New Books Network
Mathematics
Mathematics May 31, 2021

Innumeracy in the Wild

Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers

Ellen Peters

Hosted by Cory Brunson
To many mathematicians and math enthusiasts, the word "innumeracy" brings to mind popular writing like that of John Allen Paulos. But inequities in our quantitative reasoning skills have received considerable …

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Mathematics April 27, 2021

Inspiring Mathematics

Lessons from the Navajo Nation Math Circles

Dave Auckly, Bob Klein, Amanda Serenevy, Tatiana Shubin

Hosted by Cory Brunson
Math circles defy simple narratives. The model was introduced a century ago, and is taking off in the present day thanks in part to its congruence with cutting-edge research in …
Scholarly Communication April 14, 2021

Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century

Christopher Thaiss

Hosted by Daniel Shea
Listen to this interview of Christopher Thaiss, author of Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century (Broadview Press 2019). We talk about the research article, about writing styles, and about the …
Mathematics April 2, 2021

The Raven's Hat

Fallen Pictures, Rising Sequences, and Other Mathematical Games

Jonas Peters and Nicolai Meinshausen

Hosted by Jim Stein
Games have been of interest to mathematicians almost since mathematics became a subject. In fact, entire branches of mathematics have arisen simply to analyze certain games. The Raven's Hat: Fallen …
Asian Review of Books April 1, 2021

x + y

A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

Eugenia Cheng

Hosted by Nicholas Gordon
From its more mainstream, business-focused and business-friendly “Lean In” variants, to more radical, critical and intersectional understandings of feminism, the past decade has seen a flourishing of discussion from those …
Mathematics February 22, 2021

Math Without Numbers

Milo Beckman

Hosted by Jim Stein
One of the questions I am often asked is exactly what do mathematicians do. The short answer is that they look at different mathematical structures, try to deduce their properties …
Mathematics January 25, 2021

Games for Your Mind

The History and Future of Logic Puzzles

Jason Rosenhouse

Hosted by Jim Stein
Jason Rosenhouse's Games for Your Mind: The History and Future of Logic Puzzles (Princeton UP, 2020) is about a panoply of logic puzzles. You’ll find Mastermind and sudoku discussed early on, and …
Mathematics January 8, 2021

A New Year's Present from a Mathematician

Snezana Lawrence

Hosted by Cory Brunson
It would be simple enough to say that mathematics is being done, and that those who do it are mathematicians. Yet, the history and culture of the mathematical community immediately …
Mathematics December 7, 2020

The Fate of Schrodinger's Cat

Using Math and Computers to Explore the Counterintuitive

James D. Stein

Hosted by Cory Brunson
Math has a complicated relationship with the counterintuitive: Rigorous logic, calculation, and simulation can both help us wrap our minds around phenomena that defy our intuition, and thrust upon us whole new worlds …
Mathematics December 1, 2020

Supermath

The Power of Numbers for Good and Evil

Anna Weltman

Hosted by Cory Brunson
Mathematics as a subject is distinctive in its symbolic abstraction and its potential for logical and computational rigor. But mathematicians tend to impute other qualities to our subject that set …
Mathematics November 11, 2020

The Joy of Geometry

Alfred S. Posamentier

Hosted by Jim Stein
Alfred S. Posamentier's The Joy of Geometry (Prometheus, 2020) is a book for someone who has taken geometry but wants to go further. This book, as one might expect, is …
Mathematics September 29, 2020

How to Free Your Inner Mathematician

Notes on Mathematics and Life

Susan D'Agostino

Hosted by Cory Brunson
Doing mathematics can be stimulating, deep, and sometimes fantastic. It can also be frustrating, impenetrable, and at times dispiriting. In her new collection of essays, writer and mathematician Susan D'Agostino …
Mathematics September 9, 2020

Mathematics Entertainment for the Millions

Alfred Posamentier

Hosted by Jim Stein
The book being discussed is Mathematics Entertainment for the Millions (World Scientific Publishing Co.), by Alfred Posamentier. In reading this book, it occurred to me that it might equally well …
Economics September 4, 2020

Dark Data

Why What You Don't Know Matters

David J. Hand

Hosted by Cory Brunson
There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data …
Intellectual History August 24, 2020

Calculus Reordered

A History of the Big Ideas

David Bressoud

Hosted by Mark Molloy
Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas (Princeton UP, 2019) takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story of how calculus evolved into …
Literature August 13, 2020

Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries

Satyan Devadoss and Matt Harvey

Hosted by Jim Stein
There are very few math books that merit the adjective ‘charming’ but Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries (MIT Press, 2020) is one of them. Satyan Devadoss and Matt Harvey have …
Philosophy July 10, 2020

Games in the Philosophy of Biology

Cailin O’Connor

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
The branch of mathematics called game theory – the Prisoners Dilemma is a particularly well-known example of a game – is used by philosophers, social scientists, and others to explore …
Mathematics July 8, 2020

An Invitation to Applied Category Theory

Seven Sketches in Compositionality

Brendan Fong and David I. Spivak

Hosted by Cory Brunson
Category theory is well-known for abstraction—concepts and tools from diverse fields being recognized as specific cases of more foundational structures—though the field has always been driven and shaped by the …
Sports June 25, 2020

The Hot Hand

The Mystery and Science of Streaks

Ben Cohen

Hosted by Paul Knepper
For decades, statisticians, social scientists, psychologists, and economists (among them Nobel Prize winners) have spent massive amounts of precious time thinking about whether streaks actually exist. After all, a substantial …
Religion June 2, 2020

Until the End of Time

Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

Brian Greene

Hosted by John Weston
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and …