Michael Wrote Some Math Poetry

13:08Michael Stevens:The tools, the machetes you're using to chop through what feels like a dense jungle. We invented those. Yeah. The symbols, the theorems, the axioms, and yet they suddenly just become the frame through which you look and go, oh, shoot, it's it's wonderfully clear and manicured and was just waiting for these tools to fit into it. Yeah.

13:30Hannah Fry:Right. We'll do more on that if you want us to. I mean, look, me and Michael can basically, we could do an entire podcast series on like our love of deep philosophy and the philosophy of mathematics. So, you know, maybe you should tell us whether that's something that you want. But I've got another question in this one for you, Michael. This is from Thomas, who asked, how difficult was it for the discoverers of germs to convince the world that something they couldn't see was harming us?

13:54Michael Stevens:Hmm. Yeah, it was really difficult. I think a lot about the and this might be what the question asker is getting at a phenomenon in human psychology known as the Simmelweis reflex. Have you heard about this? No. So, so yeah, I mean, germ theory, first of all, germ theory is the idea that illnesses and disease are caused by real things. So not ghosts or spirits or curses, but real mechanical things, biological things that are just too small to see. OK, so if you can't see them, how do you know they're there? How do you know that an illness is caused by like a little organism and not just by bad air or your own sins?

14:42Michael Stevens:Right. Like it's hard to prove one way or the other. So one of the most famous stories of germ theory slowly being accepted was that 20 years before germ theory became a serious topic of discussion back in 1847. There was a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Simmelweis, and he worked at this hospital where autopsies were done on every person who died in the hospital. And the doctors did this without, you know, gloves, without proper antiseptic technologies because they didn't know. But it wasn't great to go to a hospital back then. You often left with brand new infections. you you would get better and then you'd get worse.

15:27Michael Stevens:And his theory was that the problems they saw that seemed to only appear at the hospital were truly iatrogenic. That means an ill effect, something bad, a disease caused by medical activity. So caused by the doctors themselves, by the nurses themselves.

15:48Hannah Fry:Because wasn't that there was like a maternity ward there, wasn't there? Yes.

15:52Michael Stevens:There was a maternity ward there and there was this disease known as child bed fever. And he said, maybe we shouldn't be doing gynecological exams with the same hands we've just performed autopsies with. And he didn't know that there was a virus or a bacteria, any kind of microbe on the hand. He thought maybe it was just the smell because he said, you know, after you do an autopsy, your hands smell. And if you wash all the debris off with soap and water, they still smell, right? So it must be this bad smell. And he thought that the smell was made of what he called cadaverous particles. But he found that if he used alcohol, the smell went away.

16:37Michael Stevens:So he instructed everyone at his hospital to wash their hands in really strong, high proof alcohol and the fatality rate of childbed fever improved by tenfold at only his hospital because of this procedure. So, of course, he wrote about it. He told doctors all over the world. This is back in 1847.

16:56Hannah Fry:That late. Oh, my goodness. Because there's the counter to that is that, you know, in other hospitals, people were I mean, it seems wild that you would like cut up a dead body and then immediately go and deliver a baby without washing your hands in between. Seems insane.

17:12Michael Stevens:Well, the prevailing theory at the time was that childbed fever was caused by miasma, bad air. And so it had nothing to do with the hands of the doctor. And I mean, it was so ingrained as a way of thinking that it couldn't be the doctor themselves. It must be something else. It can't be me. That when Semmelweis spread the results of fatality rates for fever in his hospital and how much of an improvement they found. No one accepted it. The experts felt personally insulted and they just could not change their paradigm. So Semmelweis's story has been studied profusely when it comes to understanding how people come to rational conclusions, because we don't, right?

18:01Michael Stevens:We have so many biases, confirmation bias and personal biases and authority bias. All the most famous doctors disagreed with Semmelweis. And they always had. So who's this guy? I think he is coming in and saying, well, actually, I think that it might be some like particles that soap and water aren't getting off our hands. And they said, you know, like, why would we believe you? For some reason, we have these barriers to accepting new information, even in light of convincing evidence. And so, again, it took 20 years for people to say, OK, let's start entertaining the idea of these things. We'll call them germs now.

18:39Michael Stevens:And let's do some experiments and take it seriously. So it was a slow process. And we still see that today with accepting new ideas.

