Strongly Connected Components Episode 5: Andrew Granville

My guest on the fifth episode of Strongly Connected Components is Professor Andrew Granville Canadian Research Chair in Number Theory at the University of Montreal. We discuss what pretentiousness means mathematically, the importance of enjoying doing mathematics, and how to use Zahod Beeblebrox in a proof. To find out more about Professor Granville’s reasearch and to read his award winning papers visit his website and you can see clips of the lecture he gave the MAA on patterns in primes here.

Download this Episode

[wpaudio url=”https://www.acmescience.com/Podcasts/SCC/5Granville.mp3″]

150 Years of Unprovability: The Reimann Hypothesis

It is 150 years to the day since the Riemann Hypothesis was first presented to the Monatsberichte der Berliner Akademie. So in honor of this most important of unsolved mathematical problems, and one that has a 1 million dollar bounty on its head(so yeah you should probably go solve it like right now) here is a video clip from the BBC’s Story of Maths that tells Riemann’s Story

And another that talks of the Riemann Hypothesis itself

The Zombies are Here

Scientific American has a slideshow up of various different viruses, parasites, and fungii that turn poor innocent, and sometimes cute, animals into brainless zombies.

From the article:

Crickets can’t swim, but the harrowing hairworm (Spinochordodes tellinii) doesn’t care about that detail. After growing inside of a cricket’s body and feasting on its insides, the hairworm will inexplicably compel the cricket to throw itself into a body of water, where the ruthless body snatcher can emerge and enter the aquatic phase of its life cycle. “It was amazing to see hundreds of crickets at night totally under the control of the parasite inside and jumping into the water,” says Frederic Thomas