Here is a list of some of the topics we’ve covered on the first year of the Math/Maths Podcast. The 50th episode this weekend will be live streamed (find out more).

Ahead of our 50th episode we’d love to hear your memories of the podcast’s first year or anything relevant you’d like to tell us. You can tweet @peterrowlett, @Samuel_Hansen or email.

Episode 1: Martin Gardner; 3D imagining a bee hive; Logicomix; Abel Prize collected; CBI predicts skilled worker gap as recovery takes hold; Mental Calculation World Cup 2010; & more.
Episode 2: Sharks use fractals to hunt; Reclusive Russian math genius is a no-show to pick up $1M prize money; Fibonacci Knives; Lincoln’s math exercise book; arXiv vs snarXiv; Rock Paper Scissors; World Cup; Professor Risk; Edinburgh Your days are numbered: the maths of death; Talking Maths in Public;
Episode 3: World Cup; What makes the sound of vuvuzelas so annoying?; Math Deficiencies Increase Foreclosure Risk; Multiplication makes things bigger; If sports got reported like science…; Chatroulette Genital Blocking Algorithm; First self-replicating creating spawned in Game of Life; 13 Stripes and 51 Stars; Bletchley Archives; UK universities deliver ¬£2.97 billion in services to business and industry; Michael Gove speech: ‘mathematics is the foundation on which our civilization rests’ etc.; Maths Busking; A Brief History of Mathematics; & more.
Episode 4: Decline of mathematical studies; How chicks count; Academic work ethic; Boxer Nathan Cleverly earns maths degree; Letter: Feynman to Wolfram; ‘Theorem’ generator; Unpublishable Mathematics; The Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition; Robert Boyle: wishlist of a Restoration visionary; & more.
Episode 5: Perelman officially declines $1 million for Poincare proof; GOALIE; Teaching applications ‘up by a third’; Mathematician deciphers hidden ‘Hello Code’; Apple uses formula that is ‘totally wrong’; Alex doesn’t win Samuel Johnson Prize; Alan Turing Named Top Pioneer; & more.
Episode 6: Paul the Psychic Octopus; World Cup visualisation; National STEM Centre elibrary; Women in Maths; campaign on twitter for a podcast for Brief History of Maths; The algebra of music; #mathchat; Antoni Gaudi cathedral; & more.
Episode 7: fighting terrorism; “cool” science stories; space dinosaurs; pouring coffee; 4-time lottery win; Wolfram on maths curriculum; Mandelbrot on fractals; dance; International Mathematical Olympiad; whether data are or data is; Abel Prize nominations; and more.
Episode 8: Pi day; Godel Prize and Kyoto Prize winners; ‘Buckyballs’ in interstellar space; Bridges Conference; asciiTeX; Formula for the perfect handshake; Algebra as a Faustian bargain; Maths at British Science Festival; maths puzzles outreach; MathFest; James Grime’s RSA challenge; & more.
Episode 9: The attention received by the Tuesday Boy problem; A-level reforms; Women’s International Math Congress; rowing; data sorting; sperm movement mystery; The Mandelbrot Monk; swarms of locusts; quantum cryptography; atomic clocks on International Space Station; elections; heart disease; moss spores; MathFest Tweetup; & more.
Episode 10: left-handed boys; the Mathematical Side of M. C. Escher; nested water, land and nations; the number of books in the world; Seventh graders describing scientists; pi to 5 trillion decimal places; Scientopia; drug-resistant malaria; careers in bioinformatics; Kickstarting Punk Mathematics; Sci Foo; improved invisibility cloaks; non-transitive dice; MathJax; and more.
Episode 11: Your Days Are Numbered: The Maths of Death; Simplest Solution to Rubik’s Cube; Professor Matt Parks; 2010 China Girls Math Olympiad; Students’ Understanding Of The Equal Sign; A relatively serious proof that P does not equal NP and the after effects thereof; International Congress of Mathematicians 2010; Superconductors and fractals; Pi-hunting; iSquared Magazine; the house where Einstein stayed & more.