18:47Hannah Fry:Like what? Like what kind of ideas? I realize I'm putting you on the spot here, but like, are there some ideas that scientists have been like, guys, seriously, this is a really big problem. and it's just taking people time to accept. The 1850s, I mean, it wasn't that long ago, but it sort of feels like this is a lesson that we should have learned by now, have we? Or does this still happen?

19:09Michael Stevens:Well, yeah, I mean, really recently, how COVID-19 was transmitted, how the virus that caused it was transmitted took a long time for a consensus to be reached, despite all the evidence. Believe it or not, it wasn't until December of 2021 that the World Health Organization finally recognized airborne transmission of the virus.

19:33Hannah Fry:So two years after the first sort of confirmed.

19:37Michael Stevens:Yeah, because for so long, the prevailing theory was droplet transmission. That's how they always kind of saw it. They thought, surely it can't waft through the air as well. And it just takes a long time to move something as big as modern science.

19:54Hannah Fry:You know, in the Centre of Mathematical Sciences, where I work at Cambridge, right, so you've got all of these incredible mathematical scientists, people who study how air flows and stuff. They've got like this one big lecture theatre there. And when the first reports were coming through that it was transmitted by the air, airborne disease, some of the fluid dynamicists, they took the dimensions of this room, of this lecture room, and decided to like run this mathematical model of the airflow of like what happens when you're standing at the front and basically realized that the exact design of this lecture theatre was that anyone who was standing at the front was like in direct line of fire that all of the people's air was like perfectly perfectly funneled directly to them so they um they then redesigned it and You know, these like black flags that are up to sort of like disrupt the airflow in there still.

20:51Hannah Fry:Oh, wow. Yeah. They only want the knowledge to be contagious. Exactly. Exactly. And also, if there is any contagion, I think they want it to go in the opposite direction from the professor to the audience rather than vice versa.

21:03Michael Stevens:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Speaking of the dynamics of things moving like liquids, Vin asks, in fluid dynamics, the energy flows from large structures to smaller structures. In that case, why do hurricanes exist? If larger eddies break down into smaller eddies, then no large eddies should ever form, right?

21:25Hannah Fry:What a transition that was, Michael, from germs to floating up. Don't thank me. Thank Ben. Yes, I mean, that's true, right? If you think about stirring a coffee, you know, mixing milk into your coffee, you put in your spoon and you're sort of injecting energy at the larger scale. and then the little eddies, the little vortices that come off go smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. And that's, it's known as the forward energy cascade, basically. It's sort of that friction is kind of turning into heat. And in hurricanes, it's the opposite way around, that it's like the rich get richer, the, you know, sort of a winner takes all, the kind of the little vortices that you get end up cannibalizing each other and growing and growing and growing until you get this like giant hurricane.

22:11Hannah Fry:And the reason for that difference, the reason why it's the opposite way around is it's basically because of depth. So in your cup of tea or your cup of coffee, it's like a three-dimensional fluid. But this may come as a bit of a surprise. But in the Earth's atmosphere, the Earth's atmosphere is so thin in comparison to the size of the Earth and in particular the spin of the Earth, the Coriolis effect, that it basically acts like a two-dimensional fluid, right? Which sounds like the most crazy idea. But that is basically how we know that it works, is that if you just get rid of that third dimension and you just say, okay, it's a sheet of fluid that is moving around, then suddenly everything works.

22:58Hannah Fry:You can predict the path of hurricanes and so on.

23:00Michael Stevens:Oh, wow. I've heard that if the Earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere would be thinner than the skin of an apple.

23:07Hannah Fry:Right. Yeah.

23:08Michael Stevens:It's basically not there.

23:09Hannah Fry:It's basically not there. Exactly right. I should tell you the equation that you need when you're trying to work out all of the stuff, this sort of two-dimensional flow of fluids on the surface of the Earth. It's got my favourite equation name ever. You know when you watch sitcoms with scientists in it and they try and make the scientists sound clever by using really complicated words? This is my fake-sounding, overly complicated favourite equation, which is the quasi-geostrophic potential vorticity equation.

23:39Michael Stevens:Ooh.

23:40Hannah Fry:You sound like you're smart when you're saying that. Yes, you do. But basically it just means, you know, it's 2D on the earth.

23:46Michael Stevens:One more time.

23:47Hannah Fry:Quasi-geostrophic potential vorticity equation. Quasi-geostratic? Geostrophic, yeah. Geostrophic.

