[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I sometimes go in there like for fun because it's fun to look at, but this is like a genuine resource, isn't it? People are encountering number sequences and thinking, have I found something new or what am I looking at? And they'll just enter the numbers into your database and it'll pop out and they'll say, Oh, someone has already found this and already knows what this is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tell me about how it's run now. It's no longer just you and your binders. It's no longer just me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How large is this group and how qualified are they to do this?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How much of your time does it take up and how important are those volunteers? I mean, did you say what 15,000 a year being added or something like, I mean, 50 a day.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Do you get mischievous contributions then or contributions that are illegitimate? Like is there a lot of, do you have to reject a lot of stuff that people send in and think they found some incredible sequence and you're like, this doesn't belong on this encyclopedia or it's wrong or.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How is the encyclopedia used now? Like, how is it useful to the world? Who's using it? How are they using it? Roughly speaking, everybody.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What do you think maybe you should have been more professional from the start or do you ever think about things like advertising and things like how do you deal with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is it still a project that brings you pleasure or is it like a great, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sometimes it feels like some of these sequences are just sequences for the sake of sequences, like someone will say, here's the prime numbers, but all the prime numbers plus one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or just coming up with all these just pulling algorithms from the air just because you can like cause no one's done it before.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, but sometimes you do seem to have some in there that are playful or-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But you told me about another one that was like sort of coronation years of the different King Louis and things like that, which obviously there's not going to be a chemist who's going to plug in those numbers into the OEIS.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You obviously know a lot about the people who are contributing and editing it. Do you know much about the people who are using it at the other end or are they just a, just a stat, you know, a number of hits and that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What's happening there, is that just people steal, like downloading it or stealing it? Yeah, basically.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It seems like something that could very easily become littered with mistakes like Wikipedia, you know, just completely wrong sequences must be in there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Neil, there are a lot, there are articles out there on the internet and videos and things where you're asked for your like, your five of your favorites or 10 of your favorite sequences.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'll link to some of them so people can go and read things you've said in the past. And you've also been filming Numberphile videos with me, which some have already been on Numberphile, some are still to come, so I will encourage people to keep an eye out for those. But...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can't do a podcast with you and not at least ask you for one. One of your go-to sequences that also helps people understand what the OIS is all about. Can you give me a sequence that...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, brings you some pleasure that is perhaps easy to describe in an audio format.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Of course, one of the joys of the OEIS as well as you've built in a functionality where people can then like listen to a sequence like coded onto, to musical notes. So here on the podcast, at least maybe I can play people some audio of some of these sequences as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And also in Berkeley, we're supported by Meijer Sound, the audio engineering company that sponsored this episode. Our thanks to them as always. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Brady Haran, so how about we end this episode with my favourite sequence?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For how I pronounce it, because we pronounce it de sautoy. And I thought that must have been anglicised, because when I go to France, you know, they say, Monsieur de sautoy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then a professor in Oxford, French, said, Oh, but when did your family actually come to England? And I said, well, 1745, because actually it was a Catholic family helping the Scots fight the English. So they came over with Bonnie Prince Charlie to Scotland and then,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, but he explained, well, you know, the French Revolution, they changed so many things. They tried to change the names of the days of the week, uh, the weights and measures, time, and they actually changed pronunciation. So people want to know French is for the king, le roi, but actually it used to be le roi.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you could tell whether somebody was a revolutionary or not. If they said Le Roy, they were Ancien Régime, or Le Roi, and they were in a revolutionary. So Douce Trois, before the French Revolution, was Douce Toi. So actually, I now do not apologise for the way I pronounce my name. It is actually an old French pronunciation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well weirdly, we're sitting in my office at home making this recording and next to me I have a portrait of Pierre-Francois de Sautoy. So it's very interesting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, there's kind of a mathematical element to this, because of course, every generation, you've sort of got two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and so, you know, that one name, Desotoi, comes from a very, sort of, singular branch of this huge tree, yeaah, because,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You'll get a lot of maths, but you'll also get, uhm, some Bond movies. Not that I've been in a Bond movie. No. But, uhm, one of our other relatives, Carmen de Sotoy, was an actress with the RSC, uh, and she actually appeared as a Bond girl in one of the Bond movies, so, uhm, you'll also see some pictures of her as a Bond girl.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I was born in London, but we moved out within a couple of years to Oxfordshire and so I really grew up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, not too far away from where I now, you know, work, which is the University of Oxford, and that's probably significant because I spend a lot of my time...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Doing music for example, that was one of my big passions and I would go up to Oxford a lot, play in the Oxford Youth Orchestra. And so I've always sort of had a connection to Oxford through my music and I think seeing all the students there and how much fun they were having, I think that sort of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Helped kind of set my sights on, yeah, I think that looks a really fun place to hang out and be a student and to think. But I just went to normal comprehensive school in my town, so...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nothing fancy there, but that said, you know, I have fantastic teachers and I do credit one teacher in particular, Mr. Bailson, who sort of picked me out at the end of a class and I thought I was in trouble. Uh, and, um, but then he took me around the back of the maths blog. I'm really in trouble now, but, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then he said, well, I think you should find out what maths is really about, and he recommended a few books to me. Uh, one was called The Language of Mathematics, and that was really intriguing, because at the time, I was really interested in learning languages. I thought that's what I wanted to do, because my mum had been in the foreign office, and I sort of thought that was kind of a, uh, fun, actually I thought she was a spy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Of course, you know, that's a fantastic cover, but uhm, but I was finding languages really frustrating because there were so many irregular verbs, there's a lot of learning you had to do, I really didn't have a very good memory, and so that's why I think mathematics


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, that was what was interesting. I actually had a chance to, I did a radio program for BBC Radio 4, which is called Top of the Class, and it's a chance for you to go back to your old school and spend some time with a teacher. You choose a teacher that inspired you. And I asked him at the time,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The imaginative side of being a mathematician. And that's what's interesting as well, because one of the other books he recommended, and has been very important throughout my whole life, has been, uh, A Mathematician's Apology, um, by G. H. Hardy. And in that book he describes what it's like to be a mathematician, and he continually compares it to a creative artist.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Through my time at school, what I loved doing was playing music, being artistic, I loved doing theatre. These were my passions, but I still wanted something which was kind of scientific in nature, which was exact, precise. I think I was quite an insecure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He just enjoys the security of knowing that something's going to happen a particular way and it will happen the same way again, whilst people are very unpredictable and so there's a security that mathematics provides and I think that also appealed to me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think as soon as a teacher takes interest in you and sort of


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[Assistant] Kind of experiment which in retrospect probably failed because many people got completely lost in it, but the idea was let's show our students at school real mathematics. So this course showed us the ideas of topology. It showed us the axioms of group theory. It showed a set theory and that just


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Really excited me and I think I was lucky to have a teacher who understood the mathematics and I've taught retrospectively with a lot of teachers who taught that course and they said


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was a great course, but the trouble was that most of the maths teachers, they didn't have a maths degree. They didn't understand it themselves. And so it sort of basically failed because you really, it's very deep ideas, needs somebody with a lot of depth in the understanding to be able to teach it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I really want to try and show people the real mathematics, the big stories, and I think that's what I responded to. Rather than all the just grammar and kind of the scales and arpeggios, you know, play some real music. I was lucky that my teacher and my course at school


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Play some real mathematics to me and, you know, I heard the Beethoven, I heard the Mozart. I didn't just have to play scales all the time. I think that's what we're missing. We're not being brave enough.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was the first time they'd ever risked doing it on maths because what on earth are you going to show people? You can't blow things up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's right, and it's a kind of series of lectures, five lectures, they're broadcast, uhm, on television at Christmas, amazing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, kind of exposure, but this was the first time they'd ever been done on maths. And Christopher Zeeman is one of our greatest li-, uh, I don't know if he's now, not died now, but he was one of our greatest mathematicians. He solved one version of the Poincare conjecture for, I think, dimension six. And so this was a real...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] practicing mathematician who spent his time that Christmas talking to kids and I thought, you know,