Episode 12: International Congress of Mathematicians 2010; Fields and Chern Medals, Nevanlinna and Gauss Prizes; Maths A-level numbers; A*; Are exams getting easier?; computer vs. pen-and-paper tests; Futurama; vintage calculators; Euclid’s Elements In Colour; wikimath; a conversation with Matt Parker live in Edinburgh; and more.
Episode 13: Plus Magazine, live from the International Congress of Mathematicians; Roberto Carlos’ free kick; A New Kind of Baseball Math; More on P !=NP; The #mathgeek experiment; Clustered Networks; measuring physical constants; testing string theory; Twitter Venn; Mangahigh; and more.
Episode 14: Prime birthdays; gravity defying coffee cup; maths education & innovation; why parents can’t do maths today; students get iPads; child-killing maths quiz; cult of youth; Danica McKellar books; chaos following the big bang; the two quadrillionth slice of pi; the National Cipher Challenge; hyperbolic Internets; British Science Festival; Pi-Hunting; constrained writing; recommended reading for new maths & stats lecturers; bed bugs; postgrads who teach; projectile dynamics in sport; and more.
Episode 15: Math Prizes; Google 10^100; Ed Milband’s maths geek credentials; maths lesson world record; Joseph Kruskal; Kavli Education Medal; Recursive Pizza; quantum dice; Wolfram blog; Standing on a stepladder makes you age faster; bacterial growth; maths graduates in IT; Fibonacci pigeons; special guest James Grime’s Enigma Project in Finland; Bletchley Park; more bed bugs; and more.
Episode 16: special guest Colin Wright on MathsJam and to each other about: the first truly habitable exoplanet; Ed Miliband again; breast cancer statistics; the uncanny accuracy of polling averages; chemometrics and tea; polymath 3; the origin of altruism; Mom and Dad taking math classes; Singapore Math in the USA; UK schools enlisting Indian maths tutors online; the Carnival of Mathematics; the magic square on the Sagrada Familia; and more.
Episode 17: Rubicks Cube Robot; Winning with mathematics; Pizza Hut is Anti-Math; Vedic Maths rejected; Musicians with Ph.D.’s; the mathematical secrets of verse; Klein Bottles; nanoscale Mobius strip; Calculator Plots onto Images; Irish Maths Week; Numerologists; 10/10/10; Science is Vital; World Statistics Day 2010; getstats; USA Science & Engineering Festival; G4G Celebration of Mind; Teaching Math as narrative Drama; Who are your important living mathematicians? & more.
Episode 18: Benoit Madelbrot; STEM; Mathematics is vital!; Great Mathematicians on Math Competitions & School Mathematics; Curious mathematical law is rife in nature; Augusta School Board Approves Single Sex Math Classes; Study: It’s Hard to Bring Down the Electric Grid; Mathematika Goes Online; Ray and Charles Eames Powers of Ten Video Response Design Competition; Calling all maths artists; And the Nobel Prize in Mathematics goes to…; Maths in a Box; Solving a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded; Math/Maths Podcast Live Recording at Greenwich; & more.
Episode 19: World Statistics Day; Barack Obama on MythBusters; Change the Equation; UK Spending Review; Marathon Math: How Not to Hit the Wall; the physics of the wet dog shake; Gathering for Gardner Celebration of Mind; Ridiculous-Sounding Math Classes; Pumpkin Pi; and more.
Episode 20: Can bees do maths?; How much math do we really need?; Paul the Octopus, how psychic was he and what does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad think?; Roller Coaster Math; Happy Birthday SI Units; Math Happiness in Korea; Pumpkin Math; Topswops; Bo Burnham Math Song; Complex Power Towers; Mathematics Genealogy Project; Samuel’s Facebook Network; Math/Maths Live & more.
