PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS Game theory is everywhere, from the moves you make in chess to the way countries negotiate treaties, from the strategies in our favorite video game to the decisions we make every day. But how did this field come to be? Who were the brilliant minds behind it, and what mathematical breakthroughs made it possible? Welcome to Math! Science!
It’s Flashcards Friday at Math! Science! History! I’m Gabrielle Birchak, your host. On Tuesday, we talked about the history of taxes, from ancient levies to modern systems, and how taxes have shaped governments, revolutions, and everyday life. Today, we’re staying with that theme, but on a more relatable level. This Flashcards Friday is about something many of us are feeling right
For most of history, governments taxed things you owned or traded: land, livestock, goods moving across a border, and windows in your house. The idea of taxing what you earn, your income, as a percentage, is
Welcome to Monday Momentum! I’m Gabrielle Birchak. I love physics, and one of the things that fascinates me is momentum, how things actually move forward, whether it’s a flywheel, a steam engine, or a chain of gears. Nothing gets going without it. Life works the same way: ideas, skills, and opportunities don’t move forward unless momentum is created, pushed, pulled,
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.
Today’s three flashcards look at three scientists whose work fundamentally changed their fields. They worked in different disciplines, lived in different eras, and faced different obstacles. What connects them is not symbolism or representation. What connects them is that their differences expanded what science was able to see and solve. Scientific progress rarely arrives because a community agrees. It arrives because
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,