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[Assistant] You know, living my dream, doing mathematics, telling people these mathematical stories, and I hope that one day one of you will be up here saying, I went to the lectures that Marcus de Soto did in 2006.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, I think you see, that book, A Mathematician's Apology, really, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a fantastic description of, I mean a lot of people criticise that book and I've been very critical.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's opening really puts anyone off trying to communicate maths to the general public because it says, you know, you write, it is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The job of a mathematician is to prove theorems, not to talk about them. So he's basically saying nobody should try and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, like, school about 800, 17 and 18 year olds. Amazing. It was almost like a transition to university.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I remember my maths teacher there saying, oh, maths is rather difficult, pretty difficult to get into Oxford. Why don't you do engineering? You'll probably get in, you know, there's much better opportunities for jobs. And, and I said that I do not want to be an engineer. It's really, I don't want to get my hands dirty and kind of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Messy stuff. I love just the purity of this subject and it was already tending very much towards kind of the more abstract end, what one would call maybe pure mathematics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The idea of not doing things in the normal way. You know, whilst all my mates were getting into punk rock, uhm, I was getting into Wagner and, you know, I loved going to six hour Wagner operas, uhm, in Oxford at the theatre there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Theater production, so many orchestras playing and so I spent a lot of time with that. I was very lucky to go to Wadham College, which had a lot of other state school. So, you know, people's impressions of Oxford is rather a kind of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, mixed up in sort of left-wing politics and stuff, but it, it was a joy because, you know, we were doing fantastically exciting mathematics, especially towards


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The end of the course, but also just, you know, it's where I kind of cut my teeth doing other things as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I got back on track and, and it was, you know, I realised.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Seeing real mathematics almost in my last year, a little bit, but it's that transition and it's a massive transition from


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The problems aren't solvable in an hour with the material that you've been given. Uhm, you know, every problem up to that point is, is manageable. And, and suddenly,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Your supervisor's saying, read this, read that. They're totally un- I didn't understand any of these papers I was given. I had to learn to read in a different way. Not step by step, which is, you know, kind of school and university mathematics. It was about getting an overall impression of what is this paper talking about, and then going into the details when needed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I learned a completely different way of reading mathematics. And then again, dealing with the uncertainty of your supervisor giving you a problem that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Actually, as a psychologist, not a mathematician, managing


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dealing with the uncertainty of going into the unknown. That is very, very unsettling.


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[Assistant] A real transitionary stage, but that's when I really started to buzz because suddenly I was reading.


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[Assistant] Real mathematics for the first time. You know, in that first year I did my own first contribution to mathematics and that was just such a buzz to realise, oh my gosh, nobody has ever thought this before and it's now something that with my proof will be there forever. And that is one of the just...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, robustness about it because of proof. So I know that the things that I've proved will, will, will last till the end of time. And in fact, G. H. Hardy talks about that in a mathematician's apology. He says that immortality is probably a bit of a fancy word, but mathematicians probably have the best chance of achieving it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] First of all by this rather romantic historical figure, Everest Galois, killed in a duel at the age of 20 over love and revolutionary politics in France at the beginning of the 19th century.


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[Assistant] Yet already he developed this language which became group theory and it's the language I write on my yellow notepads, which my office here is kind of piled with them. So this is trying to understand symmetry and what symmetries


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the ancient Greeks, for example, proved that


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[Assistant] The platonic solids, there are five of them, you can't make a sixth one, these are the shapes that make a dice, but I'm looking at sort of symmetries in like higher dimensions, uhm, what dice are possible in higher dimensional spaces. My other passion is number theory, so I find that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, these wild numbers, the primes, which we don't understand any patterns to them, but I'm using the same tool, but to look at what symmetries might be possible and using that kind of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Set of glasses from number theory to look at a completely different area, uhm, in group theory.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it's interesting, I don't know, that seed that was sown at school.


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[Assistant] You know what, I think it comes back again to that passion for languages because I think mathematicians divide into two types. The ones that view mathematics very pictorially and they're very good at just drawing diagrams or pictures. Roger Penray is my colleague in Oxford, you know. Twister theory comes out of his just ability to kind of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, something which doesn't sound linguistic at all. Symmetry is about geometry, isn't it? It isn't about pictures, about patterns, but this was the great power that this language had. It threw away those, and so you don't get distracted by what the thing looks like, and you can understand its structure and make things in dimensions that you


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Felt happy in this world was I think partly because I love manipulating language and seeing what the consequences of that are.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, not smooth sailing at all. And in a way, you know, I think that's important. You know, one of my favourite films is Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon, Janitor in the maths department, there are these


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think, you know, ultimately he doesn't become a mathematician in that film, because the maths is too easy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, it's no challenge. For him, it's the women, the challenge. He doesn't understand them at all. No algorithm. So for me, I think...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, it's important that things are difficult, and you have that really tough time, and I did, but then...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Indeed, my great insight happened on a train journey, not a very romantic one, it was from back from London to Oxford, but I think there's something about the, the way


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I think, you know, I've got a few moments in my life, uh, of those moments of just extraordinary insight and you, you live off those. Cause most of the time you're wrestling and you're having a really hard time and nothing's working. And so you hold on to those euphoric moments. Did you keep the ticket?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Spaces where you can kind of let yourself just, I mean, it's funny cause I don't find, you know, some people find plane journeys quite good because it's kind of a space of 13 hours and they're going over to California or something from London. But I'm afraid I just use those to watch movies that I haven't watched for a while. So, um, it's train journeys are the ones for me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I think there's an important thing to learn here, because I had, you know, this great theorem that I proved, it was in the annals, and I had to learn to deal with the downtime again. And I remember I spent some period of time in Israel at the Hebrew University, and things weren't going really well, and there was a lot of eyes on me at that point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Already, sort of early on, I was, uh, I had this wonderful thing from the Royal Society, it was called a University Research Fellowship, and it was kind of like a post-postdoc.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Most people will be going into a lectureship and the teaching starts to overwhelm you. This was a period about 10 years when I could carry on doing my research and I really.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They made some major breakthroughs during that time. But one of the things that was really important was the Royal Society were encouraging us to actually not just do our research. They didn't want us teaching because it was meant to be time out. But when I wrote an article for the Times newspaper, actually about the Fields medals, it was


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Before Matt Damon made field medals famous because they talk about them in Good Will Hunting, and I wanted to write an article just to tell people about my excitement about mathematics. You're partly starting to think about that Christopher Zeeman who'd


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Made the effort to talk to people. And I was worried what my community would think if I wrote this article. It's been ages, you know, it's a thousand words. It took me a month to write it. It was just painful. I'm not a natural writer. And you know, that sentence I...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] the importance of their work and don't just stay in the ivory tower. And that support from, you know, our scientific body, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Going back to Newton was really important in thinking, okay yeaah, I think this is an important part of being an academic. Being a scientist, being a mathematician is actually...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Telling people about why we're doing things, why it will be important, what impact it will have. And so that started me on this extra part of my career, which has now become very important, probably why I'm now probably talking to you, is that I realised that making mathematical discoveries is important, but talking about them and telling other people is when they start to come alive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We do that in our seminars, in our journals, but actually if we do it more broadly, people will realise why maths is so important.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But he came and knocked on my door and said, I came to a talk you gave in New Zealand when I was at school. And my dream was to come and work with you. And here I am. I've now done a degree. He's a Korean guy. Now I've done a degree in Oxford and I want to be your PhD student. And that's so exciting. And so the feedback's been, you know, incredibly positive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There is something about youth which is helpful, and that's a certain sort of ignorance and arrogance.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think one of the troubles is that we begin to learn fear of big problems like the Riemann hypothesis about prime numbers. And that can sometimes play us out of the game. We don't take the risks that a young person might do because they don't know they shouldn't be trying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's sort of a waste of time, I think, that, you know, if everyone else has tried this, you know, what new am I bringing to this? But sometimes it's still things that we haven't tried. But mathematics has become very rich and complex that, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Experience can actually be a helpful component. So, you know, knowing about a lot of other areas that you can bring those insights to a problem is actually means that having a bit of mathematical maturity, I think it is, is still


