Numbers with Deboki Chakravarti | SciShow Tangents Podcast

This video was sponsored by Spintronics. Head to upperstory.com/spintronics to learn more about the game and see it in action!
Whether you're tracking the orbit of satellites, looking at your phone, or picking out a dozen fresh-baked donuts, the chances are pretty good that right this second, YOU are using numbers! Hate to break it to you, bud, but math is actually pretty important after all!
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#scishow #podcast #comedy #science #education #scishowtangents

[@SciShowTangents]

This video was sponsored by Spintronics. Head to upperstory.com/spintronics to learn more about the game and see it in action!

[@ryanc473]

This is honestly one of the coolest things I've seen in a really long time. As soon as I get some cash I'm getting one lol

[@smay745]

I promise I’m paying attention to what you’re all talking about, but I’m mostly just so in love with they way you are all happily nerding out with each other. Thank you for bringing uninhibited smart-people joy to our lives.

[@lasagnahog7695]

Well dang, I had no idea this was a video podcast! I was picturing Sam as an eight foot marble golem this entire time.

[@SciShowTangents]

Close! I’m only 5’6”

[@GMOPeyton]

​@@SciShowTangentsSAMMMM SCHULTZ

[@gabby4558]

33:55 is the timestamp for when you only came here to see how Ceri's sister counts on her fingers

[@CrazyMonkeyCrap1]

+

[@MaryAnnNytowl]

I use the ASL way of signing the numbers, myself. Also single handed, but faster and simpler than those odd contortions, LOL!

[@ameba2804]

Not all true heroes wear capes

[@johnv3733]

In Greek, νόμος ( _nomos_ ) means “law” or “custom”, from which we get, e.g. “astronomy”, “economy”. It’s άριθμος ( _arithmos_ ) that means “number” - from which we get the word “arithmetic”.

[@sk8rdman]

One important distinction that never really got mentioned is the difference between numbers and numerals. Numbers are the abstract concept of quantities, and something that can you can apply mathematical operators and logic to. Numerals are just the symbols we used to represent those abstract quantities. For example 4 and IV are both numerals that represent the same mathematical concept: the quantity we call four. That quantity is the number, in the most mathematical sense of the word, but the symbol is just how we write it down. This seems like a really pedantic distinction, but it's relevant to a number of the topics you discussed here, including the sudoku fact. Even though we use numerals in a sudoku puzzle, those are just symbols that don't actually represent anything mathematical, as Ciri said. You can replace those numerals with any other set of 9 distinct objects, and it doesn't change the mechanics of the puzzle or the process to solve it. So it's actually not a numbers game at all, because the values we normally attribute to those symbols are not relevant to the puzzle in any way. Of course, that's not to say you can't use math to analyze aspects of the puzzle. There's more to math than just numbers, and the value 17 from her fact is indeed a quantity, and a bonified number (and not just an arbitrary symbol).

[@TacticusPrime]

Complex numbers really are beautiful. So much better than trigonometry at least for doing rotations.

[@TonyBridges42]

65,537 is pretty common in testing software, too, because it is one more than the largest number that can be stored in a 16 bit integer and a lot of errors are caused by trying to store a number that is too big

[@SeanTBarrett]

I mean, 65535 is the largest number that can be stored in a 16-bit integer, so 65536 is the number that is one larger, not 65,537. But what's an off-by-one error amongst friends.

[@bananatassium7009]

my voracious consumption of math content/numberphile has finally paid off, i knew the answers to all three of deboki's questions!

[@jebus456]

The stool chart was really helpful for me and my kid. My kid was diagnosed with encopresis and the GI doc gave us this chart so that we could know how well their BMs were throughout treatment. Mostly it just makes things easier for tracking/reporting purposes to say a number instead of having to describe it fully everytime.

[@IceMetalPunk]

For those wondering about the whole "created vs discovered" debate, I highly recommend the KZbin channel Another Roof's series where he builds up all of mathematics (including numbers themselves) starting with only some very basic properties and actions, like "things can be put in groups" (without even needing to define what the "things" are). It doesn't fully solve the debate, but it certainly gives a ton of insight and maybe some new perspective on the question.

[@andii64]

Journey to the Microcosmos has the most relaxing music

[@jess53nz]

And voice overs

[@CatBarefield]

Yeah i love Hank’s Journey to micro voice. So soothing

[@HeatherWarner97]

I love deboki's question "do I have to do more work if you tie?" 😂😂

[@thaumaturgeslit7759]

I read a book all about math jokes hidden in the Simpsons. And that is where I learned about the taxicab number.

