My Favorite Theorem
91 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 94 ratingsJoin us as we spend each episode talking with a mathematical professional about their favorite result. And since the best things in life come in pairs, find out what our guest thinks pairs best with their theorem.
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Episodes
Episode 40 - Ursula Whitcher
April 11, 2019 02:00 - 27 minutes - 38.4 MBMathematician Ursula Whitcher really likes mirror symmetry. And ramen. Find out what this is and why it pairs with noodle soup.
Episode 39 - Fawn Nguyen
March 28, 2019 02:00 - 28 minutes - 52.5 MBMiddle school math teacher Fawn Nguyen gets excited about right triangles and tells us all kinds of trivia about one of the most famous theorems in all of mathematics.
Episode 38 - Robert Ghrist
March 14, 2019 02:00 - 23 minutes - 32.7 MBProf. Rob Ghrist likes dynamics and his favorite theorem unifies the continuous and the discrete by relating the two essential operations in each. Fueled by Monster energy drink.
Episode 37 - Cynthia Flores
February 28, 2019 03:00 - 25 minutes - 34.8 MBCynthia Flores likes uncertainty so much that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Inequality is her favorite theorem. Plus Rick and Morty.
Episode 36 - Nikita Nikolaev & Beatriz Navarro Lameda
February 14, 2019 03:12 - 29 minutes - 40.6 MBOur guests' wedding went viral and we just had to talk to them. Also, the Intermediate Value Theorem.
Episode 35 - Nira Chamberlain
January 24, 2019 03:00 - 21 minutes - 30 MBNira Chamberlain likes applied mathematical models. In this episode he tells us about the Lorenz attractor and how that pairs nicely with Caribbean food.
Episode 34 - Skip Garibaldi
January 10, 2019 03:00 - 23 minutes - 32.9 MBIn middle school, mathematician Skip Garibaldi wondered how many real numbers you can actually name. The answer is not as many as you'd like.
Episode 33 - Michele Audin
December 27, 2018 03:00 - 29 minutes - 40.4 MBMathematician and writer Michele Audin lets us know why she loves Stokes's Theorem enough to have written a novel about it.
Episode 32 - Anil Venkatesh
December 13, 2018 04:04 - 25 minutes - 34.6 MBMathematician Anil Venkatesh likes the Shapley Value, and it turns out to have applications unrelated to politics.
Episode 31 - Yen Duong
November 29, 2018 03:00 - 17 minutes - 24.6 MBMathematician-journalist Yen Duong joins us to talk about Ramsey theory and the first "real" theorem she learned--the Ramsey number R(3,3) is 6.
Episode 30 - Katie Steckles
November 08, 2018 03:00 - 24 minutes - 25.3 MBJoin us to learn about the Fold and Cut Theorem, which asserts that it is possible to cut any polygonal shape via a single cut provided you fold the paper correctly.
Episode 29 - Mike Lawler
October 25, 2018 02:00 - 19 minutes - 13.5 MBMike Lawler is a mathematician working in finance. Join us to learn an interesting theorem about insurance pricing.
Episode 28 - Chawne Kimber
October 11, 2018 02:00 - 20 minutes - 28 MBJoin mathematician Chawne Kimber for a journey into Archimedean groups, lattice-ordered groups, and quilting.
Episode 27 - James Tanton
September 27, 2018 01:50 - 24 minutes - 33.5 MBJames Tanton is the MAA's "Mathematician at Large" and he joins us to talk about Sperner's Lemma.
Episode 26 - Erika Camacho
September 13, 2018 01:32 - 26 minutes - 18.2 MBApplied mathematician Erika Camacho tells us about modeling diseases of the eye using systems of differential equations. Her favorite theorem allows her to understand the solutions to these types of systems.
Episode 25 - Holly Krieger
August 23, 2018 02:00 - 23 minutes - 32.5 MBOur first repeat theorem! But our guest has a completely different take on the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem, giving us a ton of facts about Brouwer the mathematician.
Episode 24 - Vidit Nanda
August 09, 2018 02:00 - 19 minutes - 27.1 MBContractions on complete metric spaces have unique fixed points. That's a pretty cool theorem, according to our guest Vidit.
Episode 23 - Ingrid Daubechies
July 26, 2018 02:00 - 31 minutes - 43.4 MBIngrid Daubechies has lots of favorite theorems, but right now it's all about planar graph embeddings. Find out why in this episode.
Episode 22 - Ken Ribet
July 12, 2018 02:00 - 29 minutes - 40.9 MBEuclid taught us that there are infinitely many primes. In this episode Ken Ribet tells us why this is his favorite theorem and gives us a couple of interesting proofs.
Episode 21 - Jana Rodriguez Hertz
June 28, 2018 02:00 - 22 minutes - 31.3 MBMathematician Jana Rodriguez Hertz tells us about the Smale horseshoe map, symbolic dynamics, noodles, and all kinds of other fun stuff.
Episode 20 - Francis Su
June 14, 2018 02:00 - 21 minutes - 29.6 MBJoin mathematician Francis Su to find out why he thinks the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem is so appealing.
