Transportation matters. When people need to get places, but don’t have a good way to do so, it’s more than just a drag for them – it’s also a drag for the economy. Americans are living increasingly far from their places of employment, which knocks walking or biking out of the way for many. And not everyone has a car to get themselves from place to place (and even if they did, the cost to the environment would be pretty steep). Moreover, public transportation in U.S. cities, in particular,...

We know that The Weather is the most basic, most mundane small talk topic in, you know, the world.  We understand that The Weather is just boring to discuss. Except when it isn’t. Join us in this episode as we discuss the fascinating, and varied, uses of math in weather predictions, from model-building to handling competing forecasts. We speak with Hannah Christensen, a postdoctoral researcher in the Physics Department of Oxford University, whose 2015 Guardian article, Banking on Better...

After a conference Anna attended this summer, during which she and her colleagues considered whether they could legally protect the work they produced, we began to wonder: To what extent can math be considered—and protected as—intellectual property? Already comfortable with mathematical logic and reasoning, we turned to Sarah Wasserman Rajec from William & Mary Law School to help us approach this topic using logic and reason from the legal standpoint.  As we work out an answer in Math...

In The Road Trip, Anna and Annie look into the math that undergirds the great American summertime tradition of rolling down the windows, turning up the stereo, and touring the countryside by automobile. Randy Olson has made the planning part easy by computing the optimal road trip across the U.S.  His work to minimize the miles between landmarks in the lower 48 has been featured in the Washington Post and on Discovery News.  In fact, Tracy Staedter of Discovery News can be credited not only...

In Racism and Segregation, Anna and Annie call on two people whose online contributions have helped paint a picture of racism and segregation in this country. Dustin Cable’s work on the Racial Dot Map paints this picture in a nearly literal way; see what we mean here.  Also, check out his methodology and code, and see one source of his inspiration–the work of Brandon Martin-Anderson and Peter Richardson–here. Nicky Case and collaborator Vi Hart created a playable blog post called Parable of...

Welcome to The Other Half.  You’ll get to know us well as you continue to listen to our show, but Episode 0 is the first element of our set.   Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or via RSS