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Exactly. A lot of my PhD students say, you know, I have a lot of respect for you now having, you know, suddenly started my life and trying to keep doing mathematics with all of the noise outside. And I think being able to shut out the noise from


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All of the demands from your faculty, from your family, uh, and that's, you know, it can be very annoying sometimes for your colleagues and your, your, your family if you, if you do that, but it's really important.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think it's really important to go for smaller things, because often the dragons, you find the back way into attacking them not from head on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they go, oh my gosh, this is the way forward. So, so I think it's really important. At the moment I'm just working on a very small


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it's still manageable that I can actually kind of ride out the equations on my yellow notepads. So I think that's a strategy that I give my PhD students. Don't try and go for the big one in a first go, just go for the example of it and see whether that has enough of the kind of richness that you see what's going on in general.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well I think that was one of the motivations for the second book I wrote, which is Finding Moonshine, or in America it's called Symmetry, just simply. And it is the story of symmetry, but that's what my research is about, trying to understand symmetry, it's the story from


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, the first objects that people made, these dice, through to classification of finite symbol groups today and the things we're still doing. I kept a diary for 12 months when I wrote that book.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's why, you know, people who play are good at mathematics, because you just need to...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To try things out, try different avenues and to keep on questioning things and you, uh, that, that's really being able to ask good questions is almost...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, as I said, you know, music and theatre were always very important to me, but actually,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Theatre exercises, which are essentially little algorithms that they would then let run and see what would emerge from this. And I really love that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I was there tomorrow and actually they were quite surprised to find a mathematician who understood the language of theatre. And so I set up all of these theatre games for them to explore the maths that Ramanujan and Hardy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, exactly, but the weird thing was that the guy who runs the company, uh, Simon McBurney, he would just love this, that there was, and so he said, are you free tomorrow? I said, yes. And I kept on coming back and back. Eventually the producer said,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When Simon asks you to come back tomorrow, you've got to say no, because he's got to write a play and he's just getting obsessed. You know, he wants to know what a mock theta function is and this really is a bit too far for him. Anyway, so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This reignited my passion for theatre and out of that piece of work which became a play called Disappearing Number, I met another actress who actually had a mathematical and physics background. And we started working together about ten years ago.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We started making this piece. One of my favourite writers is Borges, Argentinian short story writer. And he writes very interesting mathematical, scientific kind of short stories. And one of them, the Library of Babel, is actually an exploration of what the possible shapes of the universe could be. It's actually a story about the Poincare Conjecture, weirdly. This kind of inspired me, oh I'd love to make a


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For the theatre, it's the stage. That is your universe. And then you can ask, well,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but how, what's the rules of this universe? If you exit stage right, what happens? Well, perhaps you enter stage left. And if you go through a trap door, perhaps you drop in through the ceiling. And so I thought, oh, this is fun. You can make actually a Taurus out of this theatre space. And so it sort of began this journey.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then we, we created a piece with two characters called X. I play X, you know, if you're going to write a play, I better have a part for myself. So I'm X and Victoria Gould played Y and we use this process of devising to create a piece, which ultimately we did in many places, but it eventually arrived at the Barbican. What an amazing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dream for an actor, let alone one who started as a mathematician, to actually perform their play at the Barbican.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, as you say, rather unusual way to communicate scientific mathematical ideas, but that's been my passion, not just to talk to the people who will come to a science festival or would naturally log on to a science YouTube channel, like Numberphile, you know, great, it's important that we give them great material, but


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think the real challenge is getting to people who wouldn't naturally choose Numberphile or a science festival, but might go to the theatre and then suddenly say, oh my gosh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's mathematics in this, but I didn't realise that was maths, the way a space is connected together. So I'm very excited by using sort of rather unexpected platforms to tell mathematical stories.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You'd be surprised, and I think it plays to this still-too-cultures idea of either you're into the arts and the humanities, or you're into kind of science, so I think you'll...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You'll find quite a lot of people who perhaps


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We got the most extraordinary reception and we found our audience was India. So we took it to the Mumbai festival and we did a couple of performances there and it was extraordinary. People on this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I always love new challenges, uhm, so for me, you know, I'm always looking for something else to challenge myself. So, you know, it was frightening, but, but exciting as well. And, and I think there's...


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[Assistant] There's something which actually is a common thread throughout all of this because even though you might say, I'm only talking to a hundred people at a conference, that's still a performance. And I think, you know, we're all natural storytellers. We're all natural performers. You know, the audience might be a bit smaller and.


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[Assistant] Might be a bit more esoteric of group theorists from around the world, but I didn't feel it was so different to now standing up on the stage of the Barbican, in the pit theatre.


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[Assistant] No, no, and I think that, that was a, I wasn't very nervous about that, and uhm, what was really exciting was to get feedback at the end of a performance, and people, you know, talking to people, and people going, what, you're, you're actually a...


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[Assistant] Weakens and got somebody else to perform it, you know, it was fun devising it. It starts with some just physical movement by me, uhm, of I do basically ruler and compass construction using my body of a hexagon in space and


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[Assistant] This wasn't just learning lines, this was a very physical part. What's next?


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[Assistant] Well, I am, I've got a real taste for this. So during lockdown, I wrote a new book, which...


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[Assistant] Oh yeaah, maybe it's, uh, some resonance there, going back to. People might know him because he was one of the people who created Bourbaki, this fictional mathematician. You know, if you go into a maths library, you see a lot of books by this guy, Nicholas Bourbaki. You think, wow, that's the most productive guy.


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[Assistant] Ow, but it turns out he's a fictional mathematician created by this French group to try and write under a pseudonym. So I use him as a kind of chorus figure in this play, but then it's the story, rather extraordinary story of Andre Vey and his journey. The play starts in prison.


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[Assistant] An Arjuna, Krishna the god, uh, Arjuna is about to go into battle, is very nervous about


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[Assistant] With four actors to take this from page to stage, and if that goes well and it's working as a piece, we're gonna pitch it to the Volts Festival, which is our kind of like,


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[Assistant] That's why all the yellow notepads around the office here. I have to use the nonlinear nature of a page.


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[Assistant] Because the great breakthroughs are very often done on the downtime and the, the time not looking at the problem and often.


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[Assistant] You know, I've always used these kind of other activities to give, to help me...


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[Assistant] It was like I was looking at the thing from a new angle. So, so for me, these things that's always been part of the journey of mathematical discovery.


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[Assistant] Today's guest is Christopher Havens. Christopher's a convicted murderer. He's serving a 25 year prison sentence.


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[Assistant] But behind bars, his life has taken an unexpected path, one of redemption. And that redemption has come through mathematics. Now we'll discuss this shortly, but first let's deal with the backstory.


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[Assistant] Look, this isn't a crime podcast and it's not my intention to explore forensic details, but it is important, I think, not to ignore the severity of what happened.


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[Assistant] In 2010, Christopher shot dead a 25 year old man named Randon Robinson, leaving his body in a Washington state forest. Christopher was 30 years old at the time.


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[Assistant] He was addicted to methamphetamine. He takes full responsibility for what he did. He pleaded guilty to second degree murder.


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[Assistant] In fact, much of what Christopher is doing now, what we're about to discuss in the podcast.


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[Assistant] Seems like an endless quest to make amends for a debt that he says can never be fully repaid.


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[Assistant] We'll touch on this again later in the interview. Now as you've probably already figured out, I'm talking to Christopher by telephone. We're speaking in 20 minute chunks because that's when the prison phone's cut out. The sound quality's not ideal, of course, but there are captions on the YouTube version of this episode if you want to check that out.


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[Assistant] Whereabouts are you? Like what's the environment you're in at the moment? You're in like a phone room or something, eh?


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[Assistant] As a boy, you know, as a, as a youngster back in your school days, what were you like and what were you like at mathematics?


