Long-standing chum of The Aperiodical, Samuel Hansen, has been spending the past year travelling round the world recording interviews and collecting audio for an ambitious series of programs about maths called Relatively Prime: Stories from the mathematical domain. The first episode will be released next Monday.
Sam’s written a nice long press release explaining what the show’s about so, rather than use my own stupid words, I’ll let him tell you all about it:
ACMEScience.com presents
Relatively Prime: Stories from the Mathematical Domain
Eight episode series explores the world of mathematics
ACMEScience.com is proud to announce the premiere of its brand-new podcast Relatively Prime: Stories from the Mathematical Domain. A Kickstarter funded series, the first episode of Relatively Prime will be released on September 17th and the series will run until November 5th, with a new episode being released every Monday.
Produced and hosted by Samuel Hansen, Relatively Prime is an eight episode series featuring in-depth stories about the world of mathematics. While each episode revolves around a single theme, the themes themselves vary widely and include a checkers playing computer, new tools for your mathematical toolbox, and things that were flat out unexpected. The guests range widely too, from a Fields Medalist to a composer to a stand-up mathematician.
“Mathematics is not talked about enough. For a subject that is, as you hear over and over again, the foundation of science and technology and engineering it seems to be rather tragically under-covered in the media,” said Samuel Hansen when asked about why he decided to create Relatively Prime. “There are great stories, not just great mathematical stories, but great human stories as mathematics is as human an endeavor as anything else. I wanted to create an outlet for people to hear these stories.”
Relatively Prime looks at these mathematical stories through a lens that anyone can understand. While the shows do not stray away from advanced mathematical topics, the content itself carefully avoids getting bogged down in technical details. Speaking on this Samuel said, “I am a mathematician, I live for the details and trust me I asked my guests plenty of technical questions, but when it came to putting the shows together I wanted to make sure that they were accessible for everyone. It would be a shame if people needed to spend a few years getting an advanced degree before they could appreciate the stories. That is not to say that I lowered the level of the content. I was very careful to maintain the integrity of the mathematics, and I wanted to be sure that my audience never felt I was speaking down to them.”
Relatively Prime will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License and Samuel Hansen is looking forward to any remixes that may result. The show will be available to download directly at the show’s website http://relprime.com, through the RSS Feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/relprime, and through iTunes.