Join Sofía Baca and her guests, the host and co-host of the Nerd Forensics podcast, Millicent Oriana and Jacob Urban, as they explore what it means to be able to solve one problem in multiple ways. This episode is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For full text, visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ [Featuring: Sofía Baca; Millicent Oriana, Jacob Urban[

The history of mathematics, in many ways, begins with counting. Things that needed, initially, to be counted were, and often still are, just that; things. We can say we have twelve tomatoes, or five friends, or that eleven days have passed. As society got more complex, tools that had been used since time immemorial, such as string and scales, became essential tools for counting not only concrete things, like sheep and bison, but more abstract things, such as distance and weight based on agreed-upon multiples of physical artifacts that were copied. This development could not have taken place without the idea of a unit: a standard of measuring something that defines what it means to have one of something. These units can be treated not only as counting numbers, but can be manipulated using fractions, and divided into arbitrarily small divisions. They can even be multiplied and divided together to form new units. So where does the idea of a unit come from? What's the difference between a unit, a dimension, and a physical variable? And how does the idea of physical dimension allow us to simplify complex problems? All of this and more on this episode of Breaking Math. Distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License. For full text, visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ [Featuring: Sofía Baca; Millicent Oriana, Jacob Urban]

Join Sofia Baca and Nerd Forensics co-host Jacob Urban as they discuss all things counting! Counting is the first arithmetic concept we learn, and we typically learn to do so during early childhood. Counting is the basis of arithmetic. Before people could manipulate numbers, numbers had to exist. Counting was first done on the body, before it was done on apparatuses outside the body such as clay tablets and hard drives. However, counting has become an invaluable tool in mathematics itself, as became apparent when counting started to be examined analytically. How did counting begin? What is the study of combinatorics? And what can be counted? All of this and more, on this episode of Breaking Math. This episode is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (full text: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) [Featuring: Sofia Baca; Jacob Urban]

As you listen to this episode, you'll be exerting mental effort, as well as maybe exerting effort doing other things. The energy allowing your neurons to continually charge and discharge, as well as exert mechanical energy in your muscles and chemical energy in places like your liver and kidneys, came from the food you ate. Specifically, it came from food you chewed, and then digested with acid and with the help of symbiotic bacteria. And even if that food you're eating is meat, you can trace its energy back to the sun and the formation of the earth. Much of this was established in the previous episode, but this time we're going to explore a fundamental property of all systems in which heat can be defined. All of these structures had a certain order to them; the cow that might have made your hamburger had all the same parts that you do: stomach, lips, teeth, and brain. The plants, such as the tomatoes and wheat, were also complex structures, complete with signaling mechanisms. As you chewed that food, you mixed it, and later, as the food digested, it became more and more disordered; that is to say, it became more and more "shuffled", so to speak, and at a certain point, it became so shuffled that you'd need all the original information to reconstruct it: reversing the flow of entropy would mean converting vomit back into the original food; you'd need all the pieces. The electrical energy bonding molecules were thus broken apart and made available to you. And, if you're cleaning your room while listening to this, you are creating order only at the cost of destroying order elsewhere, since you are using energy from the food you ate. Even in industrial agriculture where from 350 megajoules of human and machine energy, often 140 gigajoules of corn can be derived per acre, a ratio of more than 400:1, the order that the seeds seem to produce from nowhere is constructed from the energy of the chaotic explosion from a nearby star. So why are the concepts of heat, energy, and disorder so closely linked? Is there a general law of disorder? And why does the second law mean you can't freeze eggs in a hot pan? All of this and more on this episode of Breaking Math. Distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) [Featuring: Sofia Baca; Millicent Oriana, Jacob Urban]

Christopher Roblesz is a math educator who, until the pandemic, worked as a teacher. It was his experiences during the pandemic, and his unwavering passion for preparing disadvantaged youth for STEM careers, that eventually led him to developing mathnmore, a company focused on providing an enriched educational experience for sstudents who are preparing for these careers.More on energy and entropy next time!All of this and more on this interview episode of Breaking Math! [Featuring: Sofia Baca; Christopher Roblesz]

Join Sofia Baca and her guests Millicent Oriana from Nerd Forensics and Arianna Lunarosa as they discuss energy. The sound that you're listening to, the device that you're listening on, and the cells in both the ear you're using to listen and the brain that understands these words have at least one thing in common: they represent the consumption or transference of energy. The same goes for your eyes if you're reading a transcript of this. The waves in the ears are pressure waves, while eyes receive information in the form of radiant energy, but they both are still called "energy". But what is energy? Energy is a scalar quantity measured in dimensions of force times distance, and the role that energy plays depends on the dynamics of the system. So what is the difference between potential and kinetic energy? How can understanding energy simplify problems? And how do we design a roller coaster in frictionless physics land?[Featuring: Sofia Baca; Millicent Oriana, Arianna Lunarosa] This episode is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Full text here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The world around us is a four-dimensional world; there are three spatial dimensions, and one temporal dimension. Many of these objects emit an almost unfathomable number of photons. As we developed as creatures on this planet, we gathered the ability to sense the world around us; and given the amount of information represented as photons, it is no surprise that we developed an organ for sensing photons. But because of the amount of photons that are involved, and our relatively limited computational resources, it is necessary to develop shortcuts if we want to simulate an environment in silico. So what is raytracing? How is that different from what happens in games? And what does Ptolemy have to do with 3D graphics? All of this and more on this episode of Breaking Math. Theme was Breaking Math Theme and outro was Breaking Math Outro by Elliot Smith of Albuquerque. This episode is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. License information can be found here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ [Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch]

Physical objects are everywhere, and they're all made out of molecules, and atoms. However, the arrangement and refinement of these atoms can be the difference between a computer and sand, or between a tree and paper. For a species as reliant on tool use, the ability to conceieve of, design, create, and produce these materials is an ongoing concern. Since we've been around as humans, and even before, we have been material scientists in some regard, searching for new materials to make things out of, including the tools we use to make things. So what is the difference between iron and steel? How do we think up new things to make things out of? And what are time crystals? All of this and more on this episode of Breaking Math. This episode is released under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. More information here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ [Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch; Taylor Sparks]

Robert Black is an author who has written a six-book series about seven influential mathematicians, their lives, and their work. We interview him and his books, and take a peek into the lives of these influential mathematicians. Addendum: Hey Breaking Math fans, I just wanted to let y'all know that the second material science podcast is delayed. [Featuring: Sofía Baca; Robert Black]