[@mrjoe332]

"What are numbers?" Possibly the hardest question ever asked on the show

[@JHaven-lg7lj]

I love how Sam asked exactly the right questions for all the non-mathies out here Also, the point of pure mathematics is its beauty. There’s a different kind of beauty in applied maths, but you can go more fanciful places with pure

[@Syco108]

Math existed before Greek and Roman times. Humans have been counting and numbering things since before we had writing. Pythagoras wasn't even the first person to discover the theorem we just credit it to him.

[@AllTheArtsy]

I don't know if I'd necessarily call "counting and numbering" as math though. Numbers in themselves are just abstractions-- the concept of two rocks and two trees having that amount in common, for example. Which is why mathematics is usually thought of to truly "begin" with the Babylonians and Egyptians who had notation and other systems for more complex things like taxation. (But yeah it wasn't the Greeks there first 😅)

[@Katie-hh9eu]

She was just explaining where the word number came from, not where numbers themselves came from.

[@Syco108]

​I guess I misunderstood what she was saying

[@lisanorwoodtreefarm]

I'm concerned for people who have just found Tangents and are probably confused and very concerned about the minion urine lol

[@terranovarubacha5473]

Not concerned enough to explain it :p

[@Vimes4]

Sam's looking suave, rugged, and fashionable.

[@Leabluebell]

Saying that we'll defeat the robots with sudoku reminds me of throwing rice on the ground to stop vampires, as they apparently are compulsed to stop and count every grain, so it was suppose to give you time to run away!

[@itsme_taylorlee]

😂😂 you have good taste, my friend.

[@peggy4846]

As a maths major, I really enjoy being talked about like another species when they started talking about maths majors at the start 😂 Also on Sam's fact: I hate that kids were ever discouraged from counting on their fingers, how dare they take away a helpful and completely harmless tool for understanding from young kids. Not to mention having an entire generation with hang ups that they're 'stupid' because they count on their fingers which is in absolutely no way tied to intelligence. Anything that makes people like maths less makes me mad and I think the rigid and unintuitive way maths has been and often still is taught has done huge harm to people's understanding of maths. Far too many people just associate math with feeling stupid.

[@trelligan42]

There is a Korean finger-counting system called Chisanbop that puts the digits 0-9 on a single hand, so two hands can hold two digits. This is great for counting up things as you go along; I use it when deciding which month is the 8th, for example. There is a Wikipedia page and YT videos.

[@jebus456]

missed opportunity to get Brady from Numberphile as a guest on the show!!

[@Jenny-fk3ke]

I love seeing Deboki on this channel!

[@LilBeee85]

Nurse here🙋🏼‍♀️ I often use the Bristol stool chart to have my patients show me what their poop looks like if they are unwilling or unable to describe their 💩

[@GoingtoHecq]

When it comes to computers using binary they handle math in base 2 instead of base 10. For sure data storage can be cool. Also Ceri's dad supporting her through her patron is wonderful.

[@robnol84]

As infrequently that we a blessed to receive 🤲 new tangents episodes I don’t think any of us are leaving to watch something else before first watching this. (I didn’t want to go back and rewrite it with punctuation so I added a period just to annoy people.)

[@gsarngad]

I'm old enough that 16-bit graphics was a thing when I was young, so I recognized 65,537 as one more than 2°16

[@osmia]

Any progress on the possibility of a SciShow Tangents science poem book? Possibly as a p4a perk, maybe . . .

[@VikingTeddy]

Weird, this channel didn't show up on my subscriptions for a long time. Don't do dirty like that YT!

[@pogmothoin227]

14:21 sounds like a stoned philosophical, Sam 😂

[@ZipplyZane]

The PDF thing wouldn't be too hard. So each volume has, what, a million digits? So then all you need is one book that starts with a 1 and then has a million zeros, and one book that just has a million zeros. And then any time you ask for any book beyond the first book, you give the one with a million zeros. The problem would be how you could ask specific books in the series, since you'd need 10^94 is 100000000000000 times more than there are protons in the universe.

[@andrewspohrer7183]

I feel like the biggest benefit to ternary computing is that viruses would have to be rewritten from the ground up which would be likely to happen faster than the computers and software could be launched and gain traction. Ultimately defeating the purpose.

[@rasmusn.e.m1064]

Re: the post pfrrr fact: in Danish, we actually call poops sausages. Well, I don't anymore because I find it pretty disgusting, but it's the most common euphemism taught to kids. Who knew that it would be helpful in teaching them what normal bowel movements are. 😅

[@alexstauffer3359]

2 things about i: 1) It came about because mathematicians would encounter the square root of -1. Finally, someone decided "I don't know what it's value is, but let's pretend it's a real thing and see how it goes." And the calculations worked, and then kept working. B) Thinking about the value of i. You need some value where if you multiply a number by it twice you get the same number, but negative. So think of the unit circle. Cos(0) is 1, and a half turn later cos(180°/pi) is -1. The implication being that whatever i is, it's rotating the number 90° (pi/2) through some 2D plane which we now call the complex plane.

