YouSaid · the spoken record

Paulina Rowinska

lines on the record: 30
first: 2024-08-18
most recent: 2024-08-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“She actually led to the development of theories which we now take for granted of tectonic plates and the way they move and they create new forms on the earth, both on land and now we know also on the ocean floor. So she really, really changed science. And I don't know about you, Roma, but I didn't learn about her at school. And she's really done a huge thing. So this last chapter is really about these women who changed science and we don't talk about them enough.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She is, I believe, in the fiftieth more or less around the time, although she worked for a few decades in the US. And because of her work, so what she was doing, she was taking the data from the men coming from the ocean who were measuring the depth of the ocean. And she was making maps of it. She was plotting the root of the ship that was where the measurements were taken and she was kind of plotting the measurements. In a very novel and visually striking way. And she figured out that there's huge rifts going through the whole Atlantic and nobody believed that this is true because the bottom of the ocean was believed to be the most boring part of the earth because they were like there's nothing there. Like why would there be something happening there?”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yea Marisarp is my new hero, and I hadn't heard about her much before, and she's the woman who basically mapped the ocean floor or started really mapping ocean floor, even though she was not allowed to go on this expedition to the sea she was really stuck as an assistant of someone who was like much less qualified than she was. And just because she was a woman. That's what it was.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“District separation. And Gardendale, for example, is around a decade ago some parents decided to just leave a school district, so kind of create a new school district, separating themselves and leaving behind kids. And what would happen is then the new school districts would be very wealthy and then the one left behind would be very poor because school districts are mostly financed by taxes. So the more taxes parents pay, the better the schools are. And the problem is just getting worse and worse because then obviously more kids want to go and more parents want to send their kids to this.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, why are these students separated from each other? Why do students who live literally next door go to different schools? So unfortunately it happens in many places that parents of especially whites may be not super wealthy children because those go mostly to private schools but like relatively well off children. They want to separate them from mostly black who are usually unfortunately poorer students and that happens still today and it's kind of more subtle way of segregating because it's often not stated as oh we want to segregate white kids from black kids. No, we just draw a line knowing that black kids mostly live in this part of town and white kids live there. And there are some researchers who are actually studying these lines of cool”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so this was new information for me, how relatively easy it is to segregate students in the US. US is just an example. It happens all over the world, but that seems particularly striking. So how it works, I'm talking about public schools here because obviously private schools are completely separate. So usually students should go to a school that's in their school district. So every student is assigned to a school district and there's a school there and they just go there. So sounds fair, right? If I was drawing lines, I would think, okay, this school is the closest for the kid so the kid should go to the closest school. That's not what's actually happening because if you look at the school district maps, they have the weirdest shapes and sometimes you're”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they are good enough exactly, so and there are so many ways and they are really secretive about it many of these companies. So I really wanted to find out exactly what I don't know UPS does, but it's really impossible. Luckily, I found like a paper that kind of more or less describes what they're doing. And it's super complicated. But all in all, I think it's really nice that they combine the intuition knowledge of the drivers who know the routes best of all and some mathematical facts and algorithms and data. So it's a really smart way of kind of combining the human knowledge and intuition and just pure data. Every company has a different way of doing it. And to be further success really depends on it.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or something. So it's impossible to consider all the routes. Just not gonna happen. So it's actually an extremely hard problem to find an optimal route and we actually can't find one. We cannot say that this is the best route with the fastest delivery. So we've developed many, many algorithms or kind of methods of finding routes that are okay that they won't be super long, they won't be the best one, but we have to find them in a”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These days most of us, many of us rely on deliveries of stuff, ordering whatever it is, food, books, clothes. And these drivers or delivery, people who deliver the goods, they are in rush, they are really in rush because they need to deliver a huge number of packages in a day and every minute matters. So it's really crucial to plan the delivery road oximally. And the problem is this routes change every day, right? Because one day I order something, another day someone a few blocks away order something, so they cannot just stick to the same route. And there are so many possibilities that I think I found that just for one delivery driver is more than the stars in the universe.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Underground map does is basically it keeps justice information. So the distances are distorted. Henry Beck was the person who actually made this first version of this fable's map and all over the world now the transit system are mostly using this kind of we call them topological maps so the maps that kind of don't care about distances.