Picking Teams With the Math of Imbalance
About this episode
This episode discusses combinatorial discrepancy theory and its application in creating balanced teams, featuring insights from Max Levy.
Combinatorial discrepancy theory is a branch of mathematics concerned with balance. If you’re making two teams — sports, trivia, you name it — how can you make sure that they’re perfectly balanced and fair, skill-wise? You start with vectors. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with award-winning science journalist and regular contributor Max Levy on an “absurd,” “holy grail” conjecture, and the major breakthrough made in fall 2025 by two theoretical computer scientists. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine. Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel and Senior Editor Hannah Waters speak with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.
People in this episode
Host: Samir Patel
Guest: Max Levy
Topics covered
- combinatorial discrepancy theory
- team balance
- mathematics
- theoretical computer science
- skill assessment
- science journalism
Keywords
- combinatorial discrepancy
- team balance
- mathematics
- theoretical computer science
- skill assessment
- Quanta Magazine
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Quanta Magazine
More episodes of The Quanta Podcast
- Audio Edition: ‘Reverse Mathematics’ Illuminates Why Hard Problems Are Hard
- Does Computer Science Need Computers?
- How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World
- Audio Edition: A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life
- What Makes a Fluid a Fluid?
- Audio Edition: New Proofs Probe Soap-Film Singularities
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Quanta Podcast podcast page.