[@alexstauffer3359]

I defaulted to degrees because I couldn't find the Greek letter Pi on my phone's keyboard.

[@ZipplyZane]

Specifically they started using it to solve cubic equations. Part of the process can result in the square root of negative numbers. But if you just ignore that those don't exist, and do the calculations anyways, you still get the correct answer at the end.

[@HotelPapa100]

Considering that irrational numbers can't be written as a ratio it's astonishing how many of them are defined as a ratio: Pi, the ratio between circumference and diameter of a circle, golden ratio, it's right there in the name. Granted they are ratios of non-integer values, but I still find it interesting.

[@SignificantNumberOfBeavers]

I'm an applied mathematician! The pure math of 80 years ago is the applied math of today! Pure mathematicians and mathematical theorists mess around with logic and numbers for the sake of it, then applied mathematicians come along and say "oh hey, that's useful!" And pure mathematicians say "oh. Whatever." Also, yes, Mathematicians are bad at arithmetic.

[@massimocole9689]

29:55 There are a hundred trillion times more volumes in that pdf than there are protons in the observable universe!

[@sk8rdman]

They really should have had a mathematician, or even just someone with a lot of love and experience with the field on this episode. 10 minutes in there are already so many little tangents (and nit picks) that I'd like to chime in on, and I'm sure the same is true for many of your other mathematically inclined listeners. I feel like the perspective of the mathematician should have better representation in this discussion. I'd love to see you do this or a similar episode again, but with a mathematician guest.

[@catherinebaldwin6580]

I am soo glad I’m not the only one! Oh, this is painful for me, an Applied Mathematician

[@Bub98]

I'm happy to not be the only nerd that feels this way, and I also get the same vibe whenever physics comes up. I know this is a petty pet peeve, but I would love it if they added someone with a physics or math background.

[@codydwyerify]

We're talking about fingers and numbers, and noone mentioned "digits"

[@chloelilly8833]

Ok so u convinced this stoner, ima have to check it out at the end of this episode 😂

[@krystofdayne]

Isn't Ceri like half-Korean, or half-Chinese? I'm sorry if I'm mixing some stuff up here, but I thought this finger counting on one hand from 6-10 was pretty common in some Asian cultures, or at least it traditionally is. I remember seeing a Numberphile video with Tom Scott where he goes into a tiny bit of this. I'm really not knowledgeable in that area, but I wasn't that surprised hearing Ceri talk about this and more surprised that she wouldn't know about it but her sister would.

[@WeyounSix]

Spintronics is so cooool

[@RSturtleness]

‘Get off your ath and learn some math!” School of Rock.

[@MaryAnnNytowl]

Well, I guess I'm a weirdo, because I picture the numbers themselves, like they're on a chalkboard, when doing maths like that. 😂 I do occasionally use fingers to add as I keep track of costs to stay under budget, though. I use ASL counting to 10, then adjust it to my own thing as I go higher than that. 😊 And, hey, hello! 👋🏼😊👍🏼 I was one of the people that the puzzle now known as sudoku was introduced to by Dell puzzle books as Number Place. I think I jumped for joy the first time I saw it in the late 1970s, I enjoyed it that much! I still often call it Number Place, though. 😂 I solve them by some sort of logic that's more like the third way you described. I first go through and put in any of a number that must go in that spot, logically, then the next number, and the next. It often helps me solve the "hardest" puzzles better & faster than the average. Oddly, it slows me to below average on some of the easier puzzles, though. 🤔 Anyway, HUGE FAN of Number Place, here! (I love Sudoku, too, LOL!) [Yes, yes, I know - it's a joke.] Thanks for what you do, and send a gigantic hug to Hank, please. We're all rooting for him! 💙💙

[@Kaltag2278]

I never understood that rational related to ratio. Thanks!

[@tjthrash0143]

What are numbers? Is simple. Yet the simplest things are hard to define. I believe a definition would be something like this: Numbers are a set of concepts with which humans define the seen and unseen in terms that can be written down.

[@tjthrash0143]

Will it ever be possible to build computers that use anything other than binary? Yes it is possible. But would require a total redesign of, not just the computer, but the entire programming world. I came up with a concept 10+ years ago that would use base 4 (sorta) instead of base 2. I was trying to figure out how to increase the speed of computers and thought precision voltage control could do it. instead of triggering a 1 by using 3-5 volts and a zero with 0-2 volts you could instead cut that in half and read two streams of data simultaneously. In a way still using base 2 i guess... I never fully flushed out the idea because i realized it wouldnt work with current designs.

[@sk8rdman]

Numbers? No. I think you've just defined language + scriptology. I think you're definition is too broad. I'd be more inclined to define numbers as abstract quantities.