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so if you've ever been in London on any other really big city with big transportation system, you know that it's a lot. It's a lot of different lines, different directions, different numbers, different stations, etc. So if you try to pack it all in a map of London, it's just impossible to read. And there are some maps out there on the internet so you can Google and see it for yourself. Yes, it is kind of accurate, but it's just you can't use it. Because when you step on a train as a tourist, especially when you don't know the city, you just need to get to a place. So you want to see how to get from your hotel to the British Museum, for example, right? And so what you're really interested in is which train to take and what station to leave at. Now, so what the London”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We kind of okay, we take a ruler or any measurement device and we try to approximate the shape with straight lines and we see how many times we fit the ruler and we add them up and we have an approximation. The problem is then we zoom in and we have like the shape kind of multiplies because we have all these little nooks and crannies that we missed the first time. So we get a much bigger number and we zoom in again and even bigger number happens. Now we will not get to infinity because at some point there's a boundary to it but it is true that I wouldn't trust any of these measurements of how long is the cost of a country or an island. We need to know what scale of the map was used because if we don't know these numbers are meaningless.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so this blows my mind too and I still don't kind of still don't accept this fact even though I know it's true. So what happens is that coastlines, for example, or rivers or any natural kind of borders lines on the map, they are essentially fractals. And what fractals are these shapes that kind of We see a shape, we zoom in and see a small part of the shape and it looks like the whole shape by itself. So I think a good example is cauliflower, that kind of the whole cauliflower when it's like a part of a cauliflower it kind of looks like a whole cauliflower cauliflower etc etc and because of that measuring them is really really hard because when we don't zoom in”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Around this globe. Obviously, that's not how we do it in practice, but that's the idea. And some of these projections then give us completely different shapes on the earth. So I described in a book Gull Peter's projection, which is kind of shown as an alternative to Mercator. I am not a fan of this projection because I think it looks ugly. It distorts, it keeps the relative sizes. That is true, but it distorts the shapes of continents so they look just weird to me and I'm not a huge fan, but obviously it's useful to see it to see the relative sizes because suddenly you have a big Africa South America and Europe is just this tiny little continent somewhere there. So it's useful to see that.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so how we can imagine it is we have a transparent globe and we put a light bulb and on the globe we have these different continents just drawn and we can then take a piece of paper and put it in different places around the globe or cutting through the globe and it kind of the bulb projects the shades of these continents and so what we can do is exactly we can wrap kind of around as a cylinder for example the paper or we can just put a flat piece of paper like touching the globe or cutting through it and and there are a few other options like that but all projections most production projections come kind of boil down to this really the way we wrap the”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we have hundreds, there are so many, so when we are talking about these maps, we are actually talking about projections, so the way of translating the globe onto a flat map.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More facts about the north than the south, let's say. But it's a more tricky question. And this map was extremely useful and still is, but for navigation, not for learning about the sizes of continents.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of this really mathematical principle behind this map. So it's kind of that we think that Africa is just a tiny continent somewhere as unimportant, which is completely not true, obviously, even when we just look at the areas. So I always kind of defend Mercator because people think it's a racist map. Now it has been used for racist purposes racist and like just Eurocentric purposes to kind of show that the north, the geographic north, is more powerful. But I would say that this is an unfortunate result of the way the map was made. And it was quite convenient for Mercator, obviously, because first of all, he knew way more about Europe than about these lands that were still unexplored by Europeans, so it was kind of convenient that he could squeeze in.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is it completely distorted the sizes? So we have anything around the equator, which is, for example, Africa, parts of Asia, South America, they are very small compared to, let's say, Europe, Greenland, especially like northern parts of Europe and the US, I mean Canada and Russia. I grew up looking at this map. I was learning my world geography from this map. And even though I know that it distorts the sizes, I still think that Europe is much bigger than it is. And I think many of us make this mistake even if you are aware of this fact. So it's really important to know that because what do we think of big things that they are stronger, they are more powerful, more important. And this is an unfortunate result.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, sure Mercator was a Dutch plantist, cartographer in the sixteenth century. And yes, so he's famous for creating a map that's actually used also today and especially by online mapping services like Google Maps or Apple Maps and etc. This map had one goal. So it was made for navigation. So what's important when we navigate the sea, the most important thing are the angles because we are using compass, we are using different tools that it's really crucial to get the angle right. So he created a map that kept the angles from the earth, from the globe onto heteronizing them onto the map. Now, what did this do?”