Episode 21: UK graduate destinations; Jihadist Economics; Electric current to the brain ‘boosts maths ability’; US House Network Analysis; New Statistical Model Moves Human Evolution Back Three Million Years; Geometric Death Frequency; Flexible metamaterial springs to life; Matt Parker Millennium Problems Guide; £10,000 bill for £21.60 theft case that turned out to be maths error; important living mathematicians; Women’s choices, not abilities, keep them out of math-intensive fields; MathML 3; preparations for Math/Maths Week; & more.
Episode 22 – LIVE from MathsJam!: A special episode with no news but views from the floor at MathsJam. Special guests this week (who gave their names): Colin Wright, Rob Eastaway, Bubblz the Mathematical Clown, Hugh Hunt, Dan Hagon, Jeff Morley, Timandra Harkness, Alex Bellos, James Grime, Phil Ramsden, Andrew Jeffery, Colin Graham and Sara Santos.
Episode 23 – LIVE from Greenwich: Android phone solves Rubik’s cube in 12.5 seconds; Edmonton Eulers; Relativistic trading; American math achievement; Russian maths problem teaches students who’s really in power; NASA’s Metric Failure; quantum error threshold; Top Five Utterly Incomprehensible Mathematics Titles; Your own maths theorem for £15; and news & stories (including stories from MathsJam) from the floor at Greenwich. Special guests this week: Mitch Keller, Tony Mann, David Singmaster, Nic Mortimer and Noel-Ann Bradshaw.
Episode 24: Linking geometric problems to physics; Card Tricks and Data Compression; Racial profiling; The aftershocks of crime; Mumford Receives the National Medal of Science; Improve your maths to get rich & boost the economy; Anti-Complexitism; The Meaning of Maths; Vi Hart Math Doodles; various competitions; and more.
Episode 25: Innumeracy Behind Airline Security; Poker at high school; Incredible Edible Foam; Dear Santa: Please Send Owl Puke; 20th C.’s Most Boring Day; Secret of Big Caves Revealed by Math; Non-Transitivity; The kilogram; The Mismeasurement of Science; SAT vs A levels; TDA beats recruitment targets in science and maths; Country rankings in math and science; advent calendars; Math/Maths LIVE from Greenwich: Now on video; Combinations and Permutations Episode 57; and more.
Episode 26: the invention of calculus (again); Providing Incentives to Cooperate Can Turn Swords Into Ploughshares; Google Chrome OS advert Math; WikiLeaks founder was ‘no star’ mathematician; Singapore’s Math Priority & US Parents overconfident in children’s mathematics; PISA World education rankings; ant algorithms; time before Big Bang; celebrating 12/12; interest on your credit card; Skyscraper Equation; Oxfam formula for a happy Christmas; Best Mathematical Writing of 2010; Math Article Shows Collaboration Is Not Limited by Geography—or Age; The World’s Social Networks; Lego Antikythera Mechanism; Single Digits; Christmas tree designed in GeoGebra; Royal Institution Christmas Lectures; and more.
Episode 27: Finding order in chaos; Modeling Snowflakes in Wintry Wisconsin; Mobile phone radiation linked to people jumping to conclusions; IBM supercomputer set for Jeopardy quiz show showdown; Primary School Students Conduct and Publish a Study on Bees; Students taking maths post-16; BREAKTHROUGH in algorithms: Improved algorithm for Metric TSP!!!!!!!!; Human networking theory gives picture of infectious disease spread; Pythagoras, a math genius? Not by Babylonian standards; 3D printed icosidodecahedron; Possible New European Heritage Label for Bletchley Park; NCETM Special Award for STEM – Does maths count?; Math/Maths in Google Books Ngrams; and more.
