Ricky Nathvani

Whether it’s painting, constructing, wrapping things or even just designing a soda can, understanding surface areas is essential to designing the world around us. And being able to move between two and three dimensions with this type of thinking helps us learn more about the shapes that we interact with. In this episode, we discuss surface area and the ways in which this knowledge can help us navigate and better understand the world around us.

Scientists like to measure things, but they've had a heck of a time doing that with sharpness. And even if no one agrees on exactly how to measure it, our search for better tools has recently led to some of the sharpest objects we’ve ever created.

Units are the way we measure things, like, meters and feet; the U.S. dollar and the Euro, or Celsius and Fahrenheit. And, depending on the context, people often use different units for the same problem. In this episode, we discuss Dimensional Analysis, a toolkit math provides for dealing with all the different choices of units and conversions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ezGO0kN6yM

While getting money for free is a rare occurrence, there are ways in which you can make your money grow! In this episode, we discuss compound interest which can have dramatic effects in how we approach borrowing and lending money as well as help us make important financial decisions when it comes to spending, saving and investing.

The bigger the electrical current, the more powerful the magnetic field. And we've learned to harness the power of those magnetic fields to do things like accelerate particles and suspend plasma!

You've probably heard the saying "Money Makes the World Go Round" and while on its own, money may not do much, you can certainly use it to do plenty of things. Knowing how to use and manage money can help you navigate the world and accomplish goals. In this episode, we dive into the world of finance and discuss interest and its effect on each of our financial decisions.

The bell-shaped curve we find in Normal Distributions is defined by two things: mean and standard deviation. These factors can help us understand more complex problems that are not-so-standard. In this episode, we discuss Non-Standard Normal Distributions and how we can lean on simpler concepts we already understand to solve more unusual ones.

Understanding variation and how data is dispersed helps us grapple with the thing that makes the data interesting in the first place. Sometimes to capture valuable information we need to go beyond averages and explore the math behind how spread out our data is. In this episode, we discuss measures of dispersion and how this tool can give us more insight into our sets of data.

Our eyes and brains combined are incredible information-processing machines which is why we can often understand things more quickly by looking at visuals. In this episode, we discuss how we can get the deeper meaning behind data by visualizing the information we have available to us.

The Kavli Prize honors scientists for breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience — transforming our understanding of the big, the small, and the complex.

From removing glare in windows to making pacemakers safer, monolayers hold a number of possibilities for advances in future technology.

When planning for the future and attempting to make choices, chance and probability can play a trickier role than we might expect! Whether two events depend on each other or not, can drastically affect the results of your predictions. In this episode, we discuss independent, dependent and conditional probabilities and all the ways outcomes can be influenced by the relationship between events!

Life is full of uncertainty and when we have any sort of question with unknown possibilities, we're dealing with probability. In this episode, we discuss mathematical probability and how math helps us predict what will happen.

While there's times when arranging groups and objects in a specific order matters, sometimes we just don't care about the order. In this episode, we discuss combinations and how this process can cut through big numbers and give us practical answers.

This episode marks the end of our exploration of sets and counting! The concepts we’ve developed along the way (intersections, subsets and the fundamental counting theorem) will come in handy as we venture into the worlds of probability, statistics and, geometry.

There are a lot of different ways we can order a collection of objects, and the possibilities can quickly add up. In this episode, we discuss how through math, we can make sense of all the possibilities using the concept of permutations.