23:55Michael Stevens:Mm-hmm. Vorticity. Potential vorticity. Potential vorticity. Vorticity is a great word. Isn't it? It sounds both scientific and literary. and vorticity the sound and the fury vorticity there you go um i should tell you actually if

24:12Hannah Fry:you want to see the quasi-geostrophic potential vorticity equation uh slash two-dimensional fluids on the surface of a planet in action right and the way that these storms build and build and build and build and build um it's jupiter that you should look to because uh there's no solid ground to stop the wind on Jupiter so it can carry on going, carry on building. Its atmosphere is also very stratified. So it's kind of effectively this 2D wrapping. And the great spot on Jupiter, it is this hurricane that has been like feeding on these smaller storms for, we think, at least 300 years. And it's, I mean, it's the ultimate result of what happens in these situations.

24:55Hannah Fry:Thank goodness for mountains. Otherwise, we'd be in that situation too.

24:57Michael Stevens:Yeah, but Jupiter has no mountains. It has no solid ground. But it would seem that its atmosphere would have depth, though, right? Like the whole thing is just a big gas giant. Or is it stratified, meaning there's just thin layers like an onion that can't interact enough?

25:15Hannah Fry:Exactly right. They're thin layers that don't interact really enough to make a difference. So it's like exactly as you say, it's like an onion wrapped and wrapped and wrapped. Right. Well, that was quite a mathsy first half in the end, wasn't it? Yeah, it sure was. I mean, frankly, I'm happy with it. Let's go into the break and we'll see how mad we get in the second half, shall we?

25:48Michael Stevens:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

25:52Hannah Fry:Radiotherapy is over a century old, but it is still changing. Cancer Research UK helped lay the foundations of radiotherapy in the early 20th century and has driven progress ever since.

26:03Michael Stevens:Radiotherapy remains one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment today. Every year, millions of people worldwide benefit from Cancer Research UK's work to make it more precise.

26:14Hannah Fry:Scientists are still refining how radiotherapy is delivered. And one example is an experimental treatment called flash radiotherapy, which delivers radiation in fractions of a second, up to a thousand times faster than standard radiotherapy.

26:29Michael Stevens:And early studies suggest that speed could make a real difference. Flash radiotherapy may cause up to 50 % less damage to healthy cells.

26:38Hannah Fry:But scientists don't yet know why healthy cells seem to be spared, so Cancer Research UK are working to answer that. Understanding it could be key to reducing side effects in the future.

26:50Michael Stevens:For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science.

27:20Hannah Fry:dosing.

27:21Michael Stevens:EBCLIS, Librikizumab, LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EBCLIS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems.

27:49Michael Stevens:You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EPCLIS. Before starting EPCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.

27:54Hannah Fry:Ask your doctor about EPCLIS and visit ePCLIS.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979.

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28:38Michael Stevens:All right, welcome back. We had a very mathsy first half, as Hannah said, and we're going to continue to stay mathsy, but we're going to inject a little bit of rhyme, a little bit of art, a little bit of literature. What I've brought today, Hannah, is some mathematical poetry.

28:56Hannah Fry:Oh, delightful.

28:58Michael Stevens:And as I was looking through my math poetry books and my own brain, everything I found was a limerick. So very specifically, these are mathematical limericks. I wanted to share some that you've probably heard before. And then I wanted to show some that I've written just for today's episode.

29:16Hannah Fry:What a treat. OK, go on then. By the way, the chance of me having had these before is almost zero because I'm racking my brains and cannot think of a single one that I've ever encountered before. So I think this is going to be a treat.

29:28Michael Stevens:Well, let's see if you've heard this one. This one comes from the most famous palidromist ever, Lee Mercer. All right. You might know Lee Mercer from his most famous work, A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama.

29:43Hannah Fry:No, but the fact that you said that he was a palindrome is making me work out backwards in my head.

29:47Michael Stevens:It's a palindrome. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. So the history of the Panama Canal being built can be a palindrome. Same backwards as forwards. But Lee Mercer also wrote this cute little limerick. And a limerick is a kind of poem that has a very specific kind of rhythm. The most famous limerick is, of course, there once was a man from Nantucket and so on and so on. A lot of them end in a way that is not appropriate for this podcast, but there are clean versions of this Nantucket man.

30:16Hannah Fry:I don't know the Nantucket one, but I can I can imagine what rhymes at the end.

