Radiolab's "Numbers" Podcast: Exploring How Numbers Affect our Lives

[collinsmark]

Radiolab is a radio show broadcast on public radio stations across the United States. This week's Radiolab was titled Numbers.

This Numbers podcast discusses

• how numbers affect our daily lives,
• how infants intuitively perceive numbers (logarithmically), and how children eventually learn to count,
• how in normal, everyday life, most numbers start with the digit '1', less frequently '2', even less frequently '3', and so on to the least frequently '9' (Benford's law); and how that can be used to detect fraud,
• a bit about Paul Erdős, a mathematician who essentially gave up his home and most of his possessions to live temporarily with other mathematicians as he collaborated with each of them,
  
• and a story about a correspondence between a mathematician and his former teacher.

If you have an hour, it's well worth a listen. If you missed it, you can hear the streaming podcast from the link below:

https://www.wnyc.org/radio/#/ondemand/424231

 

[jedishrfu]

Great show! I listen to it a lot and especially like it when Oliver Sacks is a guest.