The Function Room

You know that feeling. You look and there are only a few. You turn around and then it's a hundred and then a million. It's growing so fast you can't even count. But it's perfectly natural. It's Exponential Growth. And author of the Maths of Life and Death Kit Yates knows all about its awesome power. We chat about viruses, going viral, pyramids schemes and naturally locusts.

"Statistics? Really?! Listen Colm I supported you on that first episode because I thought it was a fad and I didn't want to be the one to shut down your dreams but seriously, man... this has gone too far"No hear me out! In this episode I'll be talking about pints of Guinness, medical dilemmas and why we should stop checking worldometer.com/coronavirus every fifteen minutes. It's about why statistics are not always statements of pure fact but just how certain we are about how doubtful we are. It makes sense. Trust me. I'm right. (Roughly)

You've probably heard it mentioned out of the corner of your ear. Mathematical Modelling. What does it look like, how does it work, where would you even start? And why is a Dublin mathematician modelling the results of electrical currents in human brains? (Donated, don't worry)With Aine Byrne @ainebyrnemaths, Assistant Professor at the Department of Maths and Statistics in UCD and (briefly at the start) 5 year old Ruby with her own model of how the brain works. And me, hoping to learn from both. Comments, suggestions, criticism -take it handy though-  to @colmoregan @functionroompod on twitter.

My guest is Dr Eloise Stevance an astrophysicist working in Auckland, New Zealand. We’re talking at the same time but on different days of the week. Which is pretty cool.We talk TikTok viral videos, bald headed football linesmen in Scotland being mistaken for a football and how a thing called machine learning is helping people like Eloise find out the answer to life the universe and everything.And bonus info – what gender are stars?Not bad for 40 minutes work.

This week we meet a man who loves maps, elections and naturally Eurovision. We dip our toe in the recent presidential election and find out how you can use maths to see if someone is really trying to steal an election. Not through mysterious bundles of mailed in ballots, but by packing and cracking, drawing funny looking amphibious electoral maps. We hear why we need to Build That Wall in Ireland. (A beautiful colourful electoral wall. So that CNN's John King can feel at home when he visits his cousins.)But all of that is mere fluffing before the substantive issue: Why Albania loves the Eurovision. WIth Adrian Kavanagh Lecturer in Geography at National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

A special Christmas episode recorded in an actual theatre. With actual people. Just sound technicians as events are still banned due to me being TOO FUNNY. This was a fun episode with fellow comedian and fellow former engineer Eleanor Tiernan. It was recorded at the Catcast - a special podcast festival held in the Set Theatre Kilkenny (usually the Comedy Festival home) sponsored by a bit of government money to keep the industry - especially the sound and vision people ticking over. We chatted about the usual topics of sizing an incinerator, the physics of an adult's jokes, the maths of a toddler's joke, Newton's Law of cooling (whether it's better to put the milk in the tea early or late) and how we both navigated lockdown using the Dunning Kruger effect.

This time on the Function Room. It's the little things. The really little things. As Ruby(5) and Lily(3) theorise about the computers a fairy might use, I talk to UCD's John Sheekey about Quantum Computers. I got thinking about it before Christmas when Chinese scientists announced another quantum computing breakthrough.Those brand new heavies that may help humanity heal itself and even the planet but also could mean your money isn't as safe as it was online. Listen to me trying to fit enormous concepts inside my tiny brain, find out about Coding Theory and how a man in a Maths and Stats department in Dublin is trying to stay one step ahead of The Quantum Menace (my hyperbole) armed with pens, paper, markers, whiteboard in an office that doesn't have a window. (news clips from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5MBAJJU9Hk )

This time on the function room, advertising algorithms start to annoy Ruby so I decided to find out a bit more. And who better to talk to than someone the New York Times described as one of the most valuable observers of Big Data. She is American mathematician, data scientist, and author of Weapons of Math Destruction and budding movie star, Cathy O’Neill.

