Ben Orlin — Math As Universal Language (EP.232)

Infinite Loops

As a former quant with six grandkids, my spidey-senses started tingling as soon as I heard about Ben Orlin’s mission to make math fun.

A native of St.Paul, Ben is a math educator and popularizer who is known for his “Math With Bad Drawing” blog and book series. Today’s conversation revolves around his excellent, original new book Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language, which reframes math as a language, complete with nouns, verbs and grammar.

Like any mathematician worth his salt, Ben loves games, which he sees as ‘puzzle engines’. No wonder then that our conversation meandered and unfolded like a satisfying puzzle, touching upon rich concepts. We discussed making sense of sampling through fantasy towns where 70% of inhabitants are lawyers (not a town I’d like to be in), threw in a bit of Lewis Carroll to discuss the assumptions built into propositional logic (sometimes it really is turtles all the way down) and pitied the Welsh kids learning how to count (keep listening to know what that means).

I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did! For more thoughts on the episode, the full transcript, and bucketloads of other stuff designed to make you go; “Hmm, that’s interesting!” check out our Substack.

Important Links:

• Ben’s Blog
• Ben’s Twitter
• Ben’s LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• A Mathematician’s Obsession
• The Language of Algebra
• What the Tortoise Said to Achilles
• The Concrete and the Abstract
• Games As Puzzle Engines
• We’re not Built to Understand Base Rates
• Why We Always Think About Samples Incorrectly
• Randomness and Wikipedia Rabbit-holing
• Counting in Different Languages
• The Concept of Zero
• Negatives as the Mathematical Language of Opposites
• Mathematical Escape Rooms
• Why Is the World Comprehensible?
• Discussing Infinity on Infinite Loops
• The Deep Mathematics of Music
• Ben As Emperor of the World

Books Mentioned:

• Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language; by Ben Orlin
• Math with Bad Drawings: Illuminating the Ideas That Shape Our Reality; by Ben Orlin
• Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea; by Charles Seife
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid; by Douglas Hofstadter
• Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain; by Oliver Sacks