Just quickly, here’s something I saw on MetaFilter and enjoyed. The Simons Foundation has a “Science Lives” series of “extended interviews with some of the giants of twentieth century mathematics and science”.
This one is with Robert MacPherson, who invented instersection homology with Mark Goresky. I’d never heard of him and topology gives me the heebie-jeebs, but I’ve spent a very happy morning reading the fascinating biography and listening to the interview. The interviewer is Robert L. Bryant, also a research mathematician, so the questions don’t stray away from difficult topics. MacPherson comes across as an all-round excellent guy; I really recommend playing through all the clips when you have some time.
I’m putting this down here because it’s a gripe about the presentation and would’ve distracted from my enthusiasm for the content: it’s a little bit annoying that the interview is split up into clips that you have to click on individually to play. I’m capable of doing that, but I’d like to set it going and have the interview playing while I do other things.
Each clip is given a category code, and two asterisks if it’s on a technical subject, but I recommend watching them all. A few clips belong to category F, which isn’t in the legend. I can’t work out what it might stand for.