Okay enough messing around, this week we get into the Matrix. Okay not that matrix. The mathematical matrix. But this one is way more powerful than a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside a simulated reality. That’s piddly. Mathematical matrices are used in everywhere, from making computer games to quantum physics.That’s Jane Breen ,Assistant Professor in Applied Maths in Ontario University in Canada. She loves modelling the complexity of networks in the real world with some very powerful and sometimes simple tools. Speaking of simple tools, before long, I start throw around lingo like Eigenvalues and Markov Chains like I know what I'm talking about. We find out how Google got so successful, a brief digression into how drugmakers know their drugs will work and before finishing off on how to control the spread of disease. And Ruby and Lily find themselves playing with a real-life application of a Markov Chain, a Game of Snakes and Ladders. Jane Breen https://sites.google.com/view/breenjA really good youtube channel for visualising what's going on in Matrices and All Of That. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab

This time we’re folding. We’re creasing. We’re origami-ing. As Ruby and I make two birds and two planes, I find out a little bit about the world of folding. Even with those small things we made we still got the feeling we were playing with something much bigger. Just by taking a flat sheet of paper and transforming.  Folding is seen as a negative word, a defeat. Not to the people like Paul Jackson an artist who teaches folding in 80 universities or Robert Lang who gave up engineering degrees to focus on origami solutions to problems of the small and the big.Or to my guest She’s Dr Rachel Quinlan, Head of the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Applied Mathematics. In her day-job according to the NUIG website, "hercurrent research interests are generally in the area of algebra, especially linear algebra and its interactions with group theory, combinatorics, and field theory" .."group theory, particularly the ordinary and projective representation theory of finite groups." But I know that stuff like the back of my hand. So it’s her beautiful origami tessellations that caught my eye.Along the way you’ll hear about MC Escher, listen to me struggle to describe Euclid, a brief mention of diffraction, topology, stents, airbags and naturally where it always ends: With the structure of the universe.And sorry about the delay. I know it’s a pain when podcasts are irregular. Work came in that pays the bills and I'm still trying to work out a way to fit this job into all the others. LINKSBetween the Folds – Youtube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFrDN5eYPOQMore about Vanessa Gould https://www.vanessagould.com/More about Paul Jackson http://www.origami-artist.com/More about Robert Lang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYKcOFQCenoMore about Dr. Rachel Quinlan  http://www.maths.nuigalway.ie/~rquinlan/ and see her art here https://twitter.com/rkquinlan

This time on the function room: My guide to helping people think you’re a great parent. While someone else does the job.The secret? It’s numberblocks.  The BAFTA winning animated CBEEBIES TV show for 3 to 6 year old children to get them interested in mathematics in an accessible way.  Our children love it. They request it. They watch the same programmes over and over. They are not geniuses – well obvious they are – but it’s not considered polite to say. We are not Tiger parents  so far. It's just this TV show. It's funny and fun and like millions around the world our Two are hooked on it.They sing the songs, they get invested in the stories. What is it about it? Well the songs are catchy, the animation is great, the stories work. But the sums add up.I wanted to find out why. So I talked to Debbie is the Primary  Director at the National centre for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics in the UK  but also she's the maths consultant on Numberblocks!Debbie Morgan on Twitter https://twitter.com/thinkingmaths Numberblocks: https://www.learningblocks.tv/numberblocks/home

Welcome back to the Function Room, And this time, it’s about QUEUES. This has been a summer of queues. A flurry of covid tests and two vaccinations have meant a brush with Big Queue. Which got me thinking  - What makes a good queue or a bad one? And is there any maths behind it. There’s a hatch free so step forward, Professor Ken Duffy, director of the Hamilton Institute in Maynooth University to tell me about Queuing Theory.As usual on the Function room, the topic goes off in all sorts of directions. Along the way we find out about old telephone exchanges, how Victorian Britain’s worries about their Lordships going extinct led them to develop theory that was used a century later to look at viruses and what it takes to get your mathematics soldered onto a computer chip.

