Maths and Storytelling

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the relationship between maths and storytelling. Is there a hidden mathematical logic in stories? The American mathematician John Allen Paulos thinks so. It’s an intriguing thought. Patterns, measurement, the logic of jokes, numerology from Leviticus to Alice in Wonderland, but does it really go to the square root of fiction? According to anthropologists, both have similar origins - in our prehistoric ancestors’ need to measure and assess the world around them. Both mathematics and stories need a shape and structure to make any sense. But does it go further than that? Is it possible to apply mathematical logic to literature or to reduce a joke to an algebraic equation? Or are literary imagination and scientific substance irreconcilable?With John Allen Paulos, Presidential Scholar of Mathematics, Temple University, Philadelphia and author of Once Upon a Number - The hidden mathematical logic of stories; Marina Warner, novelist, historian, critic, former Reith Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, London.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• John Allen Paulos No other episodes
  Presidential Scholar of Mathematics, Temple University, Philadelphia
• Marina Warner 3 episodes
  Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, London

Related episodes

• Mathematics and Platonism
  
  11 Jan, 2001 510 Mathematics
• Mathematics
  
  6 May, 1999 510 Mathematics
• Mathematics’ Unintended Consequences
  
  11 Feb, 2010 510 Mathematics
• Maths in the Early Islamic World
  
  16 Feb, 2017 510 Mathematics
• Mathematics and Music
  
  25 May, 2006 780 Music
• Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems
  
  9 Oct, 2008 510 Mathematics
• Imaginary Numbers
  
  23 Sep, 2010 510 Mathematics
• Logic
  
  21 Oct, 2010 160 Philosophical logic
• Infinity
  
  23 Oct, 2003 510 Mathematics
• Zero
  
  13 May, 2004 510 Mathematics
• Calculus
  
  24 Sep, 2009 510 Mathematics
• Renaissance Maths
  
  2 Jun, 2005 510 Mathematics
• Probability
  
  29 May, 2008 510 Mathematics
• Symmetry
  
  19 Apr, 2007 510 Mathematics
• Pythagoras
  
  10 Dec, 2009 510 Mathematics
• Bertrand Russell
  
  6 Dec, 2012 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Emmy Noether
  
  24 Jan, 2019 510 Mathematics
• Indian Mathematics
  
  14 Dec, 2006 510 Mathematics
• Science’s Revelations
  
  29 Oct, 1998 500 Science
• The Poincaré Conjecture
  
  2 Nov, 2006 510 Mathematics

---

Programme ID: p0054625

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0054625

Auto-category: 510 (Mathematics)