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[Assistant] Do you remember what like you aspired to be? Like obviously before things took some unfortunate turns, did you have like a, like a goal or a dream or anything?


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[Assistant] I mean, now that you have, I mean, we're going to come to this later, obviously, but now that you've learned that you have this aptitude for mathematics, I'm sure you look back at a lot of things with regret, but is that one of the things that you didn't kind of dig into that mathematics early on?


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[Assistant] When you first, you know, you've been sentenced, right? And you're starting this incredibly long sentence for a, you know, a terrible crime. You haven't found mathematics yet, right? You're just at the start of this prison term.


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[Assistant] How are you thinking you were going to pass the time? Where did you think you were going to find purpose and meaning before the mathematics? What were you thinking? I'm going to get really fit or I'm going to read lots of books or this is just going to be like, what were you thinking then?


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[Assistant] Tell me about how it would turn different though. It sounds like it was this time in the hole where actually you found the light at the end of the tunnel. Can you tell me a little bit about that?


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[Assistant] Who was this Chris? Who was this person? Was he a prisoner or a visitor or a-


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[Assistant] How did it go in the early stages? What do kind of the prison authorities think suddenly when one of their inmates is ordering in all these complicated math books?


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[Assistant] Names you're about to hear include Louis Cella Cairo.


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[Assistant] And Umberto Cerruti, mathematicians in Italy who have befriended Christopher and nurtured his talent. Also Marta Cerruti, an academic in Canada.


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[Assistant] I want to ask you about the paper you had published, because I think that's a really interesting thing that happened. Can you tell me how it came about that you became a published mathematician?


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[Assistant] How did it feel to have a mathematical paper published? Like, it must have been amazing.


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[Assistant] Have you ever found mathematicians and people unwilling to work with you because of the stigma of being a prisoner?


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[Assistant] If you care to look it up, Christopher's paper is entitled on non-linear leap in convergence.


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[Assistant] Of a linear fractional transform of Hurwitz continued fractions. Christopher's modest. He's embarrassed by some of the media hyperbole that has surrounded this paper. He hasn't solved some ancient riddle or anything like that, despite what you may read. But to my untrained eye, it still looks pretty advanced and impressive.


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[Assistant] Let's deal with the prison math project. Cause obviously that's a pretty amazing thing you've been involved with as well. Can you tell me why and how that came into being?


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[Assistant] Look, I'm afraid this is what prison phone calls are like. But don't worry, Christopher will phone back shortly. But while we have a second, I will point out that schoolboy who contacted Christopher was Walker Blackwell, and he remains a co-director of the Prison Mathematics Project.


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[Assistant] What do other prisoners who aren't into mathematics and like prison guards and that think of all this, like when they, when they see what you're up to?


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[Assistant] Have you developed other interests and hobbies or have you just become a 100% math nerd?


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[Assistant] Do you ever wonder what would have happened in your life?


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[Assistant] If you hadn't been imprisoned, if you hadn't committed that terrible crime and gone to prison, because I know you were having a lot of problems with drugs and things like that, like, what do you think would have happened?


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[Assistant] Do you often think about when you're finally released from prison, what you want to do, what you want your life to look like when you're no longer incarcerated?


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[Assistant] One of them is rehabilitation and you seem to be a really good example of that.


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[Assistant] Earlier on you mentioned, uh, your parents and your family. I imagine when you went to prison, that must've been a terrible time for them when you were sentenced. How do they feel now that you're a published mathematician, you're the executive director of this project, you're...


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[Assistant] You've really turned things around. What's been your family's reaction?


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[Assistant] How do you want to be remembered? What do you want your legacy to be now?


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[Assistant] Christopher has never been in touch with the family of the man he murdered, Randon. He's not allowed to contact them.


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[Assistant] But he does think about random daily and he refers to his new life of education and research and mathematics as repaying an infinite debt.


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[Assistant] Christopher Havens is now 42 years old. He's been locked up since he was 30. The best case scenario could see him released in 4-6 years, but it may be longer.


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[Assistant] In the meantime, he hopes to grow the present mathematics project across the US.


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[Assistant] The Numberphile podcast is made possible by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.


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[Assistant] You can also support us at patreon.com slash numberphile


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[Assistant] I'm Brady Herron, and we'll be back again soon with another episode of the Numberphile Podcast.


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[Assistant] Today's guest is Steven Strogatz, he's a mathematician at Cornell University.


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[Assistant] But Steve's also pretty widely known as a math popularizer. One of those people who pops up everywhere. He's in the New York Times, on Radiolab, places like that.


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[Assistant] He was recently in London promoting a new book he's written called Infinite Powers. It's all about calculus. Now any book about calculus is obviously gonna feature Isaac Newton. So I arranged to meet Steve somewhere special, and as you're about to hear, I had a few surprises up my sleeve.


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[Assistant] The current bosses of the Royal Society have their, have their meetings, say like the President and the Vice Presidents will sit here and do business, so you're actually sitting.


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[Assistant] Keith Moore, the head librarian, has dug out some treasures, specially for today. And look, I'm gonna let everyone in on a bit of a secret.


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[Assistant] When you look at something Isaac Newton has written and you're


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[Assistant] This exceptional, exceptional case, which clearly he is in so many ways. Or is part of it looking at the mathematician in you and remembering when you were in your early twenties and thinking, oh am I rubbish and are people going to laugh at my paper? Like you talk about that secrecy and that fear that you kind of...


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[Assistant] Sympathise with, are you looking at that in an everyday way and remembering what you were like as a young mathematician or are you thinking, ah, you know.


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[Assistant] Newton did so many things, and you know, you could talk about things Newton did for a long time. Let's stick with calculus, because that's all the documents we've got in front of us, and what's been on your mind a lot lately. How would you describe, because calculus is such a famous word, right? But I think a lot of people,


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[Assistant] So Steve, before calculus came along, how did people deal with things that were changing? Because obviously they still had things moving, there was still like, presumably there were still horses and things, and things still grew, like you know. That's right. So there was movement in the world, was that just something that was completely untouchable for mathematicians?


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[Assistant] What happened in the world? What changed or what was the catalyst for calculus to be devised? Was it just that serendipitously a few smart guys happened to exist or was there some problem that had arisen that sort of, you know, the necessity that was the mother of this invention? What happened at this time in history?


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[Assistant] So anyone with like a mild interest in the history of science and mathematics, even if they're an expert on calculus, probably knows that there's this famous stoush, this famous beef. Was it Newton or was it this guy called Leibniz?


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[Assistant] Is the Royal Society's like, evidence bag. This is all the papers that Newton and Leibniz and everyone wrote that they put together to try and figure out who said what first. So we're almost seeing the leftovers of the trial. This is something you've obviously looked into in writing a book about calculus. Can you sort of summarise what happened?


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[Assistant] But he is showing friends, like, like, it's, it's, it's amongst them. He just hasn't published in, well, I guess I didn't really have journals then did I? No, they didn't have journals.


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[Assistant] Yeah, these are, this is, as I said, this is the evidence that was used to then, and then conclusions were drawn by the Royal Society. Yes. Unsurprisingly, the conclusions being that our man Newton was the man.


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[Assistant] And one of the parts of the talk that I found most interesting, and this probably says more about me than anything, was when you were talking about the birth of your current book. You were talking about working with the publisher through it, how to write it, how to divvy up the chapters, what to call it, and things like that.


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[Assistant] I find that really interesting because it sounds like that was, even though you've already written previous books quite successfully, it sounds like it was quite an education for you, that kind of to and fro you have with the publisher, you saying, this is what I think the book should be about and what it should be called and them saying, maybe not, maybe not.


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[Assistant] Do you think, do you think it's a, it's a bad word? Like I, I feel like the word calculus is some, is synonymous with smartness, the way that rockets are. Oh, rocket scientist or calculus. It just, it's like just shorthand for smart and complicated, but unlike rocket science, it's, it's got like a bad,


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[Assistant] Wrap to it. And it's a word that carries baggage. It's almost become, it's almost become shorthand for too complicated to deal with.