Episode 19 - Emily Riehl
May 24, 2018 01:59 - 32 minutes - 44.1 MBCategory theorist Emily Riehl tells us her second-favorite theorem: right adjoints preserve limits. Since this is category theory we get another theorem for free by dualizing: left adjoints preserve colimits. Listen to find out Emily's favorite theorem, too.
Episode 18 - John Urschel
May 10, 2018 02:00 - 23 minutes - 33.7 MBJoin former NFL lineman/current mathematician John Urschel to learn about how to take a dense graph and find a sparse graph whose Laplacian is very close to that of the original graph. Applied math at its finest.
Episode 17 - Nalini Joshi
April 26, 2018 02:00 - 26 minutes - 37 MBJoin applied mathematician Nalini Joshi to learn about Mittag-Leffler's theorem, a fundamental result in complex analysis that tells us how to build meromorphic functions on the plane with any prescribed set of poles.
Episode 16 - Jayadev Athreya
April 12, 2018 02:00 - 33 minutes - 45.3 MBIf you stand at the origin in a forest whose trees lie at integer lattice points, what proportion of them can you see? Jayadev Athreya guides us to the answer and then goes further.
Episode 15 - Federico Ardila
March 22, 2018 12:00 - 32 minutes - 44.4 MBMathematician Federico Ardila loves matroids and combinatorics. And he's a DJ. A great combination, you can count on it.
Episode 14 - Laura Taalman
March 08, 2018 03:00 - 23 minutes - 31.7 MBJoin mathematician Laura Taalman for a journey into the realm of Reidemester moves on knots and just how many you may need to untangle an unknot. The answer may surprise you.
Episode 13 - Patrick Honner
February 22, 2018 03:00 - 19 minutes - 26.6 MBOur guest Patrick Honner tells us about Varignon's Theorem about the midpoints of quadrilaterals. Spoiler alert: if you connect them you always (!) get a parallelogram.
Episode 12 - Candice Price
February 08, 2018 03:00 - 15 minutes - 20.8 MBOur guest Candice Price tells us about Conway's rational tangles and how they relate to the topology of DNA. Also, shakes from In 'N' Out.
Episode 11 - Jeanne Nielsen Clelland
January 25, 2018 03:00 - 17 minutes - 23.5 MBMathematician Jeanne Nielsen Clelland tells us about the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem, connecting the curvature on a surface to its Euler characteristic. This episode ends with a bang.
Episode 10 - Mohamed Omar
January 11, 2018 03:00 - 18 minutes - 25.5 MBJoin our guest Mohamed Omar in his love of Burnside's Lemma and learn how to count the number of ways to paint blocks.
Episode 9 - Ami Radunskaya
December 28, 2017 03:00 - 17 minutes - 24.1 MBIn this episode our guest tells us about Birkhoff's Ergodic Theorem and how it reminds her of certain minimalist music pieces.
Episode 8 - Justin Curry
December 07, 2017 03:00 - 13 minutes - 18.8 MBOur guest Justin Curry really likes Platonic solids. So much so, in fact, that he has all five of them tattooed on his body. In this episode we talk about the classification of these solids and what ancient piece of literature they pair with best.
Episode 7 - Henry Fowler
November 16, 2017 03:00 - 23 minutes - 32.4 MBHenry Fowler is on the faculty of Dine College in the Navajo Nation. In this episode he tells us about traditional Navajo homes and their relationship to astronomical calculations. The Pythagorean theorem plays an important role.
Episode 6 - Eriko Hironaka
October 26, 2017 02:00 - 26 minutes - 36.7 MBWe are joined by Eriko Hironaka, who tells us about the first theorem she proved. This episode deals with a lot more than just math and it's one of our favorites.
Episode 5 - Dusa McDuff
October 05, 2017 02:00 - 12 minutes - 17.3 MBDusa McDuff tells us about Gromov's non-squeezing theorem, a fundamental result in symplectic topology.
Episode 4 - Jordan Ellenberg
September 14, 2017 02:00 - 18 minutes - 25.4 MBUniversity of Wisconsin professor Jordan Ellenberg reveals that his favorite theorem is Fermat's Little Theorem, which, when you really boil it down, asserts that 1+1 = 2.
Episode 3 - Emille Davie Lawrence
August 24, 2017 02:00 - 18 minutes - 24.9 MBUniversity of San Francisco math professor Emille Davie Lawrence joins us to talk about the classification of compact surfaces, west coast coffee, and where to find good donuts.
Episode 2 - Dave Richeson
August 03, 2017 02:07 - 23 minutes - 32.7 MBMath Horizons editor Dave Richeson joins us to talk about the area of a circle. You memorized the formula in grade school, but you've probably never thought about the proof or who proved it. Dave knows.
Episode 1 - Amie Wilkinson
July 26, 2017 03:02 - 23 minutes - 32.2 MBA conversation with Prof. Amie Wilkinson of the University of Chicago about her favorite theorem. It's a classic.
Episode 0 - Your Hosts' Favorite Theorems
July 21, 2017 01:28 - 13 minutes - 18.5 MBYour hosts math prof Kevin Knudson and math/science freelance writer Evelyn Lamb discuss their favorite theorems and reveal what pairs best with them.