Episode 28 – Review of the Year: 1910: In a traditional move for the start of January we attempt a review of the year. In an untraditional move, we choose the year 1910. Topics covered: the death of Florence Nightingale gives a good reason to look at the development of modern statistics; the publication of Principia Mathematica volume 1 by Russell and Whitehead brings up axiomatisation and inconsistency; the publication of Einstein’s special relativity leaves some questions about freefall and gravity; Geiger & Marsden firing alpha particles at gold foil has Rutherford questioning the structure of the atom; ten years on from Hilbert’s Problems we ask how many have been solved; plus we look at the work of new LMS President and 1910 Royal Society Sylvester Medal winner Henry Baker and new Fellow of the Royal Society G H Hardy.
Episode 29: Rapture Math; 2011 numerology; 2011 Joint Mathematics Meetings and Exhibition of Mathematical Art; Batman Probability; ‘The worst info graphic of 2011’; NASA’s? best and worst science fiction movies; Pedantry on Euler and masts; mathematical matter; 100 Years of the Principia; Ten News Stories of 2010 – and the Statistics that Made Them; Celia Hoyles awarded the first Kavli Education Medal; Why a Cloned Cat Isn’t Exactly Like the Original: New Statistical Law for Cell Differentiation; Math Monday is the best of 2010; The 12 Math Carnivals of 2010 and the 73rd Carnival of Mathematics; LMS Membership survey; 2nd Tomorrow’s Mathematicians Today Conference; Robot solves Rubik’s cube in 15 seconds & more.
Episode 30: special guest Katie Steckles on Maths Busking and MathsJam; unlucky house numbers; Mathematics-Inspired Dance Work; Perfecting Animation, via Science; The Mathematics Of Beauty; Geomagic Squares; Irving Kaplansky’s “A Song about Pi”; Edsac computer to be rebuilt at Bletchley Park (by Boffins); An App for Every Course; Oxford and A*s; Maths Inspiration Photo Competition 2010 winner and runners up; and more.
Episode 31: Putting reality back into the equation; Weak gravitational lensing and weak arguments; Me and My Algorithm; Mass Animal Deaths; Counting Animals; Yes, bonuses do work – but for fruit-pickers, not City bankers; Finite formula found for partition numbers; Prime numbers in the House of Lords; Rhonda Hughes Honored with AWM’s First M. Gweneth Humphreys Award; National Curriculum Review – Call for Evidence; How much will the budget cuts affect your studies?; Vi Hart; Straight Statistics; and more.
Episode 32: Edmund Harriss’ job search; Museum of Mathematics; Watson ‘wins’ Jeopardy!?; Few Students Show Proficiency in Science, Tests Show; Seattle’s ‘Discovering’ math curriculum; Cal State Northridge professor charged with allegedly urinating on colleague’s office door; Coincidence odds are wrong yet again; Mathematical Model Could Help Predict and Prevent Future Extinctions; Long-standing conjecture on Plane Partitions proved; Researchers use cell ‘profiling’ to detect abnormalities — including cancer; Atom counting helps kilogram watch its weight; Math Monsters; Google donates 1 million euros to IMO; Japanese man gains world record for pi calculation; & more.
Episode 33: Dr Ian Porteous; President Honors Outstanding Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Mentors; Macroscopic invisibility cloaking of visible light; Tau Manifesto; Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code; Penny Bias; Informed Choices; Teacher training places and goodbye to the golden hellos; As 3,500 meteorologists meet, one man’s forecast: Chance of pirates; Bringing the Census into the internet age; Mathematicians design bone implants for the future; New Mathematical Model of Information Processing in the Brain Accurately Predicts Some of the Peculiarities of Human Vision; Snowdecahedrons; Crime maps: how useful?; What’s Andy Carrol really worth?; Ed Miliband admits being ‘a bit square’; Why nerds rule the world; The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4A released; Record numbers apply for university places; Marcus du Sautoy to be MA President; & more.
