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Explore every episode of the podcast My Favorite Theorem

Dive into the complete episode list for My Favorite Theorem. Each episode is cataloged with detailed descriptions, making it easy to find and explore specific topics. Keep track of all episodes from your favorite podcast and never miss a moment of insightful content.

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1–50 of 96

TitlePub. DateDuration
Episode 92 - Kate Stange10 Jun 202400:29:37
Kate Stange is a number theorist who loves quadratic forms (and who doesn't, really). Her favorite theorem is the bijection between them and ideal classes. Also chocolate.
Episode 91 - Karen Saxe03 Apr 202400:34:17
Karen Saxe is an analyst who spends her days representing mathematics on Capitol Hill. She really likes the isoperimetric inequality and its many uses. Also tennis.
Episode 82 - Juliette Bruce30 Dec 202200:29:20
Juliette Bruce is an algebraic geometer who loves to think about embedding curves in projective space. Also mountaineering.
Episode 81 - Christopher Danielson26 Nov 202200:33:13
Technically this is a theorem, but it seems so obvious that it's unclear that it needs a proof. In this episode Christopher Danielson points out that polygons have same number of sides as vertices. Many shapes make an appearance.
Episode 80 - Kimberly Ayers21 Oct 202200:33:56
Kimberly Ayers likes dynamics and so obvs her fave theorem is Sharkovskii's result that "period 3 implies chaos." Also taffy.
Episode 79 - Philip Ording15 Sep 202200:34:32
Philip Ording wrote a cool book (you should check it out) and he likes the Erlangen Program. Not really a theorem, but we're not purists around here.
Episode 78 - Daina Taimina11 Aug 202200:27:40
Daina Taimina is famous for her adventures in mathematical crocheting, but her favorite theorem comes from Desargues. She also likes to travel.
Episode 77 - Tien Chih13 Jul 202200:25:53
Tien Chih loves combinatorics, which means he really loves proving things by induction. In this episode we have a good time learning about this incredibly useful technique in mathematics.
Episode 76 - Math Students of CSULA09 Jun 202200:58:35
We are joined by a group of math students at Cal State University in Los Angeles for a diverse collection of theorems and pairings.
Episode 75 - Dave Kung17 Mar 202200:30:37
We can't believe it took 75 episodes to get to the Banach-Tarski paradox, but finally Dave Kung chose it as his favorite theorem. Also, Enigma Variations.
Episode 74 - Priyam Patel11 Feb 202200:42:41
An old favorite theorem makes its third appearance on the pod, but we always like to learn new points of view. Priyam Patel likes the Brouwer Fixed Point theorem, and this time we learn how it helps classify isometries of hyperbolic space. Also, rock climbing.
Episode 73 - Courtney Gibbons13 Jan 202200:41:57
Courtney Gibbons likes isomorphism theorems. All three of them, in fact, and she wants to remind you they are due to Emmy Noether, despite most textbooks ignoring that fact. Also, bunnies.
Episode 90 - Corrine Yap23 Jan 202400:33:46
Corrine Yap loves math, graph theory in particular, and also loves to perform her one-person play about Sonya Kovalevskaya. Also, tofu.
Episode 72 - Kameryn Williams10 Dec 202100:22:34
Kameryn Williams is a logician and their favorite theorem is the less well-known Condensation Lemma of Gödel. Also brie.
Episode 71 - Emily Howard11 Nov 202100:39:57
Composer Emily Howard uses mathematical objects and ideas as inspiration for her orchestral and chamber pieces. In this episode we talk to her about "Torus" which was inspired by work with dynamicists.
Episode 70 - Joel David Hamkins22 Sep 202100:39:45
Mathematician and philosopher Joel David Hamkins likes games (whatever those are) and his favorite theorem is that winning strategies exist. This requires defining "games", "strategies", and all kinds of other stuff. Also chess.
Episode 69 - Ranthony Edmonds14 Aug 202100:36:11
Mathematician Ranthony Edmonds likes factorization in general, so it's no surprise her favorite theorem is the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. And some history. And mead.
Episode 68 - Rekha Thomas08 Jul 202100:27:00
Mathematician Rekha Thomas likes things to have applications, and nothing fits that bill better than linear algebra. In this episode we learn that the singular value decomposition gives us a lot more information than you might have realized. Also, migratory birds.
Episode 67 - Liz Munch10 Jun 202100:33:08
Mathematician Liz Munch really likes the duality inherent in the Max Flow-Min Cut Theorem. And harps.
Episode 66 - Érika Roldán15 May 202100:37:08
Mathematician Érika Roldán likes probability and topology and all kinds of fun stuff. Her favorite theorem involves card shuffling, but it eventually leads to Tetris. Also 3D art.
Episode 65 - Howard Masur08 Apr 202100:28:50
Howard Masur likes the Riemann Mapping Theorem, a result relating topology (simply connected subsets of the plane) and geometry (conformal mappings).
Episode 64 - Pamela Harris and Aris Winger11 Mar 202100:48:35
Pamela Harris and Aris Winger have a podcast you should check out, but they also have favorite theorems as diverse as Zeckendorf's theorem about unique representations of integers as sums of Fibonacci numbers and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Also ceviche and pizza.
Episode 63 - Lily Khadjavi11 Feb 202100:50:33
Mathematician Lily Khadjavi does more interviewing than we do in this episode, as she proposes a taxonomy of theorems.
Episode 89 - Allison Henrich12 Nov 202300:35:04
Allison Henrich studies knots and her favorite theorem is about how one might unknot a knot. Also, music.
Episode 62 - Tai-Danae Bradley15 Jan 202100:31:50
Mathematician Tai-Danae Bradley is very excited about the singular value decomposition. And category theory. And Dum Dums.
Episode 61 - Yoon Ha Lee10 Dec 202000:22:23