This time, it's about Growth and De-Growth. De-What? What-Growth? A term that's been around for a while but it's obviously being talked about more if an eejit like me is throwing it around at dinner-parties. (or I will when they come back)My guest is Dr Jason Hickel who has written about Degrowth in his book Less is More. We talk about what is degrowth what it isn't, the sneaky power of exponential growth, why imperialism is alive and (making people un)well, the curious history of GDP, a brief tangent on the history of the board game monopoly, social media fights, Ruby gets to the nub of global inequality when talking about dolls and why despite all of the depressing stuff he has to read, Jason is still optimistic.

In this episode after Ruby makes up her mind, we’re talking about the mathematics of free will. It's recorded at the Cat Laughs Comedy Summer Series in Kilkenny, Ireland. A special series of shows to reintroduce everyone to the vague concept of Going To Stuff Again.My guest is Dr Kevin Mitchell. He’s a neuroscientist a professor at Trinity College Dublin and author of a book called Innate which goes right into the heart of the brain…well not the heart, confusing terminology, but right into the cells. And as he got to the smallest bits of the brain, Kevin started to wonder about free will and whether we have any choice in any matter. The notion of free will has been debated by the finest minds for thousands of years. So naturally I felt qualified to join in.And what has it to do with maths. Well…buckle up because we’re in for a bit of a head melt as we tackle topics like quantum physics, a smidge of chaos theory, WHAT IS A NUMBER ANYWAY and where annoying phantom traffic jams come from on the motorway. (apart from over reliance on cars obvs)You can Kevin at https://www.kjmitchell.com/ and on twitter at https://twitter.com/WiringTheBrain and of course me at www.colmoregan.com and on twitter the podcast is at https://twitter.com/functionroompod

After a long hiatus, the function room is back and for the first episode, comedian and erstwhile mathsy type Dara O'Briain is the guest. We chat about all sorts, hard sums, looking at the stars, the fantasy of one day going back to learn 'just for the sake of it' and then agreeing that idea might need a bit more thought. And no he didn't do a masters but I make no apologies for embellishments for the sake of a pun.

This week on the function room, my guest is Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered a NEW TYPE OF STAR. That’s like discovering A NEW TYPE OF STAR Jocelyn was a postgraduate student at the time and famously her supervisor was awarded the Nobel Prize for radio pulsars, and there was no mention of Jocelyn. Even though she helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array – the thing that found it- over two years and she was the one who first noticed the weird data the was the radio pulsar, sometimes reviewing nearly 100ft of paper. That is just one part of a long career and distinguished career. We talk about that and sexism in science, religion in science, and the perils of managing big data 1960s style and at the end inspired by Jocelyn, my daughters and I look up at the stars.

My guest is Rob Eastaway. Author of many books which make maths more interesting and accessible. He also has a podcast called Puzzling Maths with Andrew Jeffrey which you should check out if by some miracle you’re not getting all your maths vitamins from here. His most recent book is Maths on the back of an Envelope and it’s about the surprising power of mental arithmetic. Along the way, finding out,how to tell the height of a tree using the remains of a savoury snack, estimating crowds, dividing restaurant bills, counting weddings, getting a rough idea of what’s going on using Rob’s favourite word: -ish And generally hopefully, giving us all a bit of confidence to get the answer wrong but close enough. At the very end Ruby takes his advice on board and just start adding stuff up out of the blue. Well not out of the blue, off the milk carton. Follow me on twitter @colmoregan, the podcast @functionroompod. Rob is at https://robeastaway.com/

Welcome back to the function room with me Colm O’Regan. This week, it's ChatGPT. The latest thing that makes people starting dropping the phrase AI into small talk. ChatGPT and all the Ais are of huge interest to my guest. Conrad Wolfram. He’s kind of a big deal. Strategic and international director of Wolfram Research which makes Mathematica the computational software and nearly 4 decades in the area of computational education, Conrad has written The maths fix, about how AI will, or should make the maths we study in school very different. We talk steam engines, democracy and poems about lightbulb filaments. You know, the standard stuff. Find him at conradwolfram.com, find chatGPT at chat.openai.com

My guest is Alan O’Reilly, about his hobby weather forecasting. I first met him when he was on my RTE Radio Show Colm O’Regan Wants A Word. But time constraints meant I don’t think we got to talk for the recommended daily weather talk intake of two hours. Alan lives in County Carlow, in the southern midlands of Ireland from where he observes all the weather that the weather can throw at him. We talk about the hot topic at the moment which is of course snow-drizzle called graupel, we talk about not-hearing-the-weather-forecast-anxiety, being lost in the snow, the unbearable lightness of solar panels, and some of the small numbers that make a big difference in the massive maths of weather, and why it all comes down to dew point.

This week Robert Boyle, born in Ireland in the 17th century was one of the world's great scientists. I'm talking about him with Eoin Gill, Eoin Gill is a director of Calmast STEM Engagement Centre at South East Technological University, who likes Robert Boyle so much he made an entire summer school about him. Boyle was a massive deal in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and his work laid the groundwork for modern chemistry, a founder of the Royal Society, part of a list of big scientific cheeses like Newton and Kepler who discovered the universe was a mathematical and not just a miraculous place. But for all his science, dabbled in alchemy and sometimes he still just wanted a miracle.

The mathematics of art or the art of mathematics whichever. My guest is teacher, artist, mathematician,m tiktok star, Ayliean MacDonald the only one with that name in the world we think. We talk about the usual things people talk about: aperiodic tiles, Japanese Hitomezashi stitching, L-chair triominals, toilet paper, cozy-gaming and the meditative power of drawing lots of straight lines in a bullet journal. She’s fascinating. Give it a play.

Normally I try and come up with an apt pun but I couldn’t possibly come up with anything better than the title of my guest Sarah Hart’s book. She has written Once Upon A Prime, a very enjoyable read and listen about the many links between maths and literature and myth and poetry. We talk about why giants as we know them can’t exist, the 19th century obsession with statistics, the maths of Ulysses and Moby Dick and taking an idea for a walk.

John Butler is a mathematician turned computational neuroscientist, a professor of maths and statistics at TU Dublin who looks at the brain mathematically and tries to figure out why the brain does what it does We talk about the senses, why it’s good to get your questions from a child, what an neural network ‘cares about’, lots of stuff but first of all, what is a computational neuroscientist. Find out more about John and his work here: https://johnsbutler.netlify.app/

My guest is Dr Muireann Lynch of the economic and social research institute here in Ireland. She very carefully guides me an idiot on my first tour of the c-word. Carbon. How much it costs to use it, how much it costs, the maths of optimisation, Lagrange multipliers, carbon offsets, what happens when carbon has an infinite price. Warning – this contains traces of calculus that some listeners may find upsetting. But stick with it and we eventually get onto lighter topics like making twixes or other nougat-biscuit equivlants and then of course the end of habitable earth.

The maths of Criminology. With Ian Marder, Assistant Professor of Criminology at Maynooth University. We talk about statistics and randomized control studies, and bias and how crime always seems worse than it is, why you should get on with your neighbours and to build the ideal justice system

My guest is author of Chums, Simon Kuper about how a small cabal of Oxford chums managed to take over British politics. And from his book just how crap an Oxford and Eton education could be and you can still make it to the top. Along the way we learn what happens when a generation of leaders neither has a clue nor gives a toss about science and maths, the curious case of Jacob Rees Mogg, why Boris Johnson has been an accidental anarchist. what the French for chums is.

