YouSaid · the spoken record

Steven Strogatz

lines on the record: 125
first: 2020-01-07
most recent: 2020-01-07
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

“Lots of great ideas in that question. Well, okay, the short answer would be that physics is a lot simpler than economics. When you measure the moon, it doesn't mind. It doesn't react. It's just an inanimate thing. The laws governing inanimate bodies are just a lot simpler and more easily quantified than the laws governing populations or individual people. The task of the social sciences is extremely hard. They get to feed back on the system that's measuring them. It's also their ethical issues. You can't do experiments as easily or sometimes you can't do them at all on people or on populations of people. It's much harder to do controlled experiments. You try to pin down some variables and they just pop up somewhere else. So if you think about the history of science, which sciences were solved first?”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about minimum wage. Let's say we're making, okay, $15 an hour is what they're talking about now. Like everyone should be able to make that if you had a decent wage. That's still a rate of change, right? It's dollars per hour. Anything where you say per is a rate. Exchange rates, you know, how many marks per Or how many pounds per dollar? Those are rates.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in economics, people are always using the word marginal. So if they say the marginal utility, you know, how much extra pleasure or utility do you get from something for the next dollar that you spend? Or what's your marginal return on an investment? You invest one more dollar, how much bang do you get for that buck? So those are rates of change. The rate of change of return with respect to investment, that would be an example, and that's a common sense thing. You know, you don't want to at some point the marginal returns start going down, so it's not worth it to put in that extra dollar of investment. So we use that idea a lot there, but certainly in physics, we talk about speed. That's a rate of change of position with respect to time. We have acceleration. That's a rate of change of velocity. But even something as simple as a paycheck, you know, when I say I'm making $6 an hour, well, let's not say that.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's, of course, one of the key ideas of calculus, figuring out a rate of change, what we call a derivative. That's an example. The rate of change of your position when a short time interval elapses, that's a quintessential calculus calculation.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's it. Right. So we can measure your position a nanosecond later or whatever, a small unit of time later, and all those four distances have changed slightly”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. You got it perfectly. Because those clocks on those satellites are very accurately maintained and the military keeps extremely careful measurements of where the satellites are. So they have to know exactly where those satellites are and also what time it is on board the satellites. And so as you say, now they're all at somewhat different distances from your car, from your receiver. And so yes, you get to measure, as you say, triangulate. You get to measure several distances, three or four distances, to all those different satellites. And knowing those four distances, knowing where those satellites are. That places you uniquely on the earth. Not only that, it also places your velocity. I mean, so GPS can tell you how fast you're moving as well as where you are in three dimensions.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when these satellites, because they're farther from the center of the Earth, are in a weaker gravitational field slightly than we are on the ground. So these are minuscule effects. We're never aware of them in our ordinary life. But these GPS satellites are so accurate in their atomic clock timekeeping that they can actually, and they do all the time, effectively confirm Einstein's relativity predictions, in this sense. If we didn't build in the Einsteinian corrections to timekeeping, the whole GPS system would fall apart in about 20 minutes. It wouldn't be able to keep accurate time. So, okay, it's a big long walk I've just taken here to give it to you, but I mean, there's a lot more to this, but suffice it to say the GPS has a lot of calculus and advanced physics built into it, and we don't give it a thought. We're just trying to get home at night.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time can change in two ways. It can actually slow down when you're moving fast. It can also speed up when you're in a weaker gravitational field.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, It's not an easy thing to explain. I mean, we'd really have to go into a bit of relativity theory, but it is a consequence of relativity.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the satellite overhead. Now what's really tricky about all that is that the satellites need to keep extremely accurate time. They have onboard atomic clocks in them, the most accurate timepieces we know of, that are based on principles of quantum theory, which itself is built on calculus as its math, its infrastructure. But more than that, when the satellites are moving so fast overhead, they're actually going fast enough that Einstein's theory of relativity applies to them in a significant way. And the clocks on board those moving satellites run at a different rate from the clocks on the ground. In other words, time changes. Time doesn't move at the same rate. It sounds unbelievable. I mean, Einstein thought of this idea about a little more than 100 years ago. Time actually changes if you're moving. It can speed up or slow down.