The story has become part of physics lore: A young Richard Feynman, future Nobel winner, was bored with life in the remote New Mexico desert while working on the atomic bomb during World War II, so he amused himself by learning to pick the combination locks in the supposedly secure filing cabinets containing America’s nuclear secrets.

I went through childhood listening to Tom Lehrer’s “New Math“. The 1965 song, performed in part like standard spoken-word comedy, made me laugh every time.

The story above—from our old friend James Grime of Numberphile and Cambridge University—has all the makings of weirdo Americana: bad amateur science, commercial ventures based upon the same, and a state legislature eager to embrace it all.

Here’s an extraordinary recording of Albert Einstein from the fall of 1941, reading a full-length essay in English:

The essay is called “The Common Language of Science.” It was recorded in September of 1941 as a radio address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Perhaps you remember the scene (above) in Gus Van Sant’s 1997 film, Good Will Hunting. MIT professor Gerald Lambeau, winner of the coveted Fields Medal, challenges his graduate students to solve a math problem that he, himself, spent two years trying to crack. That set the bar pretty high.

Hans Rosling knows how to make a concise, powerful point. His mastery of statistics and visual aids doesn’t hurt. Behold, for instance, the Karolinska Institute Professor of International Health visualizing the health of 200 countries over 200 years with 120,000 data points.

Vi Hart, the Khan Academy’s resident “Recreational Mathemusician” turns the space-time continuum into something that can be played forwards, backwards, upside down, in a circle, and on a Möbius strip.
How you ask?
Music.

In 2001, none other than Sir Mick Jagger bought the rights to a novel by Robert Harris called Enigma. The novel, a fictionalized account of WWII British codebreakers, then became a feature film, written by Tom Stoppard, produced by Sir Mick, and starring Mr. Dougray Scott and Ms.

Maybe the biggest winner of the 2012 presidential election, other than Barack Obama, was Nate Silver, the young statistician who runs the 538 blog at the New York Times. As you may recall (it was only a few weeks ago), Silver gave President Obama roughly an 80% – 90% chance of winning during the final days of October.

For anyone who enjoyed Dangerous Knowledge (the BBC’s 90-minute documentary that takes a close look at four mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing), we bring you this – N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős.