Wrong, but Useful: Episode 75

/podcasts/wbu75.mp3

In episode 75 of Wrong, but Useful, we talk with @astrastefania, who is Stefania Delprete in real life. We discuss:

• Dreams about Maths and doing Maths in lucid dreams
• Goodreads maths reading challenge
• Newsletters I like: Stuff Evelyn Wants You To Read by @evelynjlamb and and Fair Warning by @SophieWarnes
• Is a parallelogram a trapezium? (via @cshearer41)
• via @jamesgrime: The bullseye illusion
• RI Christmas lectures with @fryrsquared
• How do you describe Confidence Intervals? How damaging is to say “I’m 95% sure that mu is between ‘here’ and ‘here’ “? We reference The Maths of Life and Death.
• via @MrShepherd Maths (Lee Shepherd): “This may be a really stupid one but please enlighten me as I’ve been thinking for a few weeks to work it out. If irrational numbers are infinitely long, does pi contain the value e in its decimal? Do they converge at some point?”
• via @johndcook: A simple unsolved problem: Are there infinitely many positive integers n such that $\tan(n) > n$?
• via @wtgowers: Pretty accessible explanation of how to solve a cubic
• Via Adam Atkinson: how much would a suitcase of gold weigh?
• Pizza Hut’s 41% off food in January
• Drawing a perfect circle
• Questions I wasn’t expecting … When you’re numbering a list for a random sample, do you number across or down? and … Why isn’t stabbing my pen into the page ‘random’?
• What can I do with a pricing gun?
• Where did Lagrange come from?

* Edited 2020-01-17 to correct @fryrsquared’s Twitter handle. Thanks to @peterrowlett.