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[Assistant] These papers here that we've been looking at, you know, this is when calculus was brand new. This was like a shiny new thing that was blowing people's minds.


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[Assistant] Asking you this question is probably a bit unfair because you're like a popularizer of mathematics and you're an applied mathematician. But I'll ask anyway. And that is...


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[Assistant] How do you feel about the fact that when you're trying to inspire interest in calculus, or mathematics in general, you always have to go to applications?


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[Assistant] Like, when I first asked you to explain calculus to me, you didn't talk about areas under curves or anything, you started talking about, you know, mobile phones and satellites and things like that. Do you feel like this is just like a necessary evil?


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[Assistant] And yet I see so many other people and you all have to do it so often saying, let me talk to you about satellites and going to the moon and like, I know.


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[Assistant] Now that's it for today, but after the audio recording I did break out the camera and I filmed a bit of Steve checking out these documents and talking to Keith Moore from the Royal Society. So see the show notes for a link to that. And thanks to Keith and the Royal Society for hosting us.


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[Assistant] I'll also link to an objectivity video we made a little while back with Hannah Fry, where she's also looking at some of these documents and having a bit of a chat about them.


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[Assistant] Steve's book, it's called Infinite Powers. I'll include links so you can buy a copy, and in case you're wondering, Steve also did donate one to the Royal Society Collection, so it's there for posterity.


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[Assistant] I'm Brady Haran and I'll be back again in your podcast feeds pretty soon, but until then, do feel free to rate the show or leave a review. If you say nice things about us, it helps the show grow and ensures we can make more of them.


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[Assistant] If you want to say bad things about us, well, well maybe don't leave a review in that case. I'm also surprised you've been listening for this long. To check out more Numberphile videos, find out more information about what we're up to, maybe support us on Patreon, go to Numberphile.com, we've got everything there you want to look at. And well, bye for now.


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[Assistant] And he does it absolutely, wonderfully well.


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[Assistant] Yeah, yeah, uhm, it's been a sort of change over time. It's just, because I have the Astro Katie thing, people don't know who Catherine Mack is, you know, like, in the general public.


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[Assistant] With my papers, you know, when I started writing physics papers, I was, I would, I would use my full name as seemed appropriate. And so I just, I've, I've diverged into these two different people now.


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[Assistant] My, my career has taken me sort of roughly east, uh, continuously. So I, you know, I did undergrad at Caltech and then grad school at Princeton. And then I continued east to Cambridge for, for.


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[Assistant] Uhm, I mean, if you had asked me, I would have told you that around ten. So, uh...


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[Assistant] Specifically, I wanted to be a cosmologist at that time because that was around when I first started reading stuff by Stephen Hawking and, you know, Paul Davies and like all these, you know, all this stuff about the Big Bang and time travel and, and


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[Assistant] Space time and black holes and that was all fascinating to me and when i found out that the job steven hawking had was called cosmologist i was like okay that's what i wanna be that's that's my that's my goal now.


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[Assistant] Um, so I was kind of in both those, those categories. I, I did track and field and, uh, basketball, you know, sort of.


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[Assistant] Athlete at the time, but in the end, you know, uh, in the end, the, the physics did win out. Like when I was choosing high schools, I was being recruited by the, um, by the local high school track team at the same time as I was eyeing this little math and science magnet school.


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[Assistant] That was the thing that I was sort of best at, but I did all the field events, you know, uhm,


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[Assistant] Shophood and, uh, javelin and triple jump and, uh, you know, long jump. All of that stuff I really enjoyed.


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[Assistant] Gone too far. Although, you know, I mean, when I was at Cambridge, I knew a graduate student who was, while she was doing graduate school in astrophysics, was also on the Olympic diving team.


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[Assistant] Uh, it was a while ago. I think, um, I did a little bit of practice, uh, while I was a postdoc at Melbourne. Like I sort of snuck out into the, you know, onto the practice field, but it's, it's hard once you're


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[Assistant] Once you're not a student, if you do running or basketball or something like that, it's very easy to just continue that through your life. But if you do something that involves, you know,


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[Assistant] Well, I mean, there's, there's that, but also like, I don't have, uh, you know, I don't have like a huge, uh, a huge


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[Assistant] Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, I've always loved math. When I was in middle school, I think I was in the math club, you know, and I would do those sort of math problems for fun, that kind of thing. I never did the competitions, but I enjoyed the practice of it.


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[Assistant] It was a little bit harder in high school because the high school I was at had this sort of, uh, I don't know, experimental math program that was built around real world word problem kind of things and group work and collaboration and I think that's,


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[Assistant] That can be very useful, but it, it didn't like, it didn't get into the kind of math that I really loved, which was, you know, sort of the.


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[Assistant] And spent a long time working in sort of various aspects of, of medical things and then became a professor and also at some point got a law degree.


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[Assistant] Uhm, she, well she was into science fiction, you know, she's always been into science fiction, so she was into Star Trek a lot, uhm, you know, when


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[Assistant] When Star Trek, when the original series, um, was cancelled, there was a big, uh, sort of popular protest about it, you know, people were like picketing the studio trying to get it reinstated, right? Uh, she was part of that. Yeah, she was very into, um,


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[Assistant] It was, uh, it was a challenge. You know, when I, when I first arrived at Caltech, there's, there are these sort of placement tests you take, uhm, when you first get there for, for placement in physics and math. For the mathematics side of things, when you, when you start, the first year mathematics is


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[Assistant] Called, uhm, Math 1, right? Like it's the, it's the first step and, uhm.


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[Assistant] You know, to complete the d- the exams in time, it just, I, it was harder to keep up with classes. So, you know, if I had to do it all over again, uh, I would've, I would've done...


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[Assistant] Uh, while I was in high school, I mean, I, I, so I, I went there and spent some time like running shifts at the detector, not.


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[Assistant] Well, so I started, yeah, so I worked on Super Kamiokande, I worked on this long baseline neutrino experiment, uh, K2K, where, from another part of Japan.


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[Assistant] To be a theorist, uh, you had to be like, you know, a super genius. And I thought like I couldn't possibly go into theoretical work because I'm not a super genius. And it took a while of being in physics before realizing that actually, you know, like everybody is


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[Assistant] At the end of undergrad and I just really enjoyed it and I uhm, you know, it wasn't sort of inaccessible in this way that I had thought of it as being and so then when I was in grad school I just totally leaned into cosmology as the thing that I really wanted to do.


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[Assistant] Like I spend most of my time in front of a computer. I think that's true for people in all areas of physics and astronomy these days. And I do a lot of coding and that's also true for most people in my field in any subfield of astrophysics.


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[Assistant] You know, you go to conferences, you do collaboration visits, you bounce ideas off of people, you sort of come up with stuff and you come up with like, maybe there's a way to


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[Assistant] And then you go through and you start on the theory side and you try and figure out, like,


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[Assistant] So that's the phenomenology side of things, trying to work out what the theory really predicts. And so that involves reading a bunch of papers, writing a bunch of equations, uhm, you know, sort of working out the order of magnitude of what's going on in that sort of system.


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[Assistant] And you try and make a connection between what the observations can do and what the theory.


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[Assistant] Is predicting and so in this is sort of in my area of theoretical cosmology which is often called phenomenology where you're.


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[Assistant] Is where you put in, here's all the parameters of the theory, uh, here's the, uhm,


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[Assistant] You know, here's the relevant equations. If I, if I tweak this parameter, this is how this will all flow through. This is what the prediction will be for the physical property that can actually be measured. You know, and then sometimes you have to do some kind of a random thing where you


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[Assistant] Choose a bunch of possible parameters and try and work out constraints or limits or whatever. So you do a lot of that sort of thing in the code.


