The Math Guy Radio Archive

Image by Richard Ress­man, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Start­ing back in 1995, Kei­th Devlin, a Stan­ford math pro­fes­sor and pop­u­lar sci­ence writer, began mak­ing appear­ance’s on NPR’s Week­end Edi­tion Sat­ur­day, where he demys­ti­fies math ques­tions, both large and small, that have a bear­ing on our every­day lives. Years lat­er “The Math Guy,” as he’s oth­er­wise called, has built up a com­plete sound archive of his radio appear­ances, which fea­tures 78 episodes record­ed between 1995 and 2001. Here are a few fine exam­ples:

• June 4, 2011 Any Way You Stack It, $14.3 Tril­lion Is A Mind-Ben­der. How can we com­pre­hend the size of the cur­rent US nation­al debt?
• Octo­ber 23, 2010. Check­ing The Math Behind The Green­house Effect.
• June 5, 2010. Run­ning the Num­bers for the World Cup.
• July 4, 2009. Top 10 Rea­sons Why the BMI is Bogus.
• April 4, 2009. Anoth­er Father of the Hydro­gen Bomb. The 100th anniver­sary of the birth of the math­e­mati­cian Stanis­law Ulam.
• Feb­ru­ary 28, 2009. What do we need alge­bra for?
• Decem­ber 27, 2008. ‘Hard Day’s Night’: A Math­e­mat­i­cal Mys­tery Tour. Math­e­mat­i­cal analy­sis of the open­ing chord and oth­er Bea­t­les music.

Again, you can access the com­plete archive here.

H/T @Stanford

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: An Ani­mat­ed Video Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

Vin­tage MIT Cal­cu­lus Lessons

Futur­ist Arthur C. Clarke on Mandelbrot’s Frac­tals