podcast revisiting the exciting first days of the 2018 ICM....
We all have our favoured methods of shuffling cards, but most of us don't think any more about it once we've started playing a game. But there's so much more to be discovered! In this podcast mathematician Cheryl Praeger and magician Will Houstoun reveal the maths and magic behind shuffling cards. And as this podcast, first published in March 2021, was the first podcast we produced in collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute, Dan Aspel also tells us all about the INI!
You can watch Cheryl Praeger talk about the mathematics of shuffling in her Kirk Lecture at the INI in 2020. You can be astounded by Will Houstoun's magic, including the amazing trick we mentioned in the podcast, and find out more about his work as magician in residence at the Imperial College London and Royal College of Music Centre for Performance Science, at his website. And you can read all the details behind the maths and magic of shuffling in their Plus articles: The magic of shuffling and The mathematics of shuffling.
This podcast was inspired by a talk given by Cheryl Praeger as part of the Groups, representations and applications programme at the Isaac Newton Institute. You can find out more about the maths behind this programme here.
In this episode we meet the irrepressible Anita Layton. As well as leading a busy research team, Anita also spends much of her downtime fostering diversity and mentorships throughout her networks, and is professionally engaged across disciplines as distinct as applied mathematics, computer science and the medical sciences. She was also voted one of 2021’s top 100 “Canada’s most powerful women”.
We are very pleased to host this episode of the Living Proof podcast as part of our collaboration with the wonderful Isaac Newton Institute. Plus editor, Marianne Freiberger, joined the INI's Dan Aspel to interview the irrepressible Prof Anita Layton of the University of Waterloo, when she was a guest at INI for a week-long workshop on kinetic theory. You can find out more about this fascinating area of maths on Plus.
Thank you to Dan and the INI for allowing us to host this episode of Living Proof on our podcast. You can find all the content from our collaboration with the INI here.
00:00 – Introduction
00:58 – Welcome
01:50 – Attending the “Frontiers in kinetic equations for plasmas and collective behaviour” workshop
06:44 – How do you stay on top of multiple fields? (“I don’t always understand every single slide in a talk!”)
12:50 – Fostering diversity in the sciences, connecting mentorships between different generations of female mathematicians
17:30 – Mathematics for “social good”? (“It excites me to do something that has meaning, that is impactful”)
19:16 – A personal history in the sciences, “I told you I don’t have a math degree. Let me tell you why…”
24:00 – Connecting kinetic theory, kidneys, blood flow and more
"We all work with exponential growth and we're really, really used to it, but we are still amazed at how fast things take off at the end." This is epidemiologist Matt Keeling talking about how a disease outbreak can still take you by surprise even if you've been working in the field for 25 years.
Matt's team at the University of Warwick has been running one of the main models that have informed UK government on the COVID-19 pandemic. In this podcast Matt tells us about his work on the roadmap out of lockdown, whether the models have been too pessimistic, and what it's been like producing scientific results that carry so much weight.
This episode is part of On the mathematical frontline, a special series of the Plus podcast which explores the work of mathematicians grappling with the unprecedented challenge of studying a live pandemic unfolding in front of their eyes. In this series we interview our colleagues in the JUNIPER modelling consortium, whose research and insights have fed into the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling group (otherwise known as SPI-M) and the now familiar SAGE - the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies , both of whom advise the UK government on the scientific aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To find out more about the work of Matt's team on the roadmap out of lockdown, see this article. You can see all of our content related to JUNIPER here.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for men in the UK and second most for women. During the first lockdown from March 2020, elective cardiac procedures and outpatient consultations were postponed and many appointments have not yet been rescheduled. In addition, those who were suffering from heart conditions did not see their GP or come to hospital. The resulting backlog presents a huge challenge.
In this podcast, first published in March 2021, we talk to cardiologist Ramesh Nadarajah and computer scientist Jessica Enright about a meeting at the Newton Gateway to Mathematics, which brought together clinicians and mathematicians to try to tackle the problem.
The three-day brainstorming session, part of a programme of activities by the Virtual Forum for Knowledge Exchange in Mathematical Sciences, developed potential solutions that could also help reduce waiting lists for other conditions — and demonstrated the astonishing power mathematics can have even when you least expect it.
This podcast, and the accompanying article, were produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute (INI), which we talked about in our last episode. You can find out more of our work with the INI here.
Have you every wondered about what goes on behind the scenes of Plus? Find out in this special guest episode!
We are very pleased to be collaborating with the wonderful Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) in Cambridge. Recently Plus editors Marianne Freiberger and Rachel Thomas appeared on the INI's Living Proof podcast, talking to the INI's communication's manager Dan Aspel.