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[Assistant] Um, well, so, I mean, people do write papers about that. Um, I don't usually, cause I'm not on the model building side, so, um, I tend not to come up with new, um, new theories of how things work. But I mean, you can always, you can always write a paper about, you know, here's, here's a cool new idea.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I mean, or, or, you know, hope that, that somebody will put together a better telescope sooner, you know, that, that's also a possibility. But yeah, a lot of the, a lot of the work I did, you know, early on my, in, in my career was about high redshift 21 centimeter astronomy, which is where we're trying to


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[Assistant] Use low frequency radio telescopes to measure the neutral hydrogen in the epic of the first galaxies basically and a lot of that work is going to be done by an instrument called the square kilometer ray which is still sort of a decade away from.


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[Assistant] Really producing the kind of data that'll be useful and I've been writing papers about that for years about like what you know what that will tell us so.


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[Assistant] Like if I were working in general relativity theory, then I would be.


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[Assistant] String theory, then I would be getting into a whole lot of really advanced sort of calculus kind of stuff and differential forms and a whole lot of.


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[Assistant] The computations you can understand.


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[Assistant] You know, even like, even the things that are being plotted are sometimes plotted in a particular way in order to bring out some aspect of the physics and so it's really helpful to just have a good facility with all of that stuff.


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[Assistant] They count, but when I was a postdoc at Cambridge, there was a colleague of mine came and gave a talk at some point about


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[Assistant] And on his title slide on the, on the talk, he put his Twitter handle and I thought this was a very weird. I mean, this was.


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[Assistant] This must have been, I don't know, uh, 2010 or something like that. It was a while ago and it wasn't, people were not doing that. Like, serious people would not include a Twitter handle on a title slide. That was a very unusual thing. And so I thought this was really intriguing and I looked at his Twitter account and it was, it was all astrophysics. You know, it was, it was very,


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[Assistant] So I know what I'm missing. I'm like, sure. Yeah. Okay. I'll, I'll try that. Um, and so I, I just, you know, I did one tweet per talk basically to try and summarize what, what the talks are about and Phil Marshall, my colleague, because he,


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[Assistant] Science writers interested in astrophysics, uhm, and then there were a few people who are just, you know, interested in the subject, but not at all connected to the field. And, uh, and I really enjoyed.


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[Assistant] Being able to talk about science in that way to connect with people who were.


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[Assistant] Kind of broadened my, my professional network. And then I just kind of carried on. Oh, so lovely and collegiate.


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[Assistant] Yeaah, yeaah, I mean at first it really, it really was, and uhm.


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[Assistant] And, uh, you know, I got to, I got to know a lot of people in a lot of different places and then, and then the Higgs, um.


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[Assistant] You know, the Higgs Boson announcement, uh, happened and I was able to tweet about that and that ended up, like, a couple of my tweets were picked up by blogs or, or newspapers or something.


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[Assistant] And I just found out, I found it was this really nice, uhm, really sort of broad community, I don't know, that worked really well for me.


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[Assistant] And i was starting to become like a sort of known voice on on twitter you know that you start to get comments right you start to get people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Trying to, trying to say things and get you riled up, right? And so I would, I would try to, you know, sort of address trolls and stuff in reasonable ways. And, um, there was a very specifically impactful moment when


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, I guess it was in 2014 or something when uhm, there was a, so Brian Cox was on a TV show talking about something to do with climate change and I tweeted about it and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, I tweeted something about how climate change makes me really sad, you know, because of what we're, what we're losing because of this process and somebody, you know, just some random person.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tweeted back to say, you know, that, that this was, you know, this is all a scam and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, hammered out a reply, just, just something like to be like, yeah, whatever, you know, go away. And I sort of chuckled to myself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Somehow, some people saw it and started retweeting it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it, uh, and it, it doubled my following in a week. Uh, you know, I went from like 40,000 to 80,000 followers or something like that. Somewhere in the middle of that, I got verified. I started getting messages from people, like, you know, saying how,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Huffington Post, I mean it was just, it was just this really bizarre, bizarre thing that happened and uhm, that just really got me into this sort of very different category on Twitter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I certainly don't want to be mean to people who are, you know, just kind of minding their own business or, or, or who are not like prominent voices, right? One of the things that that, that viral moment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Showed me very clearly was how powerful and frightening that that sort of attention can be because I.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Follow who choose to follow me who would probably agree with me that that person is wrong and might just be really, you know, really abusive toward that person and each person individually saying, oh, you're dumb is not going to be that big a deal. But when you have a huge flood of it, you know, it's, it's a different story, you know, and I've, I've been sort of targeted by.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Large online mob things in a limited way and, and, and it's, it's terrible, right? So you don't, you don't ever want to put someone else in that position. Um, so I, I try not to, I try not to use that avenue of expression too much. So.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I will sometimes reply to people in a sarcastic way or whatever and, you know, I will.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't want to fuel that, that kind of attack mode.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It has, yeaah, uhm, it's been, uh, it's been great, you know, I, the, the response to the book has been better than I could have anticipated. I mean, I'm not really in touch with sales numbers per se, so I don't know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't, I don't have a good feel for whether it's done well on that side of things, but in terms of the reviews, you know, every, every sort of professional review of it, you know, in, in magazines and stuff has been positive and, and the reviews on


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, it's not like a novel about grief or something like that. It is, uh, it is actually about the end of everything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so different possibilities for how the universe might end, uh, what they would look like, how we're trying to figure it out in physics and astronomy, uh, what we're going to learn over the next few decades. But yeah, just the different possible ends of the, of the cosmos.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, I, I want, you know, I, I often wish I could just, I could just fast forward, you know, a couple hundred years, a couple thousand years, you know, million years, something, just, just take a look.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just see what it's gonna, what it's gonna be like. Uhm, and I'm, I'm really bummed that I don't get to, I don't get to see that, that I, you know, there's, there are astrophysical events that, that I can anticipate, but I can't ever watch. Like that's,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, and it'll take a long time. You know, I would probably want to take my time machine there and then fast forward a while to actually see it carried through, but that would be really, really awesome.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some new stars forming, you'll get new stars blowing up. It won't be a huge amount of star formation cause there's, by that time a lot of the hydrogen will be depleted in both.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Milky Way and Andromeda, but you'll get, you'll get some, some fireworks and then, um, you know, when the, when the cores of the galaxies are coming together.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The supermassive black holes will coalesce. And uhm, and so you might get some really interesting sort of activity. I mean, even just at the beginning of the collision.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, they'll be tearing stars apart and stuff and then, and then, you know, they'll, they'll spiral together and that, that could be really cool. I mean, it's, it's going to be fascinating.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You don't think that would just be terribly traumatizing and, and horrible?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, you could just go watch an icebreaker, uh, plow around the Arctic Circle if you wanted to see, you know, ships cladding with icebergs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, yeaah. I mean, to see, to see a black hole close enough that you could actually see the effects of the gravitational lensing would be very, very cool.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, when I was thinking about the book, the structure of the book, one of the things that I considered doing was I thought, what if I, what if in the beginning of each chapter, about each end of the universe, I put like a little science fiction-y vignette about, you know, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What it looks like while it's happening and all this stuff. And I thought about doing that and I realized like, none of these are cinematic, you know, none of these are going to be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Interesting to watch because either you have a heat death, which is this very, very long, slow fading of the universe or you have something that's, that's so sudden that you don't see anything like the, like vacuum decay where it's just, you don't even notice it happening.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or you have something that is dramatic but only on this time scale of like millions of years and that doesn't make a good story. So, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, it does, no, it does get dramatic at the end. It's just by the time it's getting really dramatic. Well, okay, so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so, so, you know, we have this background light in the universe right now called the Cosmo Microwave Background, which is the sort of background light from the Big Bang. This light that's left over from when the whole universe was hot and dense, when it was, when it was younger, when it was smaller. And that light is dissipated through the universe as the universe is expanded.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But if the universe is compressing, then that light will be compressed, and so the universe will trend more toward that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know, I mean, the first thing we have to figure out how to do is survive the death of our sun, right? And that's, that's non-trivial, right? That's a big deal. We only have about a billion years before Earth is no longer habitable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then, you know, a few more billion years after that, the sun becomes a white dwarf and is basically useless. So we have to figure out how to get through that hump, right? And I kind of feel like if we're able to do that, if we're able to find a way to leave Earth,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, but if it were to stop and turn around, we're pretty sure that couldn't happen for, you know, tens of billions of years at least. But if it were tens of billions of years and not, not longer, then in principle we could be around for that. But, uh, you know, again, we don't really have a good.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, it's just, uh, that if it did, you kind of wouldn't see it coming.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it would happen so fast that you wouldn't necessarily really notice it. So that one probably won't happen until long, long after everything is kind of falling apart. But you can't say with certainty that it won't happen sooner.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How physics works, like what, it sort of determines the laws of physics, the interactions between particles, just how, how physics works on a fundamental level. And we, we know that the Higgs field was different in the very early universe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That uhm, the Higgs field is this energy field that's throughout all of space that it did undergo a shift.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the very early universe that sort of set up the conditions for particle physics as they are now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, and so finding the Higgs boson was an indication that like, yes, we do live in a universe like that where this, this Higgs field made a, made a change and that change determined how physics works in our universe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The problem is that measurements of the Higgs boson are increasingly better understanding of the Higgs field suggests that the value of the Higgs field has now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is not necessarily the sort of preferred value that it suggests that the Higgs field could change again. And we don't want the Higgs field to change again, because if it did, we would have totally different laws of physics. Our particles wouldn't hold together anymore. We couldn't have atoms and molecules.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that bubble would then expand out at about the speed of light.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The space inside gravitationally collapses, so you sort of turn into a black hole.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, not at all, not at all. There's nothing we can do. And because it's based on quantum tunneling, it's a probabilistic event. It's a, you know, it's based on quantum physics. So, so you can't even predict.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When it's gonna happen, where it's gonna happen, all we can do is based on our, our calculations of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Our current understanding of particle physics, we can put probabilities


