Math Mutation 255: Mountain Climbing with Dawkins

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Math Mutation 255: Mountain Climbing with Dawkins

FromMath Mutation

ratings:

Length:

6 minutes

Released:

Oct 7, 2019

Format:

Podcast episode

Description

How Richard Dawkins' metaphor of "Mount Improbable" explains the evolution of the human eye.

(Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com)

Released:

Oct 7, 2019

Format:

Podcast episode

Titles in the series (100)

Welcome to Math Mutation, a podcast for people of all ages where we discuss fun, interesting, or just plain weird corners of mathematics that you would not have heard in school.(Feedback email erik@mathmutation.com).

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Math Mutation 14 Exponentials for Easter: Bunny math. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
3 min listen
Math Mutation 19 Throwing Darts At Your Problems: The power of randomized algorithms. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 49 What Is Math Anyway?: After 50 episodes, I finally figure out what I'm talking about. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 77 Are You Smarter Than A Mouse?: According to some experiments, mice can be better at math than humans. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
3 min listen
Math Mutation 35 One Messed-Up Triangle: How non-Euclidean geometry lets you draw a triangle with three right angles. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
5 min listen
Math Mutation 81 A Billion Frenchmen Can Be Wrong: Why does the word billion sometimes mean 10 to the 9th, and other times mean 10 to the 12th? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 39 A Statistical Legend: The surprising story of how George Dantzig, the father of linear programming, earned his Ph.D. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 26 That Krazy Kepler: Discussing one of Johannes Kepler's lesser known, and sillier, theories. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 16 Doodling: What kind of pictures do you draw when your attention wanders? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
3 min listen
Math Mutation 32 How Polish Math Saved Europe: Today we talk about an early Polish success in cracking the Enigma coding machine. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
6 min listen
Math Mutation 41: Action, Drama, and Geometry Lessons: Review of Flatland The Movie (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
5 min listen
Math Mutation 25 Everything Is a Number: How Godel twisted statements about numbers into statements about statements. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 37 Baby Math: Can 6-month old babies do basic subtraction? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 33 Watch Zeno Make Russia Disappear: Infinite series and sub-replacement fertility. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 46 The World's Simplest Computer: A new theorem by a British undergraduate has just established the simplest possible computer. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 44 Friends in Mathematical Places: Story of a 19th-century Frenchwoman who pretended to be male for her career in mathematics, and how she revealed her identity to save Gauss. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 45 The Aliens Among Us: Can we calcuate the number of intelligent life forms in our galaxy with one simple equation? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 40 Death By Theorem: How do we know that irrational numbers exist? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 34 Not Over Till It's Over: Has the riddle of Fermat's Last Theorem truly been solved? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 27 How Many Crayons Do You Need?: Surprisingly, any map can be filled in with just four colors. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 69 Interesting Numbers: The unusual story of the Indian mathematician Ramanujan. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 36 Christmas in August: How the Romans coped with the odd ratios of the day, the lunar cycle, and the solar cycle. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
5 min listen
Math Mutation 95 Happy e Day!: Celebrating the constant 'e'. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 47 An Unusual Lottery: A strange lottery run by Douglas Hofstadter in the early 1980s, with interesting implications for human society. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 62 Names of God: In memory of Arthur C. Clarke. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
3 min listen
Math Mutation 150 A Podcast About Nothing: A non-zero number of factoids about zero. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
6 min listen
Math Mutation 43 A Theorem Made Real: Strangely enough, pure math can tell us interesting things about global weather patterns. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 66 Fuzzy Dice: What is the connection between dice and driving? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
3 min listen
Math Mutation 57 Really Old Math: How ancient Egyptian math may be the source of an 18th-century poem. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
4 min listen
Math Mutation 89 Improbable Probabilities: Do a few statistically significant studies prove a strange phenomenon is true? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
6 min listen

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Math Mutation 287: The Grim State of Modern Pizza: The surprisingly simple GRIM test, and how it helped to debunk the famous Cornell Pizza Studies. (Send feedback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 286: Adventures In Translation: I discuss my experiences translating "The Revolution of Promises" by Nelson Rodriguez Chartrand. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 285: Believe My Proofs Or Else: Have you used the logical method known as "proof by intimidation"? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 284: Don't Square Numbers, Triangle Them: We discuss Buckminster Fuller's focus on triangles in his Synergetics. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 283: Escape From Infinity: If we deny the existence of infinity, does math still work? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 282: The Man With The Map: In memory of Maurice Karnaugh, we discuss the "K-Map", a nice shortcut for desinging electronic circuits. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 281: Pascal vs Mathematics: Discussing the final decade of Blaise Pascal's life, when he decided math and physics were unworthy of study. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 280: Rubik's Resurgence: Thanks to social media, Rubik's Cube is popular again. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 279: Improbable Envelopes: We discuss the famous Two Envelopes paradox, along with an unconventional solution. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 278: Bicycle Repair Man: Alan Turing's adventures in bicycle repair. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 277: Bad Career Advice: Should you aim for a maximally "scalable" profession in order to become rich? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 276: Don't Believe the Math: We discuss Nassim Taleb's "Ludic Fallacy", the incorrect belief that simple mathematical models accurately predict the real world. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 275: Demanding Fair Dice: What does it take to create fair dice for an online game? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 274: The Gomboc: A strange self-righting 3-D shape was only discovered in the 21st century. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 273: A Maze Of Labyrinths: Why are literary and visual labyrinths from ancient and medieval times so different? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 272: The Mathematics of Jackie Mason: How Jackie Mason derived jokes from Talmudic logic. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 271: Too Much Testing: Think about the math before getting tested for a rare disease. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 270: Which Way To Turn: Why are screw threads always right-handed? Or are they? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 269: A Good Use of Downtime: (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 268: The Right Way To Gamble: (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 267: Free Will Isn't Free: Do the nondeterministic calculations of quantum physics inevitably lead to proof of free will? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 264: Unbalanced Society: We explore some of Alfred Korzybski's odd ideas about using math to remake society. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 263: Asimov vs Doyle: Was Sherlock Holmes' archnemesis Moriarty really a mathematical genius? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 262: My Bathroom Needs More Beryllium: How to combine magic squares and Feng Shui. (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 261: The Mystery of the S: Is the title of this podcast missing an S? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 260: The Conway Criterion: How much can you deform hexagonal tiles and still cover your bathroom floor? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 259: Is Reality Really Real?: Does Donald Hoffman's book "The Case Against Reality" prove everything we perceive is wrong? (Send feeback to erik@mathmutation.com) by Math Mutation
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Math Mutation 255: Mountain Climbing with Dawkins

Math Mutation 255: Mountain Climbing with Dawkins

Description

Titles in the series (100)

More Episodes from Math Mutation