The Math Club Pete and Noah

It's The Math Club's second anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than by telling a bunch of math jokes?  Join us as we share our favorites, along with jokes from our listeners and a few special surprises along the way.  Knock knock.  Who's there?  The Math Club!  

How many dimensions does a sphere have?  If you said three (like Noah did), you may be surprised to hear that you overshot.  In this episode, Pete and Noah explore spatial dimensions, and use a literary classic to illustrate what it even means when mathematicians talk about spaces with more than three.

A family movie night reminds Pete of an ancient algorithm for calculating square roots, so it’s back to The Math Club with pencils and paper in hand.  Join Pete and Noah as they investigate this algorithm to see just how accurate its results can be.
 
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Hey there, Math Club.  We're taking some time off to spend the holidays with our families, so this week we have a rerun of last year's holiday episode...  So Many Birds.
Season's Greetings!  With the holidays on the horizon, a famous song leads Pete and Noah to talk about strategies for adding up long sequences of numbers.  Come join the fun, and learn how a young Carl Gauss may (or may not) have done it.  And if you're up for a challenge, we even "sum it up" with a special holiday puzzle for you to try.
• Brian Hayes's article in American Scientist
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Hey there, Math Club.  We're taking some time off to spend the holidays with our families, so we have a rerun of one of our favorite episodes this week...  Tales from Decrypt.
Today’s match-up answers the age-old question of what happens when an unstoppable brain meets an unbreakable cipher.  In the red corner, weighing in at 2,193 digits….   Noah’s deviously encrypted message!  And in the blue corner.... The Commissioner of Codebreaking….  The Foreman of Frequency Analysis….  Pete’s decoding skills!  Only one will leave the ring victorious.  Who will it be?  Tune in and find out!  The match is about to begin...  DING DING DING!
• Encrypted passage to decode

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In our last episode, Hip to be Square. Pete told us about two famous magic squares—the Sagrada Família magic square and the Dürer magic square—and he mentioned that it’s worth seeing them side by side.  We thought it would be fun to put together this short video showing how they compare with one another.