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's probably not going to happen within the next, you know, 10 to the power of a hundred years. That's, that's sort of our best estimate at the moment. Uh, but we don't, we don't know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It would, it could just be, the bubble could be coming toward us at the moment and we wouldn't be able to see it until it was on top of us. So, so yeaah, I mean.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You might recognize Federico from our Numberphile videos, he wears his trademark baseball cap, and he often incorporates soccer anecdotes into his mathematics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Federico is a combinatorist at San Francisco State University. He's Colombian, and in this episode he talks candidly about the struggles and prejudice encountered by people from different backgrounds as they try to make their mark in academia.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's not always easy to hear, but it's important stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And just so you know, there's a happy ending in sight. This episode of the podcast will conclude with a stirring musical finale. That's definitely a first for the Numberphile podcast.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, at that young age, that very young age, where there's no sophistication to you yet, and if I'd come up and said, Federico, what would you like to be when you grow up? I would have heard football.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As you got older and moved into high school and things like that, what path are you on then? What kind of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you get into math quite early. You got into the math Olympiads as you get closer and closer to graduating from high school. Where are you at? Where's your thinking? Are you thinking, I'm going to be a mathematician or did you have you let football go at this stage or is it still a dream or?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you, so you got into MIT despite poor grades overall because your math was extra strong.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did you find out later what they saw or what they liked? Did anyone ever tell you, look, this is, this is why you got in?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was gonna happen. You knew you were gonna learn some more advanced mathematics, obviously. What did you think that was going to allow you to do? What was the, what was the career path you saw in front of you? Were you gonna like, were you thinking I'm gonna work in Wall Street and become a millionaire or I'm gonna become a math teacher or, or, what were you imagining at the start?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Do you blame yourself for that, or do you blame the infrastructure?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is that any different in mathematics or academia to anywhere else in the world where this is such a huge problem?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is solving this problem something that has to be done in mathematics or is it just have to be solved everywhere and then it would just trickle down and be solved in mathematics too? Or do you think this problem needs to be solved specifically in mathematics? There are things about the nature of the mathematical community that will require slightly different solutions and programs and ideas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Do you look back at your journey through mathematics, through school, university, and beyond perhaps, and see examples of times where you personally suffered because of that? Like, like examples where, oh yeaah, that happened to me because I was a Colombian guy, and that shouldn't have happened to me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, that is a clearly a deeper, bigger problem than just not being welcoming to the new guy because it looks a bit different or he's got an accent. This is like a, this is a mega problem. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's absolutely.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Do mathematics and you know, solve the Riemann hypothesis or whatever it is you want to do with your career. Uh, and does it, do you also worry that it creates this impression that, oh Federico, he's just like, you know, he's the advocate guy who's like, you know, working for good causes, but you want to be taken seriously as like a world-class mathematician. How do you, how do you balance that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] End up in places like America at the big institutions. Is that, is that, does that hurt Colombian mathematics?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What does doing research look like? Like do you, do you sit there on the sofa with a notepad and just start daydreaming? Do you go for a run to get your blood pumping? Do you, do you have a swim? Do you play some music? Like when you wanna have a breakthrough and do good mathematics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I find it hard to imagine doing, like, creatively I like, I love my ideas and I find quite often when I'm with someone else having ideas, I'm always like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I like what you're saying, but I want to do my idea. Like, like, like, is it, is there ever an arm wrestle or do you have, do someone have to sometimes let go and say, all right, I'm going to let go of my idea and we'll go with yours? How does that work when you reach that kind of tension or impasse?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, days on the earth to solve the things you're going to solve and prove the things you're going to prove, like you don't ever feel that I'm running out of time. I need to use every possible minute, you know, every possible bit of my brain energy to, you know, this is my one chance to make a huge mark on mathematics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] First, when you play football and soccer now, do you ever take the penalties?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm sure none of your opposing goalkeepers could possibly be listening to this podcast. So what's your penalty technique? What's your-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And my last question is, will you play that for me? Let me hear what it sounds like. Sure. Alright. What's the instrument called again? La Marimba de Chonta. Okay, here we go. Exclusive Federico on this instrument that I still can't pronounce.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can see more links about him and his work in the show notes. Our thanks also to the Simons Allow for Mathematical Sciences Institute, SL Math, for their support of Numberphile. My name's Brady Haran, and we'll be back soon with another podcast. In the meantime, do check out our Numberphile videos on YouTube. There's always something new and interesting to see there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hey guys, we made a game. About hot dogs? Yea, it's called Hot Dog Runner. Is it coming out March 7th, Simon? Yes, you can put it on your wishlist as of today. There you go, so go to Steam right now, go ahead and wishlist it, and, uh, it drops March 7th. Hot Dog Runner. We're excited. It's cheap. It better be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alright, I have questions. Oh, bring it. Well, you guys got to play Nightingale. I was gone that week. You were.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're sending me like pictures of like, hey we're having so much fun playing Nightingale. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I wanna know what Nightingale's like. It's fun. We've been having our eyes on that for years now. Yea, you especially, Dora. Yes. You were jazzed about this one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, now that was, I, I did watch, I can't remember the name of the channel I watched, but I, I saw like a brief, just kind of a how it works kind of thing. So I guess as you play, you collect cards, cards involved, and you use those cards to structure the next world you're going to go into.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, uhm, I guess this is kind of a preview, but today, well today we played a little, uh, Helldivers. We did, too. And you were so frustrated at that first bit of the tutorial.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Man, tutorials are an interesting thing to even have to do in a game. You kinda need them, but I mean, I do miss sometimes of just, just drop me in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's pretty deep. You know what I think I prefer? I guess survival games are a little different because there's not like structured missions a lot of the time, but...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I guess something like Red Dead Redemption where a lot of the missions are tutorial based. It's like you are learning how to play the games. Like okay, here's a mission where like you gotta go out and hunt and bring food back. And that mission teaches you how to hunt.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but I mean, that is tough to do in a survival game or even something like, I don't know, like Helldivers, you could see kind of a first mission, but yeah, I mean, yeah, you do need some sort of tutorial of like here, hey, here's the easy, you know, here's the quick button command. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's tougher to do it with a multiplayer game because, you know, a single-player game, yes, I can understand.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, multiplayer is like, you don't, you're not gonna give everyone the tutorial mission. But then again, like I think, enshrouded, enshrouded does it very well. Because when you first spawn in, there's like certain things you see, uh, where like a little, a box will pop up around like, I don't know, like a chest.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You'll walk up to a chest and there'll be like one box just at the starting point that says, these are chests. Hit X to open.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a thousand of them out there in the world go for it. Or like, oh, here's wood. Pick up wood to build campfires. Right. Just little things like that where it's not like overbearing, you're not having to listen to all this character dialogue. It's just there, you read it quickly and you move on. Right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So now wait, I guess this is a question I have. You're going from realm to realm, and you're generating these realms with cards.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you go from one realm to another, can you go back to that realm? Like where your house is? Okay, gotcha. So yeah, you can build a house in one realm and like, okay, that's my house.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but what happens if you get, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It's like you start building in one realm and then you jump to another realm like, man, I really like this realm. I wish I'd have built my house here. Would be cool if you could just copy and paste. Yeah, I think that'd be great.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because the trailer saw all kinds of crazy enemies. You guys probably didn't see giants or anything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How many of these recruits can you have per player? Probably one per person. One per person? I think so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, I love the idea of the card system because yea, it's like, okay, we're about to generate a new world. What do you want to put down? How are we going to alter it? Like, that's, that's unique. Yea, agreed. I like it. I'm going to, I'm going to stay on it. I want to play, like, we don't know when it comes out, do we?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah. I wanna see more stuff. I'm curious. Yeaah, that's exciting. Yeaah. I know you mentioned work benches, playing more in Shrouded. Yup.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Started to kinda feel that way too. Like, oh wow, you gotta make- But what I do like about, uh, in Shrouded is their work benches aren't benches, they're people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As you play a game, as you play the game, uh, you go out and it's like, okay, we gotta go rescue a blacksmith. It's like, now you got a blacksmith and you put him in your, uhm, compound or whatever. Alright. So to craft-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and you expand them by, you know, yeah, you can put benches down around them to basically increase the stuff they can craft, but they are basically crafting benches.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well I think yeaah. What does that do? Then enshrouded is good because yeaah, then you can like take the blacksmith and say, okay, we're gonna build a house for the blacksmith. And all the chests and everything in here is metal, it's blacksmith related stuff. Just put all that in there. And thank god it does, enshrouded does have a chest that's a magic chest that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All the, uhm, all the work benches talk to. I really think that's what Conan's missing more than anything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That, that's the fact that you gotta pull shit out or put shit into the workbench. Just like, no, let me have a ton of chest laying around. Please. That is just the workbench. Fucking please. That's so much, that's so much of a nicer system.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, well you hope anyone making a survival game plays survival games. You know, it's like, okay, I like that genre. So when you see someone in that genre do something,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Unique or something that's intriguing you. Oh, yeah, I gotta put that in my game. That's just gonna make my game


