# You're reading: Posts Tagged: maths on TV

### Where could you (or your rich pal) give everyone $1 million? Recently someone on Twitter, and then two people on US cable news, said that Michael Bloomberg could have used the \$500 million he spent on his presidential campaign to give everyone in the USA \$1 million. This caused quite a fuss. In short, someone divided 500 by 327, saw that the answer was bigger than 1 and the units were “millions”, and concluded that the money could instead have been distributed to give everyone \$1 million.

That’s an easy mistake to make for someone writing a tweet, but the kind of error that should have made someone think “does that make sense?” before planning a segment on TV news about it.

It’s raised a couple of interesting questions, though:

• If that money was shared between every American citizen, how much would each one get?
• If Michael Bloomberg wanted to give \$1 million to everyone in a smaller area, where could he choose? I realised that all the data I need is freely available on the internet, so I made a website to do the calculations for you: make-it-rain-bloomberg.glitch.me It asks you how much money you’ve got, then for every power of 10 dollars, it tells you where in the USA you could give every resident that much. To give you an idea of how far the net worths of people like Michael Bloomberg could go, it’s got a list of shortcuts for billionaires. Appropriately, I got that data from Bloomberg’s own website. Bloomberg himself was mysteriously missing from the list, so I got his net worth from Google and added it in myself. The most unexpected thing for me was seeing how much money these people would have left over after giving everyone in the USA \$100. They’d still be enormously, unimaginably rich!

I’ll describe a few of the fiddly details of the implementation now. At first the “how much money have you got?” input was a text field, but I realised it’d be much better to have a slider that you can swing from \$1 all the way up to \$1 trillion. It’s a logarithmic scale, so powers of 10 are equally spaced.

I got data on the populations of US cities and states from data.census.gov.

Working out which amounts and places to show you wasn’t completely straightforward. I thought it’d be easiest to fix the amounts given away to a power of 10 per person, and to find places where the population meant that the amount left over would be as small as possible. To do that, my code works through the list of places in ascending order of population, and stops at the last place whose population is big enough to give everyone at least the target amount.

I enjoyed making this tool, and I hope it helps somebody get a better feel for what these big numbers mean.

### Steckles on QI!

Our Katie was on BBC Two last night! As part of the QI Christmas special, Katie told that old chestnut about infinitely many mathematicians walking into a bar.

Viewers in the UK can see the show on the iPlayer; Katie’s segment starts about 12 minutes in.

### How to Win at Pointless

For the benefit of overseas readers, or British readers in full-time employment, I should briefly explain the concept of daytime TV quiz phenomenon Pointless. The pinnacle of British public service broadcasting, it’s shown at 5.15pm every weekday on BBC One and is hosted by Alexander Armstrong of comedy double-act Armstrong & Miller, and Richard Osman of comedy double-act Armstrong & Osman. We shall investigate how we can use maths to analyse the show, improve our chances of winning it, and ultimately perhaps improve the show itself.

The aim of the game is in each round to give the most obscure correct answer to a given question. Each question ($Q$) has a large set of valid answers $A_Q$, questions perhaps asking contestants to name “Films starring Bruce Willis” or “Countries without an O in their name”. All the questions have been asked to 100 members of the public prior to the quiz (call this set $P$), and they each have 100 seconds to name as many examples as they can (giving rise to a set $A_p\subseteq A_Q$ for each $p\in P$. The contestant gets a point for every one of the 100 people who named their answer $a$:

$\mbox{score}(a) = \begin{cases} | \{p\in P : a\in A_p \} | & \mbox{if}\ a\in A_Q \\ 100 & \mbox{if}\ a\not\in A_Q. \end{cases}$

So an obvious answer like Die Hard or France will score a lot of points, and an obscure answer like Striking Distance or Central African Republic will score fewer points. Points are bad (hence the title) so it’s better to dredge up an obscure answer than stick with something safe. However an incorrect answer like Avatar or Mexico scores the maximum 100 points. At the end of the round the contestant with the most points is eliminated.

### Dara O Briain: School of Hard Sums to return; maths students sought to take part

A tweet purporting to be1 from the press office of UKTV, the company that owns the channel Dave, has confirmed that the TV show Dara O Briain: School of Hard Sums is to return for a second series (we at least thought we knew this in July). It also says that production company Wild Rover are looking for maths students to take part. The tweet asks you to email maths@wild-rover.com to express an interest. You might remember that the first series, which aired in April-June, did very well compared with other programmes on the channel.

1. Yes, I know, but it was retweeted by Thomas Woolley, who should know. []

### Probabilitelly

On the 18th of October BBC Four is going to broadcast a programme called Tails You Win: The Science of Chance, presented by Prof David Spiegelhalter, as part of its Big Science series.

Here’s the BBC’s description:

Smart and witty, jam-packed with augmented-reality graphics and fascinating history, this film, presented by Professor David Spiegelhalter, tries to pin down what chance is and how it works in the real world. For once this really is ‘risky’ television1.

The film follows in the footsteps of The Joy of Stats, which won the prestigious Grierson Award for Best Science/Natural History programme of 2011. Now the same blend of wit and wisdom, animation, graphics and gleeful nerdery is applied to the joys of chance and the mysteries of probability, the vital branch of mathematics that gives us a handle on what might happen in the future. Professor Spiegelhalter is ideally suited to that task, being Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University, as well as being a recent Winter Wipeout contestant on BBC TV.

1. I’m going to guess this sentence is what clinched the commission – CP []

### 2nd series of School of Hard Sums

Fans of scandalous gossip (and TV channel Dave’s recent foray into maths based light entertainment, Dara O Briain’s School of Hard Sums) will be interested to note the following tweet from Marcus Du Sautoy:

This presumably refers to the show mentioned above, which featured Marcus as a maths question/task-master, providing both fiendish puzzles and mathematical insight – but who knows? People say all kinds of things on Twitter.

Would you be interested to see another series? Which puzzles would you include? Comments below.

### School of Hard Sums doubles the normal Dave audience

Last night saw the debut of Dave’s ‘School of Hard Sums’, a slightly strange but enjoyable maths show from Dara O Briain and Marcus du Sautoy. Was the show a success? Today Dara tweeted:

Of course, the show received a good deal of advertising – but it seems like good news nonetheless.