All posts by samuelhansen

Episode 2: The Road Trip

The Road Trip

In The Road Trip, Anna and Annie look into the math that undergirds the great American summertime tradition of rolling down the windows, turning up the stereo, and touring the countryside by automobile.

Randy Olson has made the planning part easy by computing the optimal road trip across the U.S.  His work to minimize the miles between landmarks in the lower 48 has been featured in the Washington Post and on Discovery News.  In fact, Tracy Staedter of Discovery News can be credited not only with encouraging Olson to tackle this problem, but also with determining the list of landmarks he used.  If you have a road trip you’d like to optimize, check out his code here.

And, because cars don’t run on math alone, we also consider the necessity of refueling on the road.  In particular, we ask Laura McLay to weigh in on gas station safety, as she computes the conditional probability of blowing yourself up while you’re pumping gas.

Along the way, we consider the role of approximation in math, the field of operations research, and the benefit of quantifying risk.  Want to understand some of the math behind getting behind the wheel?  Listen to Episode 2: The Road Trip now.

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Episode 1: Racism and Segregation

Racism and Segregation

In Racism and Segregation, Anna and Annie call on two people whose online contributions have helped paint a picture of racism and segregation in this country.

Dustin Cable’s work on the Racial Dot Map paints this picture in a nearly literal way; see what we mean here.  Also, check out his methodology and code, and see one source of his inspiration–the work of Brandon Martin-Anderson and Peter Richardson–here.

Nicky Case and collaborator Vi Hart created a playable blog post called Parable of the Polygons earlier this year.  This interactive site demonstrates the Nobel Prize-winning work of Thomas Schelling–work that concludes that small individual bias may be responsible for the neighborhood segregation we see so clearly in the Racial Dot Map.

Want to understand how math can help us better understand bias, racism, and segregation in this country?  Listen to Episode 1: Racism and Segregation now.

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