[@robnol84]

I was just talking about this today at work before watching. And like mathematicians really just be out here makin up rules. It was because of the new @veritasium and I was just thinking the whole time “so they just make up new rules to fix a problem and call it a day.”

[@JHaven-lg7lj]

Oh my gosh, adolescent calculator jokes! A well-endowed lady’s measurement was 69. The doctor said that was too, too, too much so he gave her 51 pills to take 8 times a day and that left her Boobless! (6922251x8 = 55378008)

[@BlueScreenCorp]

Why is Sam hitting 700 patrons? That sounds violent!

[@genreofstubby]

i know people who happily getting high off this channel... while enjoying their chill time. ;)

[@scoston8884]

It's got to be Sam on the Fact-off! Sorry, Sudoku puzzles are boring; I can generally figure them out.

[@Scrizati]

I have met someone who counts like Ceri's sister, but I cannot remember where

[@RamonQuiro7]

22:00

[@mama2pokemon]

MATHSPHEMY

[@realfoggy]

TIL I'm apparently a stoner.

[@shadebug]

The binary computer makes sense when you’re using electronics because electronics don’t really know states other than on or off. If you look at Babbage’s analytical and differential engine you’ll see that it’s decimal because each wheel has ten stops on it. Doing that with electronics would involve doing analogue computers so you would have the state of the electricity representing different values like different voltages represent different numbers

[@alexwixom4599]

DO NOT BLASPHEM! BOW TO THE MATH GOD. May he in his infinity bless us with ever more useful equations.

[@shadebug]

What microphone is Ceri using? I feel like she's speaking into the side of it but should be speaking into the top of it. Deboki looks like she's talking into the side of it but that looks like it's just a perspective thing and she's just being off axis

[@UnashamedlyHentai]

we already do/have built computers that do not user binary. not only can we use other number systems, but we can build analog computers, and have done so already.

[@AndrewTBP]

As mentioned in the podcast.

[@UnashamedlyHentai]

@@AndrewTBP i don't understand how people don't put together that in a video that over half an hour long, comments can and are likely made _during_ video.

[@shadebug]

If you wanna be a finger counting pro, learn to count in binary. As long as you have enough dexterity in your fingers you’ll be able to count to over a thousand on both hands though it’s very easy to accidentally skip a number

[@jasper265]

Not your strongest episode, in my opinion: - i suspect Ceri was confusing solving one sudoku with finding what the minimal sudoku is. Solving one sudoku isn't that hard for a computer, but finding out whether a very hard sudoku is solvable is a bit harder, and needing to do that for a lot of different sudokus is what made them bed so much compute time - and that's a part they left to a computer because it's not something humans (can) do - Sam's fact was largely about speculation (namely, why they were seeing a specific correlation) and the fact that there was an opposing paper - For the ask the science couch, the more interesting thing to talk about would have been analogue computers, which essentially dip a toe in the irrational numbers, or at least stray very far from just being able to represent limited length numbers. (They're currently very specialized and in limited numbers, but they are very interesting and perhaps there will be an analogue math component in computers in the future...)

[@catherinebaldwin6580]

As a applied mathematician, I find this hard to swallow. One, us appied math people love math as much as theoretical math people. To, numbers didn’t came from the Greeks. And three, you guys need to bing watch Numberphile. Sorry. I’m very passionate about marh, and my numbers are being picked on! Oh, can someone Pleeeease think of the numbers!

[@shadebug]

So disappoint that Sam said “fire to be lighted”. You’re better than that, Sam

[@AndrewTBP]

It's a famous quotation.

[@shadebug]

@@AndrewTBP It is and that famous quotation goes Οὐ γὰρ ὡς ἀγγεῖον ὁ νοῦς ἀποπληρώσεως ἀλλ´ ὑπεκκαύματος μόνον ὥσπερ ὕλη δεῖται, ὁρμὴν ἐμποιοῦντος εὑρετικὴν καὶ ὄρεξιν ἐπὶ τὴν ἀλήθειαν Which I don't hear Sam or Hank trying to stick to rigidly so imma say they have leeway to make it sound better

[@SciShowTangents]

you've kinda got a point there....

[@coylittlefish]

I love this podcast but I worry about it characterising maths and physics as difficult and uninteresting, even if it's not your thing I think there's a responsibility there to not discourage people from your platform as a science communicator. Young people listening see you guys as being really smart so listening to you talk about how difficult imaginary numbers are is bound to make them feel like maths is just impossible. It would be cool to bring on a guest from a maths/physics background to be a voice of enthusiasm on some of these episodes.

[@toveryonder1115]

no hank = profanity

[@BaddeGrasse]

I was exposed to pictures of the bristol stool scale from a young age in aged care homes 🫥 scarred for life