Science fiction author Yoon Ha Lee has degrees in mathematics and it shows. We revisit an old favorite, Cantor's diagonalization argument. Also waffles.
Episode 60 - Michael Barany12 Nov 202000:40:36
Historian of mathematics Michael Barany has a favorite definition, really, and it's about distributions. Also, we talk about the history of the Fields Medal and a well-thought-out pairing.
Episode 59 - Daniel Litt08 Oct 202000:26:36
Daniel Litt really likes Dirichlet's theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions and it's easy to see why. But we'll let him explain. Also Holmes and Watson make an appearance.
Episode 58 - Susan D'Agostino10 Sep 202000:25:11
The Jordan Curve Theorem is one of the most well-known results in mathematics and everyone thinks it's obvious. But as Susan D'Agostino points out, there are weird curves where it's not so clear. Also, poetry.
Episode 57 - Annalisa Crannell13 Aug 202000:33:29
This special episode is a mashup with the Talk Math With Your Friends online seminar series and features mathematician Annalisa Crannell telling us all about Desargues' Theorem, or, as she would call it, the Fundamental Theorem of Perspective Geometry. Also, chopsticks.
Episode 56 - Belin Tsinnajinnie09 Jul 202000:35:10
Voting theory is on everyone's mind these days. Belin Tsinnajinnie joins us to talk about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem which asserts that the only voting system that conforms to some reasonable rules is a dictatorship by one person. Also tacos.
Episode 55 - Rebecca Garcia11 Jun 202000:24:33
One of those first weird facts you learn in real analysis is that the rational numbers are dense in the reals. And then you learn later that they're measure zero. Our guest, Rebecca Garcia, says this still kind of blows her mind.
Episode 54 - Steve Strogatz14 May 202000:32:55
Steve Strogatz is famous for his work in dynamical systems, but his favorite theorem is due to Cauchy. A classic of complex analysis, it asserts that the integral of an analytic function around a closed contour is zero; one of the cleanest results in mathematics. Also, cubism.
Episode 53 - Ruthi Hortsch09 Apr 202000:28:47
Ruthi Hortsch has a very cool job working with middle school math students, but she's also a number theorist who really likes Faltings's Theorem. Also bagels.
Episode 88 - Tom Edgar09 Oct 202300:26:15
We all know the (probably apocryphal) story of Gauss adding up the first 100 positive integers as a child. Well, Tom Edgar really likes this result and will be happy to tell you about dozens of different ways to prove it. Also, Groundhog Day.
Episode 52 - Ben Orlin12 Mar 202000:27:16
Ben Orlin is famous for his bad drawings. In this episode he tells us about Weierstrass's ultimate bad drawing--a continuous function that is nowhere differentiable.
Episode 51 - Carina Curto13 Feb 202000:29:15
Mathematician Carina Curto really likes the Perron-Frobenius Theorem. Listen to find out why this simple-sounding result is so important and useful.
Episode 50 - aBa09 Jan 202000:35:22
aBa took a circuitous path to becoming a math professor. His favorite theorem is a number theory fact he figured out on the bus one day and it changed the course of his life.
Episode 49 - Edmund Harriss12 Dec 201900:31:07
Mathematician and artist Edmund Harriss thinks about geometry. A lot. And that means considering the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem and how it manifests in the real world.
Episode 48 - Sophie Carr14 Nov 201900:23:24
Bayes's Theorem: love it or hate it you can't deny that it's a useful tool in probability. Join this year's most interesting mathematician Sophie Carr to find out why she loves this theorem so much.
Episode 47 - Judy Walker10 Oct 201900:31:38
Judy Walker loves coding theory and tells us all about her favorite ones in this episode. Elliptic curves FTW!
Episode 46 - Adriana Salerno12 Sep 201900:30:55
Adriana Salerno loves one of the most famous arguments in mathematics--Cantor's Diagonalization Argument. We couldn't agree more (although we certainly agree plenty in the episode).
Episode 45 - Your Flash Favorite Theorems08 Aug 201900:35:40
At the 2019 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore, Kevin and Evelyn asked lots of folks to tell us about their favorite results, and do it in a hurry. The pairings, thought of on the fly, do not disappoint.
Episode 44 - James Propp11 Jul 201900:29:12
In this episode James Propp challenges the obvious notion that things that don't change must be constant. Indeed, it would be an odd universe in which this were not true, but it very much depends upon, and is in fact equivalent to, the completeness of the real numbers. Also potato chips.
Episode 43 - Matilde Lalin13 Jun 201900:28:32
Number theorist Matilde Lalin introduces us to the Congruent Number Problem: which integers can occur as the area of a right triangle with rational sides? This turns out to have deep connections to elliptic curves and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjectures and other cool stuff.
Episode 87 - Tatiana Toro07 Sep 202300:23:42
Tatiana Toro is a geometer and therefore loves the ur-theorem of geometry, "due" to Pythagoras. She also likes to walk.
Episode 42 - Moon Duchin09 May 201900:24:45
Geometer Moon Duchin shares her favorite result, a wild generalization of the classical isoperimetric inequality to the landscape of infinite groups. Also politics and gerrymandering, of course.
Episode 41 - Suresh Venkatasubramanian25 Apr 201900:30:10
Our first computer scientist guest tells us about Fano's Inequality and tells us the best snack to enjoy with it.
Episode 40 - Ursula Whitcher11 Apr 201900:27:56
Mathematician Ursula Whitcher really likes mirror symmetry. And ramen. Find out what this is and why it pairs with noodle soup.
Episode 39 - Fawn Nguyen28 Mar 201900:28:40
Middle school math teacher Fawn Nguyen gets excited about right triangles and tells us all kinds of trivia about one of the most famous theorems in all of mathematics.
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