We talked to Dan about mathematical journalism, spreading a love of numbers, and our new collaboration with the INI. Topics touched upon include our late boss, the wonderful John Barrow, the many joys of being a maths communicator, and the thrill that comes from finding and inspiring audiences with the most unusual of subjects.
Thank you to Dan and the INI for allowing us to host this episode of Living Proof on our podcast. You can find all the content from our collaboration with the INI here.
00:00 – Introduction
00:47 – Welcome
01:30 – A little background about Marianne
04:05 – A little background about Rachel
07:12 – A tribute to John Barrow
08:36 – Choosing communication over research
11:40 – Who is the average +Plus reader?
13:25 – The appeal of +Plus
17:05 – “Maths and hallucinations” (an article with “quite interesting comments”)
22:05 – Collaborating with INI
30:32 – Plans for the future
32:45 – Terrible coffee… but good conversation
It's amazing what you can see now thanks to remote imaging technology! Visiting far away landscapes via satellite images or watching live feeds from a famous street is fun, but remotely gathered images offer exciting opportunities to map and observe the world. The problem is that the vast amount of remotely gathered data now available is useless on its own – we need to have the means to analyse and extract information from those images.
This is exactly what the members of the INTEGRAL project, researchers based at the University of Cambridge and researchers and industry partners in India, are working on. This is an innovative collaboration between people collecting remote sensing data – such as satellite images of forests and video from traffic cameras – and researchers developing the technology to analyse those remotely gathered images to answer meaningful questions.
Some of the members of the INTEGRAL team who spoke to us over zoom. From top left: Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, James Woodcock, Angelica Aviles-Rivero, Saurabh Pandey, Sanjay Bisht, Debmita Bandyopadhyay, Rihuan Ke, David Coomes.
In this podcast we talk to some of the members of the INTEGRAL team about the innovative machine learning approaches they are developing to understand remotely gathered images, and the significant impact these technologies can have on the world. Our thanks to Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, James Woodcock, Angelica Aviles Rivero, Debmita Bandyopadhyay, Rihuan Ke and David Coomes, all from the University of Cambridge, and to Saurabh Pandey from KritiKal Solutions and Sanjay Bisht from IORA Ecological Solutions, both based in India.
You can read more about the INTEGRAL team's work in Seeing traffic through new eyes and about their new AI approaches in Maths in a minute: Semi-supervised machine learning. And you can find much more information about machine learning and image analysis on Plus.
How do you go about predicting something as complex as the Earth's climate? In this podcast — featuring climate modelling experts Emily Shuckburgh and Chris Budd — we explore what those climate models look like, the uncertainties involved in climate modelling, and also why the predictions need to be taken seriously despite those uncertainties.
We also look at the simplest climate model of them all— the energy balance model — and explain the famous butterfly effect in just one minute.
Emily Shuckburgh is a mathematician and climate scientist and Director of Cambridge Zero. The podcast features clips from Emily Shuckburgh's talk at the Cambridge Festival in March 2021, which was hosted by the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge. You can watch the full talk here.
Chris Budd OBE is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, who works on climate models. You can read Budd's Plus article about climate modelling here.
In this week's podcast we reach into our archive for a favourite story we first heard back in 2010!
The quantum world is usually associated with the weirder end of physics, including strange phenomena like superposition or quantum entanglement, the "spooky action at a distance" as Einstein called it. But it turns out that quantum mechanical processes occur in living systems too. Some species of birds use quantum mechanics to navigate and studying how they do it might actually help us with building quantum computers.
Back in 2010 we spoke to the physicists Simon Benjamin and Erik Gauger at the conference Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality at the University of Oxford to find out more.
For more information you can read our ridiculously short introduction to some basic quantum mechanics, and the accompanying article for this podcast.
Although people often talk about the links between maths and music, if you're neither a mathematician nor a musician these links might not be that obvious. In this podcast we get to explore the connection by going on a tour of the La La Lab exhibition with curator Daniel Ramos, talk to Jürgen Richter-Gebert, who created some of the exhibits, and asked Andreas Matt about the work of Imaginary, the group that produced this exhibition.
We were lucky enough to visit the La La Lab exhibition in person when it opened in September 2019 as part of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. You might not be able to visit in person today, but you can still visit the exhibition virtually at Imaginary.
You can find out more about maths and music, Fourier analysis, Fibonacci, Manjul Bhargava and the Heidelberg Laureate Forum on Plus. And you can find detailed mathematical explanations of the La La Lab exhibitions in their excellent exhibition booklet.
