Harvard Science Book Talk: Jordan Ellenberg, in conversation with Cathy O'Neil, "Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else"

Date: 

Wednesday, May 26, 2021, 5:00pm

Where Online: https://www.harvard.com/event/virtual_event_jordan_ellenberg/
When May 26, 2021 @5:00PM
Organization/Sponsor Harvard Division of Science, Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store
Speaker(s) Jordan Ellenberg (U. Wisconsin-Madison) and Cathy O'Neil
Cost free
Contact Info science_lectures@fas.harvard.edu

Jordan Ellenberg photo and book cover,  Cathy O'Neil photo

How should a democracy choose its representatives? How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? How do computers learn to play Go, and why is learning Go so much easier for them than learning to read a sentence? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? (Sorry, no.) What should your kids learn in school if they really want to learn to think? All these are questions about geometry. For real.

If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of ninth grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. Okay, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, which has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel.

Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: Where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word "geometry," from the Greek for "measuring the world." If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world—it explains it. Shape shows us how.

 

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Jordan Ellenberg is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard and an MFA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins. His areas of research specialization are number theory and algebraic geometry. He has written articles on mathematical topics in the New York TimesThe Washington PostWiredThe Wall Street JournalThe Boston Globe, and The Believer, and is a regular columnist for Slate.

Cathy O’Neil is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a mathematician who has worked as a professor, hedge-fund analyst and data scientist. She founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company, and is the author of Weapons of Math Destruction.

For more information and videos of Harvard Science Book Talks, see https://science.fas.harvard.edu/book-talks