# You're reading: Posts Tagged: Relatively Prime

In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical podcasts from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the podcast and asking them about what they do.

We spoke to friend of the site and prolific podcaster Sam Hansen about their podcast Relatively Prime.

### The Maths Podcast to end all Maths Podcasts

At the MathsJam weekend gathering earlier this month, we found ourselves invited to join maths podcasting supremo Samuel Hansen for a recording session. Nothing unusual there: podcasts have been recorded at MathsJam before. But this time Samuel wanted to record more than one podcast at the same time – since many of the maths podcasting community were present, it seemed like a good plan to grab anyone who wasn’t already doing something else and record something quite unlike any podcast you’ve ever heard.

### Relatively Prime is back!

Aperiodipal numero uno Samuel Hansen’s acclaimed podcast series Relatively Prime is back, on a new monthly schedule, with an episode about how PhD student Ibrahim Sharif designed a lottery to award licences to sell cannabis in the state of Washington.

When the stakes are so high (geddit?! – Ed.) you have to be really sure that your lottery is fair. That’s where a lot of fun maths comes in.

You can listen to Lottery Daze on relprime.com. Sam intends to fund this new incarnation of Relatively Prime through Patreon – you can pledge to pay Sam a certain amount (starting at a dollar) for every episode he releases, with perks for paying more such as a postcard from Sam or placing an ad in one of the episodes.

Listen to Lottery Daze on relprime.com

Support Relatively Prime on Patreon

Samuel Hansen’s Relatively Prime has now published all episodes of the second season, available at relprime.com, and the Kickstarter for Season 3 is now live. In fact, it’s so live it’s almost run its course: the third season will only be funded if at least $24,000 is pledged by Saturday 12th March 2016 at 4am GMT. At the time of writing, as I just pledged my support, the project is 30% backed. Consider supporting this third season of stories from the mathematical domain! You can watch a video of animated Samuel telling you about the project, listen to Samuel speaking about why you should support this, or read an interview Samuel did about Relatively Prime with Shecky Riemann at Math-Frolic. To drum up your enthusiasm, you can listen to existing episodes or read our own Colin Beveridge’s recaps of season 2. Don’t delay too long, though – go to Kickstarter and pledge to support the project now! ### Relatively Prime Recap: Season 2, Episode 8: Diegetic Plots, Chapter 2 There really isn’t enough silliness in maths. Samuel has tried to inject some throughout the series, sometimes more successfully than others. This is the episode where he finally nails the silliness. Diegetic Plots, Chapter 2 is a nice finale to a generally good season of Relatively Prime. Dealing with sketches and haiku from the mathematical domain, we get a glimpse of the daft side of maths. ### Relatively Prime Recap: Season 2, Episode 7:$f(\theta) = 1 – \theta$I’d have written it as$r = 1 – \theta\$, myself, but even then it’s not much of a heart. However, that’s pretty much my biggest gripe about this episode, the penultimate in series 2 of Samuel Hansen’s one-of-a-kind mathematics podcast, Relatively Prime.

Episode 7 is subtitled “Dating in the mathematical domain”, and looks at the maths involved in dating and relationships, and begins with some of the comments Sam’s dating profile received from non-mathematicians. Now, denizens of the dating world: Samuel has many flaws and failings; picking on the fact that he’s a mathematician seems a little arbitrary and unfair, like deciding not to vote for Donald Trump because you don’t like his tie. I have this unfamiliar sensation. Could it be… surely not? It appears that I feel a little sorry for Samuel. Don’t tell him, ok?

### Relatively Prime Recap: Season 2, Episode 6: Principia Metropolica

I’ve been looking forward to this one: cities in the mathematical domain. This is the kind of applied maths I can really get behind.

Samuel starts with Mike Batty of University College, London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis discussing how cities grow and organise themselves. The structure is frequently fractal; how does one calculate the dimension of a city?

From a top-level view of cities, he moves on to a low-level description of one of the biggest problem in cities: traffic (another thing that fascinates me). We get a glimpse of traffic waves, and the unfairness that the person responsible for the average jam doesn’t suffer from the effects. And we learn that Gábor Orosz (University of Michigan) tests his hypotheses using robots as well as simulations.