The Function Room

The last episode - and a great way to go out. By taking the ultimate trip on the Z-axis and exploring the sea. We fuss so much about exploring outer space and going to Mars when a whole other planet exists just beyond the beach. Olive Heffernan has been researching the ocean for most of her life. She has written a brilliant book - the high seas about the wonder of life there, and what threatens it. Because guess what, humans are Never Not At It. And that's it then for The Function Room for the time being. I'll be back. I just need some help! In the meantime, A Few Scoops, the podcast I do with Aoife Moore is 6 episodes in and going strong. (after only 5 weeks, It would have taken me 5 weeks to write the intro to one function room episode before :). Thanks to all of you for listening and the lovely messages.

This week I do some basic drills, some shuttling runs on the massive world of statistics in sport. Former accountant Paul McDonald has many hats, but he is now a sports stat specialist, company founder and originator of the expected transfer values algorithm, trying to bring some sense back to crazy world and numbers of football transfers fees.He talks me through xG – the expected goals phenomenon that you may have heard thown around, expected Threat and expected Transfer Value.Along the way we discuss players as different as Juan Riquelme and Denis Irwin and whether stats will kill football.

This week in the function room, the hole shebang. A bit about Black Holes with Dr John Regan. Royal Society - SFI University Research Fellow in the Department of Theoretical Physics. we caefully scrape the surface of the topic of black holes without hopefully getting sucked in and destroyed by the weight of the topic. John tells me how he got into black holes why he can't really get out, how Einstein nearly got it wrong and then got it right with a little help from his friends, what the LIGO saw, what it's like as a black hole expert to look at the first photo and is there a black hole in the room with us right now? There's the usual whiteboard nosing and of course I ask about time travel.

Matt Kenzie is one of the Science advisors on the hit Netflix show Three Body Problem.The show and the book is about what happens when aliens want to say hi. Aliens called the San Ti, from a planet in a system of three Suns orbiting each other. They are a three body problem and chaos ensues for the San-Ti.3BP is made by Weiss and Benioff, so we talk about Game of Thrones naturally, the three body problem, nano-slicing, quantum tunnelling and just how close to life the life of the phd student is the image of being young, hot and ready to save the world.Warning contains spoilers about the series if you've started it. If you haven't they mightn't mean much to you unless you've seen the show. So I don't know whether it's a spoiler or not but look just be careful. Also contains references to elephants, dimensions and boring a hole in your head with a proton beam.

Another episode title Im jealous of becuase I didn't pick it, it's the work of Keith Houston a writer and software engineer who has made a habit of writing about things that are there in plain sight. He has written about the history of punctuation, a book about the book and last year a book about the history of the pocket calculator. There's lots of interesting nuggets in this episode including how an ant counts, who counts with their genitals, the unlikely role a Tea company played in making calculators, what happens when there's an actual bug in your computer, and when it comes to calculators, what does Keith think is the fairest of them all.

This week my guest is Hannah Daly, Professor of Sustainable Energy at University College Cork. It's the third of a trilogy about energy - a sort of trilogy there was another episode in between (a sort of Rogue One of maths/energy episodes)While the other two talk about where we get energy -magical molecules- or store them -stone batteries- this one focuses on working out how much we'll need using mathematical models.

A look at some of the stories behind the massive sums of an energy revolution. My guest is David Volts, energy journalist and writer of the Volts newsletter and host of the volts podcast. After Catherine Sheridan's H2 Oh! last week, this is the second of what looks to be an inadvertent energy trilogy. (Or enilogy or trinergy. No doubt that's been trademarked already)David Roberts has been writing and talking for years about the challenges but also the incredibly cool stuff happening in the biggest equation the world has ever seen: The terrajoules of energy that the planet uses every year: how to make it from electrons moving around instead of just burning stuff in the ground. we talk about carbon fibre electric wires, magic cement, stone batteries, black mass and why changing the energy system of an entire planet sounds like a crazy idea but it just might work

Function Room 39 There's Been a Breakthrough with TJ Hegarty. TJ Hegarty is the founder of Breakthrough Maths an online maths tutoring company based in Ireland. We talk about small farmers, not letting your father down, wanting to sell butter giving up in the Far East, changing your mind and deciding to give up your job and not sell butter in the Far East, semantic memory, off the grid tutors and where he wants his next breakthrough to be. Warning: This episode contains strong elements of Corkness

This week we look at the maths of conspiracy theories with physicist, cancer researcher, science writer author of the Award-winning The Irrational Ape why flawed logic puts us all at risk. how to tell if one most likely isn't true, a scary thing called Availability Heuristic, why it's not sugar is making those children hyper at the party, what you think when you first hear the name "Freddy Starr"

The mysterious world of the Riemann Hypothesis. This is about an unsolved problem relating to prime numbers.Bernhard Riemann was a German mathematician who lived in the 19th century and along with a lot of work on geometry also looked at prime numbers.If you're finding this hard to grasp don't worry. Me too. And this episode is not just about this, it's about the nature of things that are unsolved and why the search for solutions itself is important. My guest is Dr Alex Kontorovich professor of Mathematics at Rutgers university in New Jersey, He takes me on a tour of 18th and 19th century geniuses who couldn't stop thinking about prime numbers. There will be bits where you'd really want to visualise what's going on. For that, check out the link belowYou'll hear me butt in -in the edit- with some simple explanations of things I didn't understand at the time. I didn't interrupt at the time because I didn't know what queesiotn to ask and wanted to appear smarter than i was. You know, a tale as old as time. How I Learned to Love and Fear the Riemann Hypothesis | Quanta Magazine

Climate Worrier - the maths of Climate Change. I talk to mathematiciand a man wading kneed deep in the climate models, Chris Budd. Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, He takes me painstakingly -but not painfully- through the key Big Numbers that you should know about when it comes to climate change. We recorded this a couple of years ago during Maths Week 2023 and guess what, it's still an issue! WHo knew?(Apologies for sound quality on this, I have a slight Long Wave Radio sound about me, just it was a youtube interview and I think the internet had covid when we recorded.)

this week in the function room, It's in our Nature - the fascinating world of biomimicryMy guest is Kathyrn Parkes, a technologist with a career spanning nearly 3 decades in designing products and an expert in User Experience. She tells me about what we can learn from nature, the stigmergy of termites, why ants don't have a boss, the benefits of hippo sweat, but also some unusual stuff too.

The maths of symmetry.Hi it’s me Colm O’Regan. The function room is back after a little summer break and my guest is Pauline Mellon, professor of mathematics at UCDShe wants to talk about symmetry and I’m glad she did. She brings me on a tour of maths, religion, biology, art, chemistry, AI and naturally of course town planning.