In this episode:

• Zeno’s beach bungalow and why he can’t come out to play
• Do train tracks actually touch at infinity?  How do YOU know? Have you been there?
• Watch out for the Hordes!!
• Welcome to the Hilbert Hotel … you can check in any time you like, blah, blah, blah …
• What do you do with an infinite number of mathematicians? Run!
• Explaining jokes at the Unit Interval, a great neighborhood bar.
• Is one type of infinity BIGGER than another kind?
• Counting ALL the Real Numbers, “… 2, ah ah … 3, ah ah … pi, ah ah!”
• The Power Set:  the enemy of the X-Men.
• Fractals, Hippies, and gettin’ trippy
• Is Nick a quantum human?

It’s taken a while to get this episode up.  Our original plan of having a weekly or bi-weekly schedule was more than ambitious than we’d expected.

But, never fear, we haven’t stopped – only slowed down to make room for those pesky things in life like work, school, and family!

Please feel free to comment in the comments section about what you think worked and what you think didn’t.  Your opinions will help to make this an even better show!

In This Episode:

• All about Combinatorics – the Mathematicians fancy way of “counting”.
• The magical musical and production styling’s of Keith Schreiner make Tom and Nick seem “almost” respectable.
• Tom invents the natural numbers in under 3 minutes.
• 5 primates are standing in a line … can you come up with a punch line?
• Is the factorial [5! = 5x4x3x2x1] just a way for mathematicians to justify yelling?
• How many ways can you cage 2 primates out of 5?  And is this illegal?
• The importance of watching Stargate SG1.
• Why is your genome smarter than your computer?
• If you went far enough on a space ship, would your toothpaste taste like rye bread?
• Apparently Nick ‘Horton’ has an alter-eg0, Nick ‘Lion’.  It does sound more manly.

This program was produced by Keith Schreiner who’s other work you can find here.

We’ve got a new episode recorded, that I’ll have edited and up on the site by tomorrow at the latest.

To tide you over I’ve compiled a list of Game Theory books that we love.  we’ve been getting a surprisingly large number of emails asking if Tom and I can recommend any great books on the subject.  Well, hell yes we can!

I’m gonna put them into a couple of categories.

Popular Books on Game Theory

OK, I’m going to be totally honest here.  I don’t usually like popular game theory books.  They come off as silly (often).  I know how that must sound coming from me of all people, but hey, that’s just the way it is.

However I DO like a lot of books that are implicitly game theoretic.  That is, they use game theoretic thinking without being all that clear about the fact that they are using the types of reasoning that is inherit to the subject.

Here we go:

The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg is just funny.  In fact, Landsburg is himself a game theorist and a rather accomplished one at that.  But, this book is all about everyday life and how economic reasoning (read: game theoretic reasoning) can help make sense of some of the big (well, small) questions we all have about day to day existence.

Landsburg went at it again with this book on more of the same subjects as his last.

Academic (ish) Books on Game Theory

My favorite is this one:

by Herbert Gintis.  It’s mostly just a huge collection of problems.  The only math you need is high school algebra for many of the problems, but having some calculus and linear algebra wouldn’t hurt.

by Philip Straffin.  This book is very introductory and has very little “math”.  It’s small and easy to read.  It’s the first game theory book I read, and it still holds up as a undergrad level intro.

Anatol Rapoport has made massive contributions to game theory in Political Science.  This book is a small intro book with a bit more math that Straffin’s book.  I found it helpful in my first term.

Maynard-Smith changed the face of evolutionary research by introducing the field to game theory.  This is book that did it.  It also serves as a great intro to people who aren’t as mathy.

Cool Books you Might Also Dig

Below are a couple books that you might be into.  They aren’t exactly intro books, but they aren’t “upper level” book either.  Instead they are speculative, or scientific, and approach the subject with a sense of possibility.

This book is about a totally new subject in the social sciences called “behavioral game theory” (which we’ll eventually do a podcast on).  It is not math, it is science.  Instead of looking at the theory of games and the consequences of that theory, they aim to test the theory.  They put people in rooms and actually have them play games and see what happens.  How closely to people stick to the strategies that game theory would predict them to use?  Very interesting!

This book is also by Herbert Gintis, and is a work of philosophy as much as it is a work of game theory.  He thesis is that game theory is to the social and behavioral sciences what calculus is to the physical sciences.  That is, this is his grand unifying theory of the behavioral sciences.  And I totally agree with him.  Read it, and be converted.

• Tom and Nick are not as happy with Pi Day as you’d expect.
• Why do Hippies like Pi so much?
• Where does pi come from, and why do we care?
• Is mounting a Ferris Wheel on a Flat-Bed Truck a good idea?
• How many digits of pi can YOU recite?  I’ll bet not 69,000!
• Nick and Tom give you back 23 hours and 40 minutes of your life … ish.

Bonus Pi Recipes

Continued fraction recipe for pie at Math World

Recipe for Boysenberry Pie:

Click here for the recipe from Simply Recipes.

• What’s wrong with the “medal count” ordering in the Olympics?
• Is it really all that surprising that Canada is good at Curling?
• quasi ordering vs partial ordering vs total ordering – who cares?
• Nick, leave the carrots out of this!
• Dealing with our Daddy issues with an ancestor semi-lattice
• Are you your own ancestor?
• For that matter, is a sandwich equal to 5 dollars?
• Discovering the quasi-order of joy-points

• Geometry on Acid: The category of Topological spaces and continuous maps.
• Tom has a silly putty reason for everything.
• The continuity of film.
• Did Xeno predict calculus?
• Ms. PacMan also loves donuts.

Here’s a video of a coffee cup continuously deforming into a donut.  Mmm … donuts.

• Cooperative vs. Non-cooperative games
• OR Combinatorial vs. Procedural Games
• Does Curious George belong on the show “Shark Tank”?
• The most hardcore competitive market ever devised
• How rapacious can Tom get?
• Is Nick totally worthless?

• What is a Category, and why do I care?
• Did cave men use the word “the”?
• Getting funky with “functors”.
• The WORST George Clinton impersonation of ALL TIME
• Sets vs Groups vs Vector Spaces vs Graphs
• Do movies take away something important from life?
• Do 3-d movies give it back?
• AND Bonobo Sex … Yes, I said  it … Bonobo Sex

• What’s wrong with economics?
• Is mathematics an appropriate tool for social science?
• Vector bundles
• The Delorean and it’s role in understanding typewriters.
• The 12-Gauge shotgun approach to fixing economics!

References

• Eric Weinstein’s lectures on Gauge theory (3 video’s at the bottom of page – well … links to video’s.)
• Tom’s post on it here.
• Terrence Tao on Gauge Theory

• What does a good Clint Eastwood impression have to do with being a good teacher?
• How Teach For America is revolutionizing the teaching scene
• Can you teach good teaching?
• What’s up with Texas and their maniacal standards for graduation?

References

• What makes a good teacher?