Season 2017

Marcus Feldman explains how he models the effects of a cultural preference — in this case, a preference for sons over daughters in China.

Francis Su explains how mathematics can help a person to live well.

Francis Su discusses how the community of mathematicians tends to exclude certain people.

Sylvia Serfaty explains why you don’t have to be a genius to become a mathematician.

Sharon Glotzer explains how emergence, entropy and order can all fit together.

John Novembre explains how he uses genomic data to map human history.

A Defense of the Reality of Time

Join David Kaplan on a virtual-reality tour showing how the sun, the Earth and the other planets came to be.

Khatri learned that by working with 'messy' clinical data sets, he could find genes that the human body expresses in response to diverse forms of a disease.

Jessica Flack describes the special challenges of applying collective computation to the understanding of complex biological systems.

Jay Pasachoff explains what scientists can learn during a total solar eclipse.

The UCLA astrophysicist explains how tracking the movement of stars revealed the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Svitlana Mayboroda describes how the landscape function helps solve the mystery of wave localization.

Neil Johnson on the physics of collective human behavior.

Nigel Goldenfeld explains how condensed matter physics provides insights into the collective state of early life on Earth.

Rebecca Goldin explains why quantitative literacy is so important.

Michael Assis demonstrates how defects can be used to tune the properties of Miura-ori origami.

A Mathematician Who Dances to the Joys and Sorrows of Discovery

Minhyong Kim wanted to make sure he had concrete results in number theory before he admitted that his ideas were inspired by physics.

Corina Tarnita argues that to fully appreciate nature, you must first understand its rules.