Allen Farrington
About this episode
The episode features a discussion with Allen Farrington on the intersection of mathematics, education, and Bitcoin.
In this first-ever guest episode of Magic Internet Math, Rob Hamilton and I (Brian Hirschfield) welcome author and thinker Allen Farrington for an unfiltered tour through math as a liberal art, why rigor matters more than vibes, and how curiosity—not applications—often drives real progress. We trade stories about learning (and unlearning) math, from the lore of the irrationality of √2 and CP Snow’s Two Cultures, to Paul Lockhart’s Mathematician’s Lament, Joel David Hamkins’ philosophy of mathematics, and the perennial tug-of-war between pure and applied work. We also dig into education: what good teaching feels like, why boredom or excessive difficulty turn students off, and how letting people “cook” can build conviction and genuine understanding. From elliptic curves to hash functions, we connect math to Bitcoin without turning into “I f’ing love science” cosplay. Allen throws down a challenge on explaining why hash functions have the properties we rely on (beyond just how they’re built or what they do), teeing up our next series. Along the way we touch cryptography culture, modular arithmetic, the modularity theorem vs. Fermat’s Last Theorem credit, and how AI tools help—and…
People in this episode
Hosts: Brian Hirschfield, Rob Hamilton
Guest: Allen Farrington
Topics covered
- math as a liberal art
- education
- curiosity in learning
- pure vs applied mathematics
- cryptography
- Bitcoin
- AI in mathematics
Keywords
- math
- education
- Bitcoin
- curiosity
- cryptography
- AI
- pure mathematics
- applied mathematics
- learning
- teaching
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Bitcoin
Books & works: Mathematician’s Lament, Two Cultures, Fermat’s Last Theorem, modularity theorem
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