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's right. Sure, anytime we use our GPS gadgets to find our way to a strange destination or sometimes even to find our way home when we're lost after going far away GPS is a wonder of calculus. It's got so many different aspects of calculus built into it in the way that it acquires signals from the satellites overhead, the way that the satellites and the whole system estimates distances by doing a complicated mathematical calculation. It has to look at distances to three or four different satellites overhead. Really what the GPS system does is it doesn't directly measure distances. It measures time and converts those into distances. So the time is the time it takes for a signal to go from the satellite to your GPS receiver, given that it's traveling at the speed of light. Because it's an electromagnetic wave, this signal is going to move at the speed of light. And so you have to time very precisely how long it takes for the signal to get to your receiver from the time it was emitted.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it gets copied inaccurately. I mean, it's an RNA virus with a bad copying mechanism. That's actually to its advantage because it can generate many variants that can escape any drug you try to hit it with. But while Perilson's math showed is that if you did two drugs, your odds were a little better because then the virus would have to do two simultaneous mutations. The odds of that were lower than one. But three drugs would be the sweet spot where the odds were so low that HIV could mutate three simultaneous ways that you could basically keep it at bay for a long time. And that's now the modern regimen, the three-drug therapy. So math was key in understanding that. It didn't certainly didn't solve the problem on its own. You needed the immunologist and the doctors too. And of course the pharmaceutical companies. But with all of them working together, calculus was a key supporting player in helping change the way we look at HIV and certainly how we treat it.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's it. The math also showed that given this furious replication rate of HIV, it was no wonder that it was able to become resistant to essentially any drug. Mutations were happening so fast when HIV would get copied.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. It was a furious battle of attrition, an all-out war that was being held to a standstill. The immune system was holding HIV at bay.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Together with a team of other researchers to figure out what these protease inhibitors were actually doing with HIV, how are they working? And they showed that after taking one of these drugs, that the levels of virus in the blood would drop exponentially fast. It would really plummet. And what was so important about that is that by making measurements on the rate of this exponential drop, Perelson and Ho were able to show that the body was producing about a billion virus particles every day. HIV was making an enormous amount of new virus and the immune system was clearing it out and flushing it out of the body just as fast as it was being made. So it was a completely different picture that was not the case that the virus was dormant those 10 years. In fact, it was in this all-out.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With HIV, then that would mean if you had any drugs to treat it, you shouldn't use them at the beginning when a person is infected. You should wait until the symptoms start showing after 10 years, because you don't want the person to develop resistance to the few available drugs, this being back in 1985 or so. So that was the way HIV used to be treated, that they really wouldn't do much until full-blown AIDS, and then it turned out the available drugs didn't help. But all of this changed around 1994 when a new wondered drug called protease inhibitor became available. And the trouble, even though with that, is that just one drug, people would always develop resistance to any drug you gave them and HIV would come back. So where math comes into the story is that in the mid-90s Dr. David Ho, an AIDS researcher and a mathematician, Alan Perelson, worked”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is it the case, for instance, that HIV is hibernating during those 10 years, that it's just somehow lying dormant in the body waiting to come out and become full-blown AIDS? If you believe that's the picture, and certainly some viruses do that, you know, people who have been infected with Different types of herpes viruses, let's say, will know that they can have long periods with no symptoms in between outbreaks. So we do know, and chickenpox is a similar thing where people don't get shingles until they're much older after they had chickenpox as a little kid. So you can have tremendously long dormant periods of viruses not doing anything in the body. So if you think that's what's happening”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tremendous crash would seem to happen, and they would become terribly sick, and that's when HIV would become AIDS, at which point all kinds of nasty opportunistic infections would set in weird kinds of pneumonia that you wouldn't normally see, weird cancers that were very uncommon, and then at that point the person would only have a very short time to live, maybe a year or two. The mystery, I mean, what was thought to hold a clue to what might be going on was this bizarre asymptomatic period of 10 years. What's going on in the body for those 10 years when the person”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could detect some virus in the blood, but they'd get over it. So after two weeks, it seems like the person was sort of better. And then years could go by without any particular symptoms except for this strange, low level of T cells, these crucial components in the immune system. It seemed to be that the T cells were being depleted somehow by the presence of the virus, but otherwise people weren't that that sick. But then after maybe 10 years, suddenly...”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, okay, yeah. So take your mind back to, I'd say, you know, like the mid-1980s, where in the West here in the US or Canada, the HIV epidemic was really starting to hit. It was this very mysterious disease. wasn't so clear what was causing it. And but the symptoms were very predictable that a person who got infected would at first show flu-like symptoms. They'd feel kind of sick for two weeks, but then they'd get better. You know, they might have a fever. You could see their T cells important components of their immune system had a measurable change.