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Want facts and want them fast? Our Maths in a minute series explores key mathematical concepts in just a few words.
How is frequency related to pitch? Hear the music we love emerge from pure mathematical beats.
We talk to Stuart Johnston who uses mathematics to find out how noise pollution in the oceans impacts whales.
Generating electricity without the use of fossil fuels is not just an engineering and industrial challenge, it is also a huge mathematical challenge.
In this podcast author Coralie Colmez shares insights into her novel The irrational diary of Clara Valentine.
We talk to early career mathematicians who spent some of their summer holiday solving problems posed by industry — such as how to blend a perfect smoothie!
What requires the fewest assumptions?
That...
a single, functional, self-sustaining human brain fluctuated into existence about 50 years ago (when my consciousness began)
...or that...
an unimaginably enormous and complex universe fluctuated int existence billions of years ago, and through a nearly endless series of unlikely events, expanded to allow billions of functional human brains to evolve on a planet which just happens to be perfectly suited and situated to sustain them.
What I find scary about this Boltzmann Brain idea is that there wouldn't have to be more than one... me!
...and that Occam's Razor seems to imply that that singular delusional existence is most likely true.
Sorry fellow readers... you don't exist!