Function Room 27 A Sense Of Ounce – The absolutely fascinating history of one of the most important hallmarks of our existence - how and why we measure things. James Vincent has written a book, Beyond Measure about it and he joins me to talk about this thing we completely take for granted that has changed the world, been part of revolutions, where the metre is stored and also the very strange world of anti-metric guerillas.

The baffling arithmetic of Dereliction. I talk to Jude Sherry and Frank O’Connor of Derelict Ireland who ask the very simple question about an equation that makes no sense: Why is it that there are tens of thousands of people who need a home and tens of thousand of empty buildings that could be homes. Although specifically about Ireland, this is a question that could be asked anywhere.

The maths of symmetry.Hi it’s me Colm O’Regan. The function room is back after a little summer break and my guest is Pauline Mellon, professor of mathematics at UCDShe wants to talk about symmetry and I’m glad she did. She brings me on a tour of maths, religion, biology, art, chemistry, AI and naturally of course town planning.

this week in the function room, It's Anyone's Guess - the maths of guessworkDavid Malone of Maynooth University and the Hamilton Institute. I ride the wave of ignorance through some big topics like Information theory, Entropy, what makes a good password and how hard it would be to figure out what I had for breakfast. But first, I notice David has that all important mathematician background behind him in the interview - a white board with lots of squiggly symbols. i have to ask

this week in the function room, It's in our Nature - the fascinating world of biomimicryMy guest is Kathyrn Parkes, a technologist with a career spanning nearly 3 decades in designing products and an expert in User Experience. She tells me about what we can learn from nature, the stigmergy of termites, why ants don't have a boss, the benefits of hippo sweat, but also some unusual stuff too.

This week it's the maths of puzzles, and how to get wrap your brain around the fact that the answer isn't obvious. Rob Eastaway is my guest- the first returning guest. He has a book out called Headscratchers - a compendium of puzzles from the last five years of the New Scientist. And he's over in Ireland for Mathsweek. (check out mathsweek.ie). And given the weekend that was in it, we really have to do a snippet on the maths of rugby.

Climate Worrier - the maths of Climate Change. I talk to mathematiciand a man wading kneed deep in the climate models, Chris Budd. Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, He takes me painstakingly -but not painfully- through the key Big Numbers that you should know about when it comes to climate change. We recorded this a couple of years ago during Maths Week 2023 and guess what, it's still an issue! WHo knew?(Apologies for sound quality on this, I have a slight Long Wave Radio sound about me, just it was a youtube interview and I think the internet had covid when we recorded.)

My guest is Joanna Donnelly meteorologist and author of From Malin Head to Mizen Head, a lovely book about the almost meditative experience that is Irish Sea Area Forecast. Hers is the voice Irish radio listeners will hear last thing at night and first thing in the morning. We talk Hecto Pascals, my favourite of all the Pascals, how maths finds some patterns on this giant sphere of ours and why its best to give bad news first.

The mysterious world of the Riemann Hypothesis. This is about an unsolved problem relating to prime numbers.Bernhard Riemann was a German mathematician who lived in the 19th century and along with a lot of work on geometry also looked at prime numbers.If you're finding this hard to grasp don't worry. Me too. And this episode is not just about this, it's about the nature of things that are unsolved and why the search for solutions itself is important. My guest is Dr Alex Kontorovich professor of Mathematics at Rutgers university in New Jersey, He takes me on a tour of 18th and 19th century geniuses who couldn't stop thinking about prime numbers. There will be bits where you'd really want to visualise what's going on. For that, check out the link belowYou'll hear me butt in -in the edit- with some simple explanations of things I didn't understand at the time. I didn't interrupt at the time because I didn't know what queesiotn to ask and wanted to appear smarter than i was. You know, a tale as old as time. How I Learned to Love and Fear the Riemann Hypothesis | Quanta Magazine

Kjartan (pronounced Jartan) Poskitt is a maths book phenomenon. Author of Murderous Maths a series of, funny books for children about maths, they've been published in 25 countries. We talk about duels, how a fencing teacher went looking for pi, Archimedes, the magic stall at York market and the importance of having your own lair.