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The concentration of virus in the bloodstream of a person with HIV, you know, after they take a combination drug therapy, their viral concentration will plummet, thankfully. So when doctors develop strategies for the life-saving treatment nowadays, the triple combination therapy that has turned HIV into a chronic illness from what used to be a near certain death sentence, calculus played a big part in quantifying the dynamics of how the immune system interacts with the virus and what role the different drugs that have been offered would play in all that. So that's it. I mean, calculus is the math for describing a world in flux, and since everything is in flux, you could see that it's bound to be pretty useful to have the ability to do that.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Calculus is one of the greatest ideas of all time. I would say it ranks right up there with relativity theory from Einstein, with quantum theory of the atom, with evolution from Darwin. And I mean, it's just had an enormous impact on the history of the world. It's the mathematics of change, if you had to say it in one word, that's what calculus is about. How to quantify things that change, especially things that change in ever-changing ways. So it's the first part of math that can cope with the dynamics of the world. And what do I mean? So the simplest kind of change is something moving, literally moving, moving, changing its location from place to place. So you could throw a ball or you could hurl a javelin. You could be thinking about the planets moving around the sun. You could be thinking about...”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hates math or is demoralized or even feeling shattered about it because it can be super soul crushing. It can also just be boring. I mean, there's all kinds of different negative reactions. Some people feel ego deflation. They really feel like they're stupid. Other people can do math, but they just don't see any point to it. They think it's boring. And then there are yet others who find it very exciting. So there's challenges for parents of all three types of kids, the board child, the depressed or distraught child who has tremendous math anxiety, and then the kid who wants to do more math but is limited by the environment. So I don't know. I would have different ideas, I guess, for each one.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we got onto this because you were asking, what can parents do Zamir had already, I guess the thing was that Zamir and other little kids Are very aware of what's out there in the world of the Internet. And so he knew me from the Internet. He knew other mathematicians from the Internet. And he doesn't really particularly read books. He watches videos. That's where a lot of learning is happening for kids today. So I would say parents should try to learn, I mean, sure, they could help the kids with the homework, but there's a lot of good learning to be had on the internet that seems to connect very well with this generation. So I would try to use that skillfully. It's not that hard. If it's a, so to speak, gifted child or someone with a lot of talent, that poses a different set of questions than the kid who's very frustrated.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, you can see it on YouTube, me and Zamir talking, and you'll see my eyes pop out of my head because I think, wait a second, what is this? This kid knows natural logarithms at seven, and pretty soon he says, yeah, and it works with imaginary numbers too.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A traditional magic square, you put in the numbers one, two, three, up to nine, such that every row adds up to 15, and every column adds up to 15, and every diagonal adds up to 15. There's a way of putting those nine numbers, one through nine, arrange them in the squares so that every row, every column, and every diagonal adds up to 15. That's an ancient idea. That's a magic square. What this boy Zamir had figured out how to do was something similar, except that every row column and diagonal multiplied to the same number rather than added. If you multiplied the three numbers, you'd always get the same number. So he's explaining to me how he figured this out, and I thought, this is pretty good. This kid is seven. This is amazing. But then he says to me after like 10 minutes, it also works with natural logarithms. And this is all captured on tape.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's actually a clip of that my encounter with him because I didn't know anything about him. I just thought I was going to shake his hand and who knows what to sign a book for him or something. But he's got all kinds of math he wants to show me. And so I thought this could be fun. So I told his mother take a little video of us, turn your phone on, and just let's maybe he'll want to watch this video afterward. Anyway, she records it, and we're talking for about 40 minutes where it begins with... So, just to remind people, if they've ever heard of a magic square or played with one, this is a three by three square of numbers.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, that's how it's done. And the kids are already doing it. So I had occasion recently to meet a seven-year-old boy whose mother said he was very excited. She's actually a professor at my school at Cornell. And the mother said that her son, who is seven, you know, that he was very excited to find out that a mathematician whose books he reads for fun actually teaches at the same school as his mom. And could he come meet me? So I was talking to this little boy.