30:20Michael Stevens:Yeah. So if you look it up, you'll mainly find like clean versions that are pretty clever. But then if you want to find the dirty ones, you'll read them and you'll go, oh, my gosh, that is a lot dirtier than I expected. So here's what I want to share from Lee Mercer that is a mathematical limerick, not a palindrome. It begins with this equation, okay? Everyone's looking at this. Looks like a normal old equation. And yet when we read it, we find the meter of a limerick. A dozen, a gross, and a score, plus three times the square root of four, divided by seven, plus five times 11, is nine squared and not a bit more.

30:58Hannah Fry:Hang on, let me just work it out. It actually holds. It holds. It holds. Oh, that's nice.

31:05Michael Stevens:It's really nice.

31:06Hannah Fry:Gosh, can you imagine how long it took him to come up with that?

31:09Michael Stevens:I know. But now let me read you this one, which is from an unknown author. It's an anonymous limerick. I think that in a video, I once credited it to a guy named Matthew on Stack Exchange, but I have since learned that he was just sharing it. He did not write it. So we had Lee Mercer's equation. Now look at this equation. the integral z squared dz from one to the cube root of three times the cosine of three pi over nine equals log of the cube root of e does it hold hang on it holds it's true it only works

31:44Hannah Fry:in american accent though because if you said dz then three you sort of it falls it falls apart

31:50Michael Stevens:okay but here let me tell you this it doesn't have to be zed it could be um t let me do a version for the rest of the world. The integral t squared dt from one to the cube root of three times the cosine of three pi over nine equals log of the cube root of e. That is absolutely gorgeous. Isn't it gorgeous? I'm so genuinely impressed.

32:18Hannah Fry:To get it to work so that it actually works as an equation, I cannot even imagine how much time that takes.

32:26Michael Stevens:I know, because normally when you write a limerick, you can go, ooh, okay, the meter or the rhyme isn't really working. Let me find a synonym. But in math, you can't always do that. It needs to also work mathematically. Now, it helps that things like DZ or DT3 and E all rhyme. Cosine and nine, that's pretty nice.

32:45Hannah Fry:Yeah, but you need the cosine and nine to be in the E bit.

32:49Michael Stevens:I know. I know.

32:51Hannah Fry:The score and not a bit more. I mean, I'll be honest with you. He might be good at palindrops. That is a tiny bit cheating.

32:56Michael Stevens:It's a tiny bit cheating. Yeah, I will admit that too. It's nine squared and not a bit more. It's like, ah, that really, it helped you. It could equal anything. And you could just put on the and not a bit more and finish the rhyme and the meter. Okay, so here's one that's not about an equation. And this one is also from an unknown author. This is an anonymous limerick. A mathematician confided a Mobius strip is one-sided. You'll get quite a laugh if you cut one in half, for it stays in one piece when divided. That is delightfully nerdy. That's really delightfully nerdy. It's very fun.

33:35Hannah Fry:Also true. If anyone wants to cut a Moby strip in half and have that joy for yourself, then off you go.

33:42Michael Stevens:Yeah, take a strip of paper, twist one end over, tape them together, cut it in half. It won't be cut into halves. It will just be one bigger loop. Okay, well, here's one. This is from Dave Morris from an issue of wordways. This one is if you're talking about cheating, this one, it's almost kind of like funny in the way that it works. Cool. Here it is. A one and a one and a one and a one and a one and a one and a one and a one and a one and a one equal 10. That's how adding is done.

34:14Hannah Fry:Yeah, that's my kind of guy. Still pretty clever. Still pretty good. That is still pretty good.

34:19Michael Stevens:I feel like that's the kind of limerick where once you come up with and a one and a one has the right rhythm, then everything else falls together. Wait, did you say that you wrote some yourself? Yes, I did. I did. So, okay, here's a geometrical one. Let's do some geometry. Wait, wait, wait.

34:36Hannah Fry:Are any of them as impressive as that integral one?

34:40Michael Stevens:No, none of them.

34:41Hannah Fry:They are, though, because you wrote them.

34:43Michael Stevens:Thank you, Hannah. Okay, so this one's about shapes. The rhombus was keenly aware that his side lengths were famously fair. But when he brought in his neck, all his angles were wrecked. And then the poor guy was a square. And this plays on the pun that wrecked, R-E-C-T, means right, a right angle, a rectangle. You nerd. Rectangular square.