This week we look at the maths of conspiracy theories with physicist, cancer researcher, science writer author of the Award-winning The Irrational Ape why flawed logic puts us all at risk. how to tell if one most likely isn't true, a scary thing called Availability Heuristic, why it's not sugar is making those children hyper at the party, what you think when you first hear the name "Freddy Starr"

13th December, on the day of the earliest sunset in Dublin, my guest is Eibhear OHanlon, who more than anyone else knows how to call it a day. He has been the curator of theauldsthretch twitter account, now on mastodon and bluesky for 8 years. Each day he lets gives people a bit of hope and a warning about the length of their day. We talk about earth tilts, the weirdness of leap years, how do you know the sun has set, the importance of a smidge.

Function Room 39 There's Been a Breakthrough with TJ Hegarty. TJ Hegarty is the founder of Breakthrough Maths an online maths tutoring company based in Ireland. We talk about small farmers, not letting your father down, wanting to sell butter giving up in the Far East, changing your mind and deciding to give up your job and not sell butter in the Far East, semantic memory, off the grid tutors and where he wants his next breakthrough to be. Warning: This episode contains strong elements of Corkness

Catherine Sheridan, an engineer and systems thinker who after 20 years working on water, roads, energy is focussed on a tiny powerful magic little molecule: Hydrogen.We talk 5th year Physics experiments, making the world a fairer place, why the poetry of Robert Graves and the short stories of David Foster Wallace can teach us about the maths of molecules, why we need silver shrapnel rather than silver bullets, a little plug for mygug a magic egg made in cork that turns your food waste into heat and why we need to start hiring carbon accountants.You can find her on all the socials and catherinesheridan.ie. If H2 is your thing and let's face it, it is whether you like it or not, she's the woman to go to. She mentions one book I'm definitely going to read: How the world really works by Vaclav Smil.

A look at some of the stories behind the massive sums of an energy revolution. My guest is David Volts, energy journalist and writer of the Volts newsletter and host of the volts podcast. After Catherine Sheridan's H2 Oh! last week, this is the second of what looks to be an inadvertent energy trilogy. (Or enilogy or trinergy. No doubt that's been trademarked already)David Roberts has been writing and talking for years about the challenges but also the incredibly cool stuff happening in the biggest equation the world has ever seen: The terrajoules of energy that the planet uses every year: how to make it from electrons moving around instead of just burning stuff in the ground. we talk about carbon fibre electric wires, magic cement, stone batteries, black mass and why changing the energy system of an entire planet sounds like a crazy idea but it just might work

My guest is John Fardy, presenter of Newstalk's Radio (and GoLoud's) movie show ScreenTime. He has watched a lot of movies which means, statistically he's seen a lot of mathematics in movies. Therefore a lot of tall blackboards, a lot of troubled geniuses who struggle to talk to people but speak to numbers with ease, a lot of running around with pieces of paper that have the Eureka moment on them. We chat about his favourite mathematical movies and also what movies would we like to see made.

This week my guest is Hannah Daly, Professor of Sustainable Energy at University College Cork. It's the third of a trilogy about energy - a sort of trilogy there was another episode in between (a sort of Rogue One of maths/energy episodes)While the other two talk about where we get energy -magical molecules- or store them -stone batteries- this one focuses on working out how much we'll need using mathematical models.

My first replay! Given what we've been hearing about Google and their Gemini code disaster and bias and all sorts, time to revisit one of my favourite episodes, with Cathy O'Neil author of Weapons of Math destruction and has a company that audits algorithms. At some stage in a futurstic world when you're in trouble with the Algo Cops you'll wish you listened to Cathy. Eagle-eyed or maybe that should be bat-eared listeners may note that I used to do a lot more preamble with the podcast and lean more heavily on my daughters for 'content' but as I've tried to put a podcast out every weekish, I can't be getting the children on board all the time. They've their own stuff to do. And are understandably less inclined to help out on Daddy's speculative projects.