Episode 34: The Best Questions For A First Date; The Science of Soccer Substitutions; Role of statistics regulator; Math may help calculate way to find new drugs for diseases; Proposing math models to enhance two-way wireless network communication; Without language, numbers make no sense; Unique math program helps students; Aloha Math; Overweight Kids Who Exercise Improve Thinking, Math Skills: Study; Mathematics teachers learn to inspire students by encouraging pattern hunting; The pointy end of pineapple numbers; Giant Leaps; Researchers produce world’s first programmable nanoprocessor; 2011: Ranking 200 Jobs From Best to Worst; 1942 adding machines: a marvel of non-essential zero elimination!; The blackboard – a modern classic; Carnival of Mathematics #74; Bite-sized History of Mathematics; Valentine’s day mathematics; & more.
Episode 35 – Why Maths? Special: a special episode in which Samuel and Peter spoke to Ruby Childs about her investigations into why some people like maths and choose to study it further, when others don’t and whether we should be saying “maths is fun”.
Episode 36: Watson, Jeopardy and beyond; mathematician credited with solving one of combinatorial geometry’s most challenging problems; Ants build cheapest networks; ‘Periodic Table of Shapes’; Pride in poor maths culture ‘must be tackled’; Alan Turing’s Patterns in Nature, and Beyond; Alan Turing Papers bought by Bletchley Park Trust; It’s a young numbers game; World Education Rankings (episode 26 call-back); Fastest-Declining Academic Fields; Maths and Sport: Countdown to the Games; 20 Top Math Teacher Tweeters; Radical Statistics essay competition; Math Raps; special guest Julia Collins joins Samuel to discuss Engaging with Engagement; and more.
Episode 37: Math/Maths History Tour of Nottingham; U.K. Powerless to Stop ‘Jedis, Witches’ Spoiling 2011 Census; Apportionment in the European Parliament; the world’s most difficult maths problem; The Hodge Conjecture; pi birthday; Polisticians, Demographics and Destiny; All it took to beat Watson, the “Jeopardy”-winning computer, was a rocket scientist-congressman; The End of Algebra?; Compulsory Maths; Dyscalculia Day; The Way You Learned Math Is So Old School; Learning Math with a Video Game; I predict a riot: Where the next dictator will fall; getstats Stats Buskers; and more.
Episode 38: A short one this week because Peter wasn’t able to talk to Samuel. Peter apologised and spoke briefly about: Earthquakes and tsunamis, and prediction; Celebrating mathematical women; Pi Day; and your correspondence.
Episode 39: nuclear radiation; the Worst Statistics in the World; SOCCER SKILLS DOWN TO MATHS AND SCIENCE SAY SPORT BOFFS; Mathematicians invent a new way to pour stout; Can bees color maps better than ants?; Is mathematics discovered or created?; Bressoud Testifies Before House in Support of STEM Funding; Les Valiant Wins ACM Turing Award; ABEL PRIZE 2011; Romanian Masters in Math & Science; Riemann hypothesis; Using cams to solve math problems; Mathematics of Web Design & the Golden Section; The maths of 007 Top Trumps; calculus-based CAPTCHA; What Pi sounds like; & more.
Episode 40: RSS urges people to fill out Census; The Abel Prize 2011: John Milnor; A Schock Prize for an enormous theorem; Organized religion ‘will be driven toward extinction’ in 9 countries, experts predict; Deciphering hidden code reveals brain activity; James Gleick’s Information; Banking cheats will always prosper; Public School Math Doesn’t Teach Students How to Reason; Mathematics in Movies; 14 Holidays Every Math Major Must Know; Education bosses shamed as recruitment advert for MATHS teachers shows equation… with the WRONG answer; How to make a Slinky look like a Klein bottle; and more.
Episode 41 – What makes a mathematician? And who should communicate mathematics? Also: Math Awareness Month; MathFest 2011; Peabody Awards; GCHQ Code Cracking Challenge; & more.
Episode 42 – Maths in the City: special guest Rachel Thomas on Maths in the City; Pioneer Anomaly Solved; 3D Knight’s Tour; Antikythera Mechanism; Google grants for math; FBI cryptography – Help Solve an Open Murder Case; Requiring Algebra II in high school gains momentum nationwide; Mangahigh Launches 100% Free Games-Based Math Resource for US Schools; Gauss Facts; and more.
