Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture…
What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number were the biggest you had a symbol for? If you were doing math in ancient Egypt,…
Most of us today would assume that morality and ethics, being value propositions, are questions for inspired leaders, religious creeds, poets—in other words, for the humanities. But what if I told you…
In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Guillermo Badia. Dr Guillermo Badia is a philosopher working in logic. His research interests are logic in computer science, semiring-based logics and models of…
Based on decades of research, Beyond the Quantum: A Quest for the Origin and Hidden Meaning of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a panoramic rethink of quantum physics, with potentially…
Jennifer Beineke and Jason Rosenhouse‘s new book The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects: Research in Recreational Math (Princeton University Press, 2015) covers a multitude of topics and is…
Adam Kucharski, who won the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, has delivered another winner in an area rife with both winners and losers. The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the…
In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facilitated complex calculations. It has long been…
A fun, dazzling exploration of the strange numbers that illuminate the ultimate nature of reality. For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert…
The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind (Henry Holt and Co., 2026) is an exploration of the quest to use mathematics to describe the ways we think, from its origins three…
