Is Calculus God's Language? Prof Steven Strogatz

Bits of intellectual conversations with the best minds in the world.
Researchers in various fields ranging from A.I to religion, economics to morality and everything in between.
All conversations were held on the podcast of Dr. Roi Yozevitch.

0:00 Intro
1:33 Calculus's beauty and importance
15:08 Calculus vs. Geometry
19:30 What stopped Archimedes from inventing Calc
30:43 The limitless limit
37:56 Intuition and God
48:59 The heart of calculus
51:22 Pop-science
54:32 Incorporating history into Calc 101
1:02:42 Feynman ideas & books
1:06:00 Integrals
1:08:18 Is my calculator Intelligent?
1:12:10 Satisfaction is underrated; Beauty is overrated.
1:13:58 Productivity and book writing tips
1:27:50 Social Media and Shabbat
1:36:34 Strogatz's most favorite midrash
1:41:18 Reli's second coming; On asking hard question

[ernestb.]

Great video. Nice to hear from Steven his thoughts. One thing about the closing argument, regarding not asking the questions, and the conclusion that God wanted that proportionality of the electric field is 1/r^2 and things like that. I would not use that argument for anything in science because we can or use it to "explain" everything in science or nothing. I think we should not use that argument when we don't know the "why" part. So we know it is proportional but we don't know why. I would always say "we don't know why (yet)", and maybe we will never know why. Maybe this civilization will extinct before we resolve that why. So if you use the argument of God's will, than it is of course everything, including 1+1=2. We have achieved great knowledge during our evolution and development. Some civilizations have achieved also some great knowledge long long time ago, and most of that knowledge is unfortunately gone. Probably some great insights, different of ours. But anyway, nice to listen to you guys. 👍 As an electronic engineer I have a drive to learn some math at the age of 51 and after some 20+ years of electronics experience. The math I had on college, that I have passed the exams, but the math I never really have learned. I kept the books from the college, and after 20 years I am looking at those, and no wander I have never learned it. the text is sooo dry. The teacher was probably dry too. We need more teachers like Steven. It makes a big difference. I had a great teacher physics (electrostatics and magnetism) at the collage though. He would use a plastic chair, put it on the desk, slam on it to lets us see and understand Damped sine wave. He was actually looking for a ruler, but could't find, and took a chair 🙂 Just great.

[alfredbudy]

Brilliant book. Love this topic perhaps the most unbiased topic humans have left. Though I believe in ethnomathematics and ethnoscience

[yanntal]

Set theorists are true gods in my opinion!
People who can take uncountably large sets, still somehow give them a proper ordering and even performing induction (in fact transfinite induction) on them, somehow going over them one by one and finishing the process!