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Forbidden Numbers Ate My Brain

The Dark Side of Math and Why We Need It

This is a casual practice run of my talk debunking vicious misinformation about MATH!

Math is not a robo-brained exercise in following rules, any more than art is about memorizing that BLUE + YELLOW = GREEN. Like art, math is inherently creative and driven by intuition. It can be subversive and has led to controversies and dangerous ideas.

You might call this "Austrian math," because I investigate how human values give meaning to mathematical concepts, similarly to how the "Austrian school" approaches economics.

My Favorite Clips

3:13 the ancient Greek cult member martyred for the square root of two

11:08 the irrational mystery hiding in every square room

22:40 inadvertently embedding pi in the dimensions of the pyramids, "the banality of ratio" (not aliens)

36:20 Pythagoras' iPod

42:30 introducing "Perspective Shift," the intuitive math skill that no one talks about

50:42 the void: what's outside a finite universe?

55:14 money is the root of all zero

1:00:46 the monk who almost died for pi

1:14:11 how your intuition solves Zeno's infinite paradox on the first day of algebra class

1:32:11 a metal detector does not find the metal--YOUR INTUITION does

1:36:00 let's look at "shifting your perspective" FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

1:44:07 the Dark Side of rationality: intuition gone wild

1:53:48 the almost-holy equation of everything

1:55:02 experts accused Einstein of misinformation

2:01:39 Aristotle rationally deduces that men have more teeth than women

2:14:10 break the awareness loop, with an ORACLE?

2:26:28 Conclusion: memorize the rules, trust your FEELINGS

2:31:05 even the MATH FROG must be boiled slowly

Thanks for watching!

It had been several years since I looked at this talk, but I wanted to capture it quickly to share the ideas. So, I winged it on a laptop's built-in mic and fixed some errors using a second laptop's mic. I trust that all the myth-busting fun still came through.

The talk was written for a one-hour time slot but really requires an hour and a half. This run-through took me two and a half hours! Consider speeding it up using the control in the lower-right corner.

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