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you're joining a multiplayer thing and you see your ship, you know, coming to your buddy, you know, it kicks in the music there. And then like, you know, when you decide we're going to go down to this planet and you all get in the pods, kicks in the music again. Why are you going down there? It just, it's.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's so good with its musical cues that I'm like every


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, you can, I guess you can peek ahead when you play the game. It'll show you like, you know, what this strike does. But as you play more and more, you just unlock more and more powerful shit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I know, Neebs, you started playing hildivers and you're like, I wish I could take off this cape.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I don't want the cake, but- I-I don't blame you. Well, that's another thing, they can sell ya.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's true. That's why it's there. I want a green cape. I'll tell you what, what kind of upset me when I started playing the game is, uh, you earn medals and then those medals you can spend, um, as you rank up, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But as I started ranking up, I was like, man, I'm saving up for this, uh, this rifle on layer two or whatever it is. I gotta buy the rifle. It's like, oh, nope, this is on, you got enough medals, but it's on level two. You have to spend a certain amount of levels, uh, medals on level one. Shut up. Before you can, it's like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it's down there. Who cares? It's down there. Just let me have it. Let me get it. It's my medals. Let me do what I want. I'm a saver. I want to save my medals for the good stuff. The Incredibles got me to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, maybe. That's the thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's one of those games where if you hit reload, you don't keep the clips that are...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah. And also it's a cool setup, just the galaxy map. Yeaah. Of how, okay, this enemy faction is heading towards Earth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you can see the amount of players working on different planets to secure the planets from the bugs. It's like, that's kinda, it brings the community together, lets you see what the community's doing. It's like, that's kinda neat.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know. I hope so. I'm sure some of those missions are...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nah, it's got, it's got a lot of good stuff in there. Hell no. Yeah. You know, yeah, we play a lot of games here, but that's one, like, after playing it, I was like, yeah, I would play more of that. I'm ready for some more. Me too. Yeah. In a heartbeat.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, we went camping up there and then one day we went swimming and it was a little swimming area where a bunch of people were hanging out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These little kids come up and start talking to us and this one little kid just globs on the kneebs and doesn't let go. He's like, this guy's my hero. He's tall and strong and I'm gonna follow him around all day. God bless him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but it can be over- I mean, especially like shampoos, like, you know. I don't think you should wash your hair that damn much.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, uhm, this is for Bad Movie Night. Yeah. Anthony got ripped off.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because it was good? What do you mean? No, no, well, we went on a cruise. A little catamaran cruise. Oh, he got financially. He got nice and rummed up. Then after that we end up in this like little town near the cruise ship in like just the port of Antigua.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there's a bunch of DVDs, and you know, I have bad movie night a lot, where we're always looking for trash, always looking for something weird. These are DVDs. Right. DVDs be cheap.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes, it's like, okay, this is perfect for bad movie night. Let's get this. And then he also found like, well, two packs of DVDs. And he's like, and he got excited. He's like, oh man, look, these look great for bad movie night. These will be awesome. And he goes up to the counter. How much are these? 50 bucks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He paid for like three DVDs, right? Well, it was one DVD, the Swedish Mango, and then like a two-pack. So really five movies, but still.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's ridiculous, but he got way too excited and he showed his excitement to the guy working the counter. Can't do that. 50 bucks. And you know what? Pretty insulting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I did watch uhm. It's actually pretty good. I watched Wonka, the new Willy Wonka. Yea, I heard it was alright. It's good. I like it. It's fun. It's not bad.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Comment section will tell me. Comment section, what is this, what is this movie?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Fair enough. Everybody just needs like a fucking blood test machine for their house. Might as well, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All the, all the damn blood test machine and all is like hooked up to it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, doing your own, uh, I've got one of the little. Here's my blood pressure, here's my blood work, there you go, upload it. Put that shit on the cloud.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's the thing, you're not gonna get a right reading. That's the same thing, I have like that white-coast syndrome or whatever, like any time I'm in a doctor's office, I'm like nervous. Which I shouldn't be, but it's just like, ugh, I'm annoyed, my blood pressure's high just because I don't wanna be there. It's all of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just a snorer. Yeaah. I mean, you know, he's a loud guy in general. It's true. He's just, he's got a boisterous voice. And so just imagine that, snoring.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, in my head I was like, oh, he must have like left some footage. You wanted to, you know, is anybody at the office? Can you transfer footage to the Google Drive? No.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He ordered Kruppa, but it showed up here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, that bridge is old, it needs repairs, yeaah. It's so fucking bad, that's why they're doing this. They've apparently been trying to get money from the state to repair that bridge for years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of those ones like twisting in the wind before they really knew how to build them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, for smoother movements. Like while I'm there. Gotcha. Yeah, I just gotta teleport around quick, cause stuff's only rendered like around my body, and it's just weird how that works. Right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At the very least, get like a POI expansion for Darkness Falls. Yes. And like, treat it like we're moving, you know? Like a moving day, and then it's a bunch of new POIs, a bunch of new areas. I thought that would be cool, just to refresh the series. And are we starting from scratch?