Life-Changing Math

Ted Dintersmith, author of Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math that Schools Won't Teach You, argues that much of what we learn in math can be outsourced to machines. That frees people to understand the mathematical ideas that underlie much of modern life. An example is estimation, such as political polls. Understanding the various metrics that fill the news requires creativity coupled with logic. Learning to ask the right questions is more important than, say, learning to do closed-form integrals.

Josh Cole discussed Zeno's paradox that says motion is not possible since you must go half-way, and then half of the remaining distance, and so on, infinitely. Aristotle and others struggled with this, using ideas like "potential infinity" that hint at ideas that would appear in calculus hundreds of years later. The ancient Greeks were focused on the counting numbers, so they expect things to happen in succession. In particular, the Arrow Paradox asks at what point in time does an arrow move.

Joseph Bennish discusses Euler’s formula, which involves pi, e, the imagery i, 0 and 1, a beautiful formula that unites disparate types of numbers. We can think of e raised to an exponent as compound interest or a function with a remarkable property. We can extend the properties we expect from exponentials to imaginary numbers, which gives us periodicity instead of the usual steadily rising exponential growth.

Aris Winger, Math Professor and Executive Director of the National Association of Mathematicians, has experienced first hand how math can save students' lives by uplifting them. Our education system can move beyond workbooks and help students, all students, think crisper and understand what's happening in the world.

Beyza Aslan, Associate Professor of Math at the University of North Florida, crochets mathematics. This turns abstractions, such as hyperbolic geometry, into something that can be touched, felt, manipulated, and experimented with. Her work as been exhibited at the Joint Mathematics Meetings.

Ben Cornish, host of The Mathematicians Podcast, discusses Pythagorean triples, integers that can be the sides of a right triangle. There are infinitely many primitive triples, as he proves. This concept has been around even before Pythagoras and across cultures. Yet, there are always new questions to ask. Answering one involves, surprisingly, complex numbers. We leave you with an open conjecture.

Joel David Hamkins, author of Proof and the Art of Mathematics, presents the game Buckets of Fish, which seemingly will go on forever. Yet he presents a proof that it will always come to an end. In fact, he proves it using contradiction, mathematical induction, and even transfinite ordinals. Why do mathematicians like to do multiple proofs of a single statement? He also gives a winning strategy for the game and proves it works.

Krystal Taylor, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Ohio State University, discussed the surprising characteristics of fractals, "infinity in a box." They may have fractional dimension, which varies depending on how it's measured. An infinite perimeter may enclose a finite area. Yet they are not just mathematical oddities--they appear in nature and have practical applications.

Alon Amit addresses the various facets of mathematics. Is it an art or a science? Both? Neither? Is it invented or discovered? Why is math that's developed for purely aesthetic reasons so often a useful tool for the real world? He likes that there are not simple, one-way answers. He challenges the listeners to post questions to Quora that surprise and delight him.

Alon Amit, prolific Quora math answerer, discusses how Artificial Intelligence might change the role of the mathematician. AI will make mathematics more efficient but it can't do math in a deep sense at present. It can't perform logical reasoning or even know if it's wrong. However, there are recent advances in proof verifiers. They may eventually be able to check complex proofs like the recent alleged proof of the ABC Conjecture.