Another episode title Im jealous of becuase I didn't pick it, it's the work of Keith Houston a writer and software engineer who has made a habit of writing about things that are there in plain sight. He has written about the history of punctuation, a book about the book and last year a book about the history of the pocket calculator. There's lots of interesting nuggets in this episode including how an ant counts, who counts with their genitals, the unlikely role a Tea company played in making calculators, what happens when there's an actual bug in your computer, and when it comes to calculators, what does Keith think is the fairest of them all.

This week in the function room, Census Sensibility with . A glimpse into the work of Ireland's Central Statistic office, the CSO with Statistician Jess Coyne. Yes it's been a little while since the last one. The Easter break and childminding and whatnot intervened and I took a count and there wasn't enough hours in the day. But I'm back now and this time we're talking about what questions you ask and how you ask them to get the numbers that represent what's going on in a country.

Matt Kenzie is one of the Science advisors on the hit Netflix show Three Body Problem.The show and the book is about what happens when aliens want to say hi. Aliens called the San Ti, from a planet in a system of three Suns orbiting each other. They are a three body problem and chaos ensues for the San-Ti.3BP is made by Weiss and Benioff, so we talk about Game of Thrones naturally, the three body problem, nano-slicing, quantum tunnelling and just how close to life the life of the phd student is the image of being young, hot and ready to save the world.Warning contains spoilers about the series if you've started it. If you haven't they mightn't mean much to you unless you've seen the show. So I don't know whether it's a spoiler or not but look just be careful. Also contains references to elephants, dimensions and boring a hole in your head with a proton beam.

My guest is Katie Steckles, Mathematician, presenter and communicator. She has written seven books about mathematics, hosts the brilliant Mathemetical Objects podcast where she and her co presenter Peter Rowlatt discuss with their guests, very ordinary objects, and sometimes weird ones, and the mathematics behind and because of that object.The kind of podcast I would love to have made if i were cleverer and had thought of it. It's a very interesting chat about the arbelos, kalaidocycles, bringing the stories of mathematics to light, the skill of not knowing what you are doing, Euclid's brother, Pythagoras's very existence, Jeff Goldblum, and a global maths communications hub built on a submarine in Katie's long term plans.Again apologies for the aperiodical nature of these podcasts - pretend it's another era and post gets held up in winter storms. ANyway it's fitting as Katie's website is call Aperiodical.com and describes that lack of pattern in her blogposts.Things you can look up afterwards - the kaleidocycle, the tetrahedron, Andrew Wyles - the man who solved Fermat's last theorem. Tim Gowers, an expert in combinatorics, Terence Tao, childhood genius who kept getting better, and the late Maryam Mirzakhani. Jurassic Park dragon curve and chaos theory. It's all to do with fractals. And I'm going to do lots more on that.

This week in the function room, the hole shebang. A bit about Black Holes with Dr John Regan. Royal Society - SFI University Research Fellow in the Department of Theoretical Physics. we caefully scrape the surface of the topic of black holes without hopefully getting sucked in and destroyed by the weight of the topic. John tells me how he got into black holes why he can't really get out, how Einstein nearly got it wrong and then got it right with a little help from his friends, what the LIGO saw, what it's like as a black hole expert to look at the first photo and is there a black hole in the room with us right now? There's the usual whiteboard nosing and of course I ask about time travel.

This week I’m joined by another returnee to the function Room, a lecturer at the Maynooth University Department of Geography and we’re talking about voting systems and the numbers they generate. We catch an STV, - single transferrable vote, FPTP -first past the post and the second chance of the French system.We find out why Eurovision is a giant democratic experiment and ultimately why a vote in Ireland goes on an adventure.