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yet I find that these columns tend to get used a lot in schools because they do cover the standard curriculum all the way through grad school. But especially a lot of elementary school and middle school and high school. Anyway, so I think parents could try reading those columns. They're free if you have the time subscription or you can get the first ten of them free. Or you could also, there's so many things on YouTube now. You mentioned YouTube, and there are a lot of good resources. There are just excellent, it's like a golden era of math communication. There's someone named Three Blue, One Brown. At least that's his handle on YouTube, who makes really great videos about everything, just at a more pedestrian level, there's Khan Academy, where you can learn all kinds of things. He's very good. It's like his vision is bringing education to the world at no cost and to a large extent. I think he sort of succeeds. He's really very good. But there are others, a person named Mathologer.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back in 20, I guess it was 2010, I think that's when it was, 2010, I was asked by the op-ed page editor of The New York Times to write a series about math for that kind of reader, for just the educated sort of person who's curious about a wide range of things who would be reading the times. And so that was the proposition. Do 15 weeks of math in the New York Times starting from preschool, you know, like the idea of numbers up to as far as you can go to graduate school or beyond and make it understandable, make it fun. And so it was a fantastic challenge. I really enjoyed that. That later grew into the book, The Joy of X, but it was always written with the parents in mind. It was meant for adults. And so there's a lot of references to things that only adults would know about literature or philosophy or sports or history.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kids What sort of like YouTube videos Event ton Well, one thing I suppose a parent could directly try to help him or herself first. If the parent started to like math and felt more secure, that would be a big help. So when I wrote...”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's what you would have gotten from your tangent. Your tangent of 45 would give you one. So, you would have concluded it's 10 units up on top of the 50 that were there to begin with So, yeah, I think 60. But okay, well, this is, look, it's not usually good to do math over a podcast. What are the other...”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's like you're stacking a square on top of the whole picture. And so the fact is that when it's a square, the 10 units on the bottom translates into a 10 units on the vertical side.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, isn't it 10? You could use the tangent, but with a 45 right triangle that has a 45 degree angle as one of its angles, the other angle is also 45 degrees. Because 45 plus 45 plus 90 makes 180. So that's what I mean by saying it's a half of a square. It's a square sliced along its diagonal. That's a 45-4590 triangle”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A right isosceles triangle, in other words. So it was 10 units over east or west to the tree. 10 units north would be to the top of the tree. So looks to me like 10 plus 50. I would have thought 60.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“45 upward from the horizon? That's one heck of a tall tree. Okay, so let's see. All right, so 45 going up. That wasn't what I had drawn So if I do that, that 45 degree angle makes an interesting, if I go over to where the tree is and then continue up vertically from the top of the tree. Let's see. Or, no, sorry, the tree is very tall. I guess I'm hitting the trunk of the tree. It looks to me like I have to go 50 plus 10. I mean, well, is that wrong? 50, geez, I'm going to embarrass myself here, the professional mathematician. But it looks like it's a 50-foot tall building. And then because you said 45 degrees, that's going to make a half of a square, right? That's a 45, 45, 90 triangle, so to speak. That's a half of a square”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't know. I may be misunderstanding the question, but I've drawn a picture with something that's a line standing up that's 50 units tall, 50 meters tall. Now, when you said 45 degrees viewed from the top of the building to the horizon, it wasn't clear to me if that means 45 degrees downward.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one and the slash and the 16 with his foot. And it's sort of a sad scene because you can find it on YouTube. The father says, ah, he's an idiot, just ignore him because they can't figure out what he's drawing. But he's giving the right answer. Anyway, the point being that this father... Ah, who didn't know how to do the problem could have stifled all discussion in the family except that Patty broke through.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then young Patty in a very dramatic scene starts making noises over in the corner of the room. Nobody's been paying attention to him the whole time. And someone says he's trying to say something. What are you saying? Go, Patty. What are you trying to say? And they put a piece of chalk between his big toe on his left foot and his pointer toe. And he starts scratching out something on this chalkboard. And you can tell as you're watching. He's trying to do 16th because one quarter times one quarter is 16th. He has figured out 25% of a quarter is a 16th. But it's pretty hard to draw the...”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We see him with his father, and he's thought at that time to be mentally challenged, the young Patty, because he has trouble talking. A question comes up his older sister is working on her homework, and her father is there sort of reading the newspaper or whatever, and the daughter says, what 25% of a quarter and the father says that's a stupid question. You can't take 25% as a quarter. You can't take a quarter of a quarter.