Ep. 95: Jordan Ellenberg

Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk

"People may think of themselves as having no mind for geometry at all, but that's purely an illusion."

Jordan Ellenberg -- mathematician, numbers guru, and explainer -- joins the podcast on the day his new book is released. The book, called Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else, takes that subject so many people had problems with in middle school or high school and shows even the most casual reader that we all have a feel for geometry somewhere inside us-- even if we don't think we do. Coincidentally, that is something Daniel has long said about music and its mass appeal, and so Daniel and Jordan explore the fascinating parallels between geometry and music, and even get into a heated discussion over Jordan's portrayal of Puccini and his operas! Gerrymandering, politics, and math are all connected in this conversation as well, and some great poetry makes an appearance, too.

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Jordan Ellenberg grew up in Potomac, MD, the child of two statisticians. He excelled in mathematics from a young age, and competed for the U.S. in the International Mathematical Olympiad three times, winning two gold medals and a silver. He went to college at Harvard, got a master’s degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins, and then returned to Harvard for his Ph.D. in math. After graduate school, he was a postdoc at Princeton. In 2004, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he is now the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics. Ellenberg’s research has uncovered new and unexpected connections between these subjects and algebraic topology, the study of abstract high-dimensional shapes and the relations between them. Ellenberg was a plenary speaker at the 2013 Joint Mathematics Meetings, the largest mathematics conference in the world, and he has lectured about his research around the United States and in ten other countries.

Ellenberg has been writing for a general audience about math for more than fifteen years; his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Wired, The Believer, and the Boston Globe, and he is the author of the “Do the Math” column in Slate. His Wired feature story on compressed sensing appeared in the Best Writing on Mathematics 2011 anthology. His novel, The Grasshopper King, was a finalist for the 2004 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. His 2014 book How Not To Be Wrong was a New York Times and Sunday Times (London)bestseller and was one of Bill Gates’ top five summer books; it has been published in sixteen countries.