Episode 43: Did Samuel pass his thesis defence?: Letting There Be More Mosquitoes May Lead to Fewer Malaria Deaths; Australian mathematicians say some endangered species “not worth saving”; Are Ants Smarter Than Fifth-Graders at Math?; the Duckworth-Lewis Method; 2 reviews of Alex’s Adventures in Numberland; Ethnomathematics; How do routefinders find their routes?; New Symmetries; Open University to get US funding; The On-Line Blog of Integer Sequences; The Big Risk Test; MathsJam 2011; whether Samuel passed his thesis defence; and more.
Episode 44: Prehistoric Sat-nav is back: Museum of Math has a Home; Prehistoric Sat-nav is back; Snow Alogrithms; Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book; Flu Math; Professor who “makes maths fun’ gets top award; A Better Way to Teach Math; Child calls 911 for maths help; 10 Charts About Sex; Olympic sports; Predictive Health Prize; Gambling with Secrets; Otomata; Glee is Wrong; and more.
Episode 45: Will Grigori ever speak to the press again?: White Blood Cells Solve Traveling-Salesman Problem; Grigori Perelman Interview (“Grigori Perelman claims he can control Universe”); UK Voting – AV referendum; Push to define year sparks time war; What do you want on your tombstone?; Early math skills predict later academic success; STEM Education DATA; Strange Places to Prove Theorems; Ravi Kannan Wins Knuth Prize; Mathematical Guggenheim Fellows; Why we’re all far too sure of ourselves; In a Data-Heavy Society, Being Defined by the Numbers; and more.
Episode 46: Early Mathematics Day: a report from special guest Dan Hagon live from the BSHM/Gresham College Early Mathematics Day; Grigori Perelman; the Maths of AV; The Greatest Mathematicians of All Time; Could Han Shoot Second?; Paul The Psychic Octopus – The Movie; 40 Years of P vs. NP; TakeAIM: Articulating the Influence of Mathematics; Good maths journalism example: Tackling the big unaswered problems; Journal of Humanistic Mathematics; High School students offer flood of ideas; Why Bayes Rules; 13-Year Periodic Cicadas Emerge; Mangahigh now 100% Free also for UK & Republic of Ireland Schools; 14th Early Career Mathematicians Conference; The Calculus I Student; Numbas; and more.
Episode 47: Listener questions: This week Samuel and Peter were joined by special guest James Grime to answer listener questions. What use are graphics calculators? What is your favourite number? How do you solve 6/2(2+1) (and do you care)? Is maths rapidly developing or finished and polished? Why is most taught maths pre-1950? Is maths discovered or created? When did you first consider yourself a mathematician? What do you think of the arts? What do you think about the stereotypical mathematician? Can a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem exist? What’s the best maths communication conference? How do people use Twitter for networking and publicity?
Episode 48: Apocalypse, post-apocalypse & extinction: Judgment Day Mathematics, and what happens next; You’re Living in a Computer Simulation, and math proves it; Calculations may have overestimated extinction rates; Teeth Clenching Mathematics; The Danger of Praise; Supercomputers crack sixty-trillionth binary digit of Pi-squared; S. Korea US to Exchange Math Teachers; Teenagers must stick at English and maths; 71st Putnam; Olympiads; World Measurement Day; Arabic-Indic numerals; Calculus Rhapsody; and much more.
Episode 49: MathsJam Explosion: K3,3 is planar; Hardwired Geometry; Italian Seismologists Charged With Manslaughter for Not Predicting 2009 Quake; Highest paying majors; Code-cracking machine returned to life; Scenes de ballet; How maths can help with (almost) everything; 144 BC Chinese War Game Theory; dyscalculia and math anxiety; jargon; 75 Years of Computer Science; MathsJam explosion; and more.