35:10Hannah Fry:That's amazing. Do you know what? I think I actually, it's got, you know, there's sort of an anthropomorphization to that. There's like, you know, it's cute sort of imagining it. In many ways, I prefer that to the other extremely clever ones.

35:24Michael Stevens:It's got a character in it. And, you know, I really debated whether I should gender the rhombus. Are his side lengths or its side lengths? Was the poor guy now a square or was the poor thing now a square? I guess you can make your own decision.

35:38Hannah Fry:I like that. I like the guy.

35:40Michael Stevens:you like yeah i think it's i think it's the kind of thing a guy would do bring in his neck and then oh my angles are all wrecked and now since my side lengths were the same on a square um and it's a great way to kind of teach i don't know if anyone's going to use it to remember the definition of a rhombus but you know a rhombus is any quadrilateral whose sides are all the same length yeah which means a square is a kind of rhombus but a square is a rhombus with all right angles wrecked angles so that's just a little one for the geometry nerds talking about using poems to remember stuff

36:15Hannah Fry:and we were talking about hurricanes earlier there was a guy called lewis fry richardson no relation um who was integral in lots of the um the modeling of hurricanes and weather systems and he had a little rhyme which was to remember how uh it all worked basically i mean quite literally talking about hurricanes. He had big worlds have little worlds that feed on their velocity and little worlds have lesser worlds and so on to viscosity.

36:44Michael Stevens:Isn't that cute? That's really cute.

36:47Hannah Fry:Yeah. I mean, your rhombus is on is better, but.

36:50Michael Stevens:No, no, there's no such thing as a better or worse poem. You know, maybe there's a more or less successful communication of feeling. But I do feel for this rhombus. It should have been happy with what it was.

37:05Hannah Fry:It wanted more respect.

37:08Michael Stevens:And so not knowing what to expect, there's different versions of it that I wrote, but I thought that's, that's the one that's the first version of the rhombus limerick I wrote simply had his angles become wrecked. And I'm like, ah, but unfortunately a rhombus with rectangles is exactly a square. It needed to be about a parallelogram. Yeah. It squares up its angles and becomes a rectangle, but parallelogram does not have the right meter to be in a limerick. Limericks have to have dactyls, which means a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed. Oh, yes. For example, there once was a man from Nantucket.

37:49Okay.

37:50Michael Stevens:But parallelogram, it doesn't have that little triplet.

37:55Hannah Fry:Could you split it though? Could you go

38:00Hannah Fry:parallelogram.

38:00Michael Stevens:Yes, you could parallelogram.

38:04Hannah Fry:Yeah.

38:04Michael Stevens:But then it doesn't scan and people go, oh, you're not very good. So I wanted to share these with you. These are more of like a work in progress. I'm really into division by zero, division involving zero. And so I've tried to write some limericks describing the three ways zero can be involved in division. And this first way is when you take some number that's not zero and you divide it by zero, right? This is like, oh my gosh, it's going to create a black hole and it's going to end the universe. And this is how I feel about it. Division by zero earns prison unless we agree with precision that math doesn't break if there's nothing you take because dividing by none ain't division.

38:55Michael Stevens:The idea here is that, look, if division is just is repeated subtraction and I ask, well, if you take away nothing from, say, five, when will I have nothing left? It's like, well, you're not dividing because you're not subtracting if you're not taking anything away each time. Like it's not a paradox or a weird, you know, singularity inciting event. It's just not division. No prison for you.

39:22Hannah Fry:That's essentially where we're at.

39:24Michael Stevens:Now let's talk about when zero is the dividend. Okay, zero divided by five, zero divided by n. Well, here's the limerick. When zero is the number on top, you don't need a logical cop. If you aren't done till the total is none, just scribble down zero and stop.

39:46Hannah Fry:Okay, can I tell you the things I like about this? Right. One, I like that you are going through the different types of the ways that zero is involved and you're doing it logically and it's a progression and it's great. Two, I like how both of those limericks are tied together by the insistence of there being some sort of maths police. Yes. Who are absolutely eager, eager to catch people for these zero division crimes. I'm absolutely loving it. Wait, have you got one more?

40:13Michael Stevens:There's one more because there's the special case where zero is divided by zero. And this is different. So here's that limerick. Repeated subtractions are grind. But when you see zeros combined, any number will do both a lot or a few. So we say the whole thing's undefined.

40:32Hannah Fry:Oh, that's good. I need a judge in there.

40:35Michael Stevens:And for our listeners at home, I think to appreciate it more, I'm just going to tell you that what's going on there is that we're saying zero divided by zero is asking many, you know, there's a lot of ways to parse what it means. But one thing it can mean is how many zeros does it take to have zero? And as it turns out, it could be none or five or 17 or a billion. That many zeros will always be zero. So it can be any number. And that's why zero divided by zero is undefined. Now, a lot of people say that a number divided by zero maybe is like infinite or something. But even an undeniable amount of nothing won't ever equal the dividend.

41:19Michael Stevens:So like the quotient is just it's not division. And then finally, when you're when you're dividing zero by another number, you're asking like zero divided by seven. How many sevens will give me zero? It's just none. Easy.

41:32Hannah Fry:That whole thing about the number being undefined, zero divided by zero. I mean, I also think we should do a whole episode on zero. At this stage, Michael and I really are just doing a whole podcast series on on the philosophy of mathematics. but zero divided by zero it's uh sometimes there is actually an answer sometimes sometimes it's undefined sometimes it's infinity sometimes it's zero sometimes it has a finite answer

41:57Michael Stevens:um okay so yes we're going to do an episode on this you're going to teach me i'll write some more lyrics and then finally the division involving zero limerick sonnet or you know a book of poetry will be complete yeah there's so much to say about zero for example my daughter likes me to count by twos when she's going to bed. And I always start at zero and she's like, is zero even?

42:20Hannah Fry:And I'm like, well, it is for a few reasons.

42:23Michael Stevens:It just helps the pattern work, but also like an even number is just two times some integer and two times zero is zero. So zero is even. And she still doesn't really believe it. So we'll set her right.

42:35Hannah Fry:Meanwhile, my two daughters asked their dad the other day, is zero a number? And he gave them an answer. But then when we were all together, he said, oh, you should really ask your mum that question because she'll have something much more interesting to say. And they both declared that they deliberately didn't ask that question in front of me because I would give a boring answer. In fact, because of my job, right, I know quite a lot of like the most amazing science people in the world, right? You, Michael being one of them, Brian Cox being another, I've met David Attenborough, like all of these people.

43:09And I've tried over and over again to introduce my daughters to them.

43:13Hannah Fry:And every time I'm like, come on, let's watch one of these programs. It'll be amazing. And every single time they say, mommy, why are your friends so boring? So, you know, hopefully you, dear listeners, will find it slightly more interesting than my children.

43:27Michael Stevens:I hope so. I mean, my daughter's young enough. She hasn't quite like become a rebel. so I can still tell her, yeah, look, we're going to count by twos tonight. And she asks for that, but that's because she doesn't know that there's anything else to talk about.

43:44Michael Stevens:All right. I've got, I've got two more limericks I want to share, and these are about us. Okay. So they're not actually mathematical or scientific really. All right. Let's start with this one. I'm not quite happy with this one, but here it is a circle of chips was prepared but filling it nobody dared till she pointed out with no shadow of doubt that the areas just fry are squared

44:12i love it i love it yeah that's great also thank you for using chips as well rather than fries

44:18Michael Stevens:i know right i felt like the kind of like cross-atlantic the transatlantic combo here deserves fry and chip. So they're both in there. It also meant that I didn't have to repeat the word fry over and over again.

44:31Hannah Fry:So that was absolutely brilliant. I'm going to have that put on my wall. Go on. I want to hear you on Michael. Go for you on.

44:37Michael Stevens:Okay. Well, this was, this is actually about both of us. Deep thinkings, a kind of defiance. And so was their nerdy alliance. Mike was the guy and the girl was named fry and the rest as they say is well, science.

44:56Hannah Fry:yeah they are so good they are so good we have found a new skill we have found a new skill from michael stevens um if you have any limericks that you'd like to share with us um any others i think michael you need your own one i'm gonna between now and the next episode i'm gonna i'm gonna furiously yeah i don't think i've ever written one in my entire life so um that we're gonna really test your theory on whether it's possible for there to be a good or bad poem and once once I come back to you with that. But I think that concludes our episode for the day. If you have anything you'd like to send us in, limericks or otherwise, send them to us, the rest is science at goalhanger.com.

45:34Michael Stevens:Yes, and please join our newsletter at the rest is dot com slash science.

45:39Hannah Fry:We'll be back next Thursday with another episode of Field Notes and on Tuesday with our normal episode. See you then. See ya.

45:52Thank you.