Podcast for Mathematicians

Mathematicians are podcast listeners too. Aren't they? They, and anyone else interested in mathematics, will be interested in a BBC podcast from the network's In Our Time series on prime numbers.

(First a navigational note: Oddly, the In Our Time iTunes Music Store Page does not list this or other past shows, making it necessary to go to the BBC's Web site, where the prime numbers podcast can be downloaded.)

As the show's Web site says, "For nearly two and a half thousand years, since Euclid first described the prime numbers in his book Elements, mathematicians have struggled to write a rule to predict what comes next in the sequence. The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler feared that it is 'a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate.'"

The hook for this podcast is the recent discovery of the highest known prime number, with 9.1 million digits. An analysis of this find segues into an infinitely fascinating discussion of these mathematical buidling blocks.

The show's guests are all eminent mathematicians:

Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics and Fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford;

Robin Wilson, Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University and Gresham Professor of Geometry;

Jackie Stedall, Junior Research Fellow in the History of Mathematics at Queen's College, Oxford.

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