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The air above the pole showing the US and Russia, I mean today's Russia. I mean, it showed they are really close to each other. So this kind of showed that, yeah, the thread from the Soviet Union is also the US is threatened. So kind of to tell the citizens to Americans, yeah, they should be worried, they should be doing something about it. On the other hand, if you show a map from like a European perspective, it seems they are on the opposite sides of the map, but they are really far away. It's two different maps. None of them is really wrong or better than the other. They are just showing, telling a different story. And that's why it's so important to be aware of it because we are looking at the news, we are reading the newspapers, and they show us maps. How they present the story.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so well, I wouldn't say we cannot describe it accurately or well because we are quite good at doing that, but there's no perfect map, right? So we can show the same phenomenon, the same place, the same area in many different ways. For example, we can keep the relative sizes of continents, let's say, but then their shapes will be distorted or the other way around. We can keep the directions, the angles, but the sizes will be wrong, etc., etc. And this is fine as long as we know what's distorted. And this has some political implications as well. So when we have, for example, conflict, then different sides can show different maps of the same thing. And really showing you a different story. So I really like this examples from the Cold War when you could show the map kind of from above.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“However, the total curvature must be zero. Now, how do we find this curvature? It's a more mathematically involved, but what matters is that we multiply these curvatures. So we have this non-zero number, and we then multiply it by the kind of other curvature towards the direction of, let's say, the middle of the pizza from the end of the slice to the other end of the slice. What number multiplied by something non-zero gives us zero? Well, it must be a zero curvature. So this kind of ensures that the other direction, the pizza will stay flat. It's probably hard to see when you just listen to the podcast, but just grab a slice of pizza and see that for yourself. And that's the same principle.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's a good way of describing it. Okay, so starting with the pizza had zero curvature, because it was flat, okay? And we need to keep this curvature of zero. So what happens when we fold a crust is that the curvature along that direction is non-zero. I mean, it's just curved. Like, I think it's quite intuitive.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what it basically says is that we cannot change the curvature of a surface. A curvature is very specifically defined by Gauss, but what matters really, you know, you can imagine that some things are round like or an orange is very round and then a sheet of paper is flat, so they have different curvatures. And we cannot change the curvature without tearing the object or destroying it in some way. And this is true for making maps, but that's also true for, for example, eating pizza. So, you know, like when we have pizza is basically when it's thin, like a proper Italian pizza, it's flat like a sheet of paper.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he was a mathematician. I would say probably the greatest mathematician ever life. He was not just a mathematician. I mean, his achievements come up in physics and geophysics and geography and all over the place, really. He was quite an eccentric guy too. And so the theorem I talk quite a bit about in the book is the remarkable theorem. So the name says it all really like it's really important.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I mean, how do we actually measure where stuff is? How do we measure dimensions of the earth and how do we figure out the shape of the earth? And also the earth is not a two-dimensional object, so this doesn't help because it's very, very hard. It's actually impossible to make a two-dimensional map out of a three-dimensional globe without any distortions, right? And we still make maps, but they are all distorted in some way. And somehow we sometimes aren't aware of it. We forget about it. And it's a mathematical fact that we just can't do that proven actually by Gauss hundreds of years ago. I would say this is like the main challenge of making them ups. And that's really why cartography as a field exists. Because every cartographer has to figure out A way of making a map in the best way possible in given circumstances.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, if taught in the right way, if we know why it's fun, right? And I was thinking, you know, there are so many popular maths books and they are about different topics, mathematics in biology, medicine, in, I don't know, astronomy in many other fields. And I was just thinking, what's there that really interests me? And I've always loved maps and geography. And I was sure there must be a book about it, but there wasn't. I couldn't find anything about mathematics of maps. So yeah, that's what happened. I wrote a book I wanted to read, really.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so I knew I wanted to write a book popularizing maths because people are scared of mathematics and I think it's just not okay because we shouldn't be scared of maths. And it's okay.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh well, I just couldn't decide what I wanted to study, so I was torn between mathematics and linguistics and geography and a few other completely unrelated courses. And I just thought, you know, mathematics is everywhere. So since I'm undecided, if I even for some reason don't like it, it won't be a wasted year or two. So yeah, I ended up liking it. And it's useful and it's fun.”
2024-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · On the Map: Why Mathematics Can Be Seen Everywhere We Go, with Paulina Rowinska · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT