The Numberphile Podcast

The Numberphile Podcast comes from Brady Haran, who also makes the Numberphile videos on YouTube, and its focus is the people behind mathematics. Research still comes up, but the conversations keep returning to biography: where a guest grew up, which teachers mattered, how a career took shape. Haran keeps his questions light. When Chris Oates names his birthplace, Milton Keynes, Haran answers 'What an exciting place that is', and he asks Roger Penrose outright whether anyone at school saw a prodigy. Penrose says no. He mentions being compared with his older brother and recalls living in England until he was seven. His parents decided to stay in Canada when the Second World War broke out, and then he tells a story about spinach. Told to eat half of an unwanted circle of it, he reshaped the circle into a semicircle of the same volume. Oates, a statistics professor, gets a similar arc: childhood first, then career, then research. When the research arrives, he gives a non-technical picture of the proteins in a cell as a network, with proteins as nodes and arrows marking their potential to interact. Guests range from a Fields Medal winner to a student still finishing his master's. Hugo Duminil-Copin, who won the Fields Medal in 2022, says he felt responsible for speaking about math to the public and bought books by mathematicians to study how they do it. In the end he decided the real question was how to talk, not what to say. He also wants a replica medal to take on foreign trips and school visits. Sashko Olenchenko is completing a master's in mathematical physics and making math videos from Kyiv, work sometimes interrupted by the need to shelter underground from Russian missiles and drones. He chose theoretical physics partly because he was bad at experiments, and he describes long stretches of university spent online as pandemic closures came and went. Destin Sandlin of the YouTube channel Smarter Every Day names the teachers who made him care and worries that modular online courses are shortchanging students. One episode reverses the usual roles: Haran answers questions sent in by Patreon supporters and followers on Twitter and Facebook, then signs off hoping for a guest next time so he does not have to do so much talking. Some conversations also exist as video. The Sandlin conversation is on the Numberphile 2 channel, and a shorter video cut of the Duminil-Copin interview has visual explanations that did not work as pure audio. Several episodes close with thanks to backers including Jane Street, the Ben Delo Foundation and Patreon supporters. A good first listen is 'Why Did The Mathematician Cross The Road? - with Roger Penrose', if only for the spinach.