(The image in this podcast is of the Tonnetz exhibit at the La La Lab Exhibition Image © Wanda Domínguez / Imaginary)
Like many early career researchers, Francesca Scarabel has moved around the world to take the first steps in her career: from her home in Italy, to Finland for her PhD, to Hungary and Canada for postdoctoral research. Now she works at the University of Manchester as part of the JUNIPER modelling consortium.
We spoke to Francesca about what it's like being part of the mathematical emergency response, the importance of local knowledge, and not being afraid to share your ideas.
You can read more about the work Francesca mentions in this podcast in Understanding waning immunity.
This podcast was produced as part of our collaboration with the JUNIPER, the Joint UNIversity Pandemic and Epidemic Response modelling consortium.
The Mathematical frontline podcast is about the mathematicians who are grappling with the unprecedented challenge of studying a live pandemic unfolding in front of their eyes.
In this podcast we are really pleased to talk to Ed Hill, a member of the modelling consortium from the University of Warwick, where he is also part of the Zeeman Institute for Systems Biology & Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research group (SBIDER). Ed tells us about his journey through the pandemic, his contribution to keeping work places and universities safe, and the importance of pacing yourself.
To read about some of the work Ed mentions in this podcast see the articles Pandemics and psychology and COVID-19 and universities: What do we know?
This podcast was produced as part of our collaborations with JUNIPER, the Joint UNIversity Pandemic and Epidemic Response modelling consortium, and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI).
Like many couples, Ellen Brooks Pollock and Leon Danon, have had to make it through the pandemic juggling lockdowns, child care and work. But unlike many of us, they have also both been working together on the mathematical front line of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ellen and Leon are both both from the University of Bristol. The are members of the JUNIPER consortium of modelling groups from across the UK whose research and insights feed into the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling group (otherwise known as SPI-M) and SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, both of which advise the UK government on the scientific aspects of the pandemic.
If you or someone you loved found yourself living alone during the various lockdowns you benefitted directly from Ellen and Leon's work: as we find out in the podcast, it was their work on household bubbling which showed that these support bubbles were safe.
We spoke to Ellen and Leon in July 2021 for our special podcast series On the mathematical front line. The series features epidemiologists whose efforts have been crucial in the fight against the pandemic. They are the people who make sense of the data to estimate things like the R number, and who make the mathematical models that inform (and sometimes do not inform) government policy.
Mike Tildesley is now a professor in the Zeeman Institute for Systems Biology and Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research at the University of Warwick - but he started out doing a PhD in astrophysics, which is far literally and mathematically from studying the spread of diseases. We talked to Mike in July 2021 about his unusual route into epidemiology, the work he's doing on the pandemic, and about the highs and lows of working on the mathematical frontline.
Mike is a member of the JUNIPER modelling consortium, and a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling group (SPI-M) that advises the government on the scientific aspects of the pandemic. This is the second episode of our special podcast series On the mathematical frontline, where we talk to the mathematicians working on the COVID-19 pandemic. We explore the maths they do, how they go about it, and what impact their work on the pandemic has had on their lives.
Over the last two years we have done a lot of reporting on the maths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Behind the maths there are of course people — those mathematicians who make the epidemiological models that do (and sometimes do not do not) inform government policy, who are grappling with the unprecedented challenge of coming to grips with a live pandemic unfolding in front of their eyes.
Our special podcast series, On the mathematical frontline, is about those people. It explores the maths they do, how they go about it, and the impact it has on their personal lives.
The first person we spoke to for this series back in February 2021 was Julia Gog, Professor of Mathematical Biology at the University of Cambridge, participant of SAGE and member of the epidemic modelling group SPI-M.
Gog is also a founding member of the JUNIPER modelling consortium we are collaborating with, and which you'll hear more about in the podcast.
So what is it like working on the mathematical frontline? Find out more with Julia Gog!
Today, 23 March 2022, marks two years since the UK locked down for the first time in the COVID-19 pandemic. We relaunch the Plus podcast by looking back to where our pandemic coverage all began, by revisiting our podcast from April 2020.
Back in March and April 2020 one thing was on everybody's mind: the novel coronavirus - now better known as COVID-19. In this podcast we spoke to two people who have become very familiar to many of us over the last two years. We reported on our first COVID-19 conversation with Julia Gog, an epidemiologist who has been informing the Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). Julia is now a close collaborator with us here at Plus as part of the JUNIPER modelling consortium (as we'll find out in the next podcast). We also spoke with David Spiegelhalter, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, who is now a familiar figure through his frequent appearance on radio, TV and in print giving clear and calm explanations about the numbers behind the pandemic. David told us about how to communicate science during a crisis. And, at the end of the podcast, we had a go at explaining the maths of herd immunity in one minute.
To find out more about the topics covered in this podcast see:
The music in this podcast comes from the band eusa. The track is called Now we are all SoB's.
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.