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you don't, it's going to be ugly. There's a scene I'm trying to remember. Yeah, it's in my left foot. Do you remember this Daniel Day Lewis movie? What was the name of the guy? He was a poet, Patti, no, what was his name? I'm not remembering, but you know the movie I mean, right? He's completely paralyzed, except that he can move his left foot, the young boy. And he later goes on, it's a true story, goes on to be a magnificent artist who draws fantastic drawings and does paintings with the toes of his left foot. But early in the movie,”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do that. You're not supposed to be the equal or even the lesser of your kid. But in intellectual matters, I happen to like honesty. And if you don't know something, why are you trying to pretend? You're going to get found out anyway.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because I think the parents are critical to this in that a parent who says, well, I never used math in my life, so it doesn't matter, that's not going to help. We have to try not to pass on our own anxieties to our kids. What I try to do and what I would recommend other people do is to not be afraid to admit that you don't know something. That's a big, strong reaction to say I don't know let's figure it out. You know, either we can figure it out by thinking about it or we can look it up on the web. I mean, that's maybe a second best choice, but sometimes that's the best you can do. But the key being, it's okay to not know everything. Now, I suppose in some models of parenting, the parent is the authority figure and to relinquish authority is a big concession. And so these are maybe in more traditional homes. The parent will never.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is, it is. And when you collaborate on research at the cutting edge of math, where nobody knows the answer, I mean, you can't look it up. You can't ask a professor because no one knows. And it's the same thing with science or any other thing at the cutting edge of knowledge. When you're collaborating, it really helps to be vulnerable and to have a safe enough relationship with your collaborators that you can say, I don't get this. Could you go over that again or I don't see what to do or to suggest a stupid thing that someone else, rather than jumping down your throat, or they could tease you. Maybe they do jump down your throat a little, but it's ultimately safe to take intellectual risk. That's the point.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meaning nobody's going to feel stupid here. We're all confused. Confusion is the normal state of affairs when you're trying something really hard and when you're exploring the unknown. So it is a safe space in the sense that you can trust us, that we're all on the same team trying to figure this out together. And don't worry about looking stupid. I'm confused over here too.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They do, and they do figure them out. And if they're stuck, I say, okay, let's figure out what. And then people learn how to get unstuck, which is really valuable to have problem solving strategies for coping with frustration. We also talk about emotional stuff. Like, okay, we're stuck. How does that feel? Well, I'm frustrated. I'm mad. I'm curious. Whatever. And people talk. Now, there's a lot of people these days criticizing the notion of safe space. You hear this, that this is like a snowflake thing. Okay, we shouldn't talk politics, but I'm sure your listeners know what I mean, that you hear about in education, especially higher ed, that there are things that we're not supposed to talk about because it triggers people, and this is a safe space where we're not going to trigger anybody. And that's usually presented as very negative thing that stifles free speech, et cetera. But I want to bring up the possibility, because I've lived it with these students, that when you make a space that is safe for mathematical confusion,”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and explore them. And the point being it's very empowering. The students feel, hey, I can do this. I don't tell them the answers. The whole course is based on me never lecturing. I just give them puzzles.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good, okay, I'm glad it's coming back to you. So I don't know. I mean, we don't, maybe it's not so good to do it in this audio format, but I'll tell you the answer comes out to be four. If you calculate the circumference and you calculate the diameter, you'll end up getting that they're always in the ratio. I think I'm doing it right. It's always going to be four times the diameter will be the circumference, which is interesting. The pi is actually a whole number. It's four in this geometry instead of 3.14. So, I mean, okay, what's the use of this? It's not like it's so important to have the geometry for getting around cities with grids. It's just to make the point that this is a playground. This is the realm of the human imagination. You can think of alternative geometries.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, exactly good, right? So the circumference would be just that. It's the distance you would travel if you moved around the circle, the total distance following the circle around on its rim, and exactly the diameter is the widest distance across the circle. So, you know, again, you have to try to calculate that or see what it would be for my little example with the circle of radius 3 in this funny geometry.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, all right, then I'll say well, it should look like a diamond. I mean, it should look like a tilted square. Okay, so when my students discovered that, one person started screaming. She's saying, that's wrong. That can't be right. That's crazy. So I said, what's the problem? She said, a circle is round. This thing has points. I mean, this has corners. This doesn't look round. So I said, well, who says it should be round? Just because the Euclidean circle is round in traditional geometry, this is a new world. We're making new rules. This doesn't have to, who says it has to look around? It doesn't look around. So, and then you can do more. You could say, what is pi? Calculate pi in this geometry. Now, that takes you back to fundamentals again. 3.14159 like that, but that just memorizing. That's not thinking. Thinking would be what does pi actually mean? It means the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter of a circle.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT