TRANSCRIPTS It’s Flashcards Friday, and I’m your host, Gabrielle Birchak. Today’s flashcard is a simple idea with sharp teeth: a resource can exist and still be unreachable. So instead of only asking, “Does help exist?”, I want to ask a better question: Can people reach help through the real-world gates of access? Here’s the model. Six Gates of Access. If
The “Witch of Agnesi” is one of the most misleading labels in the history of mathematics.
In 1993, science historian Margaret Rossiter introduced the term the Matilda Effect. Writing in the journal Social Studies of Science, Rossiter described a recurring pattern
In today’s episode, I give a historical account of the life of Haiti’s first female physician, Dr. Yvonne Sylvain, who fought for maternal care, cancer screening, and modern medical practice in the twentieth century.
Podcast transcripts Welcome to Math! Science! History! I’m Gabrielle Birchak, your host. For Women’s History Month, I wanted to feature one brilliant thing, one clean win, and one woman whose work still quietly runs the world, even if most of us do not realize it. Today’s “one brilliant thing” was a sorting system. A classification scheme. A way to take the universe,
Science fiction is not valuable because it predicts the future. It is valuable because it trains the mind. It gives us a way to practice thinking about systems before we build them, and to practice caring about consequences before consequences have real names.
If you have ever felt your stomach drop when you’ve lost a file on your computer, then you already understand the first lesson of history. History is not only made by people. History is also made by what survives.
Today on Math! Science! History! I follow ten Black women inventors. Some left thick paper trails, stamped with patent numbers and filing dates.
It’s Flashcards Friday! This podcast is a follow-up to Tuesday’s episode about Benjamin Banneker. This brilliant individual was predominantly self-taught. I found his story very inspiring because he was self-educated. In other words, he learned everything he knew about astronomy and surveying without being in a classroom. And today, when people say they are self-taught, that means so more than
The holidays have ended, the decorations have come down, and many people have stepped outside to find that the ground has been quietly transformed into a dense, slippery physics problem.