Science Friday - Looking Back On A Century Of Science, Holiday Math. December 24, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: December 24, 2021

Looking Back On A Century of Science In 1921, the discovery of radium was just over 20 years in the past. And the double helix of DNA was still over thirty years in the future. That year, a publication that came to be the magazine Science News started publication, and is still in operation today. Editors Nancy Shute and Elizabeth Quill join Ira to page through the magazine’s archives, with over 80,000 articles covering a century of science—from the possibilities of atomic energy to discussions of black holes, to projections of the rise of the avocado as a popular fruit. There are mysteries—are spiral nebulae other universes? And there are missteps, like the suggestion that the insecticide DDT should be incorporated into wall paint.   How Can Math Make Your Holidays Merrier? Stumped on how to wrap an oddly shaped gift? Trying to figure out how to create the perfect Secret Santa game? Need to weigh the cost/benefit analysis of giving a present to that distantly-related aunt? Math is here to help make your holidays merrier. Mathematician Hannah Fry joins us to talk about how to view the holidays—and the world—from a mathematical angle. And in The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus, she and co-author Thomas Oléron Evans share their tips on how to have a geometrically superior holiday season. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm I Refledo. Later in the hour, putting some math into your holiday merriment. But first, a favorite conversation from earlier this year about a century of science. What was science like a mere hundred years ago? Let's say 1921. Well, you had the discovery of radium. It was only 20 years in the past. The double helix of DNA was still 30 years in the future. and in 1921, a publication called Science News began operation. I began reading it religiously decades ago. It's still in operation today, and it's seen a lot of science over that 100 years. Joining me now to talk about a century of covering science is the editor-in-chief of science news, Nancy Schutt,

and Elizabeth Quill, Enterprise Editor and Archive Wrangler for the magazine. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Ira. Great to be here. Great being here, Ira. Nice to have you both. Natsy, let me begin with you. Give us the origin of the magazine. Where did it come from? That's a great question, Ira. Way back in the early 1900s, newspaper magnet EW scripts, after he made many pots of money in the publishing industry, became friends with a zoologist, Edward Ritter at the University of California. And these two men realized they shared a deep interest in science's potential for making the world a better place. And they also thought that a healthy democracy dependent on public understanding of science. Scripps actually thought

that newspapers were doing a pretty crummy job covering science. They were running a lot of articles about fake cures, dangerous patent medicines, conspiracy theories. So he and Ritter decided that they were going to join forces and launch a syndication service that would provide factual evidence-based articles to the nation's newspaper. And that was the precursor of science news. It started on April 2nd, 1921. So it wasn't like an independent journal that would get mailed to people. It was a service for newspapers. Right. They actually mailed out articles that newspapers could reprint. And it became really popular. Actually, I looked back and there was one in April 21, which is the founding month where the Emporia, Kansas Daily Gazette published one of the Wire Service stories about

the discovery of the oldest and staleest bread in America, which was actually a 500-year-old archaeological finding in the Quiflowings at Mesa Verde National Park. But they covered a lot of real bigger news as well, including earthquakes in California. And it quickly grew to the point where just members of the public wanted to get it in the mail. And so it first expanded into something called Science Newsletter, which was a weekly newsletter, and then became a four-color magazine, which is what we still have today, and that's Science News. And I recall reading about the early days, seeming that the newsletter was very closely tied into the structure of official Washington science, right?

Yeah, it's interesting looking back that they were doing things that we wouldn't do today, really. I mean, the early offices were over at the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences. In the 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt asked science service, which was our precursor organization, to research, the number of women working in science and government, but definitely deeply tied into, you know, the Washington, D.C. science community. Now, Beth, I know you've been rambling through the archives of those hundred years, some 80,000. article, is that correct? That's right. More than 80,000 news reports in our archive. Any general impressions or takeaways from that list? Wow. There's so many gems in that reporting. And you can find anything if you're interested in basic discoveries. That's there. The reporting of insulin as a treatment for diabetes is there, all the way up to cloning of Dolly the Sheep.

The first to use of the term to our knowledge, the term black holes in print appears in our archive, there is just so much to investigate for people like me who are really interested in the history of science and for anyone who wants to know how currents of the past connect to current events. In celebration of our centennial, we've launched what we're calling the Century of Science Project. And it looks back at major advancing the sciences across the fields. It builds on those 80,000 news reports. And what's amazing is the articles not only track the greatest discoveries and give context for what scientists thought at the time,

but they also show that some of the biggest questions in science are enduring, how our brains work, what's the nature of the cosmos, how did humans evolve? Those stories are there from the beginning, and they still are sparking our curiosity today. I want to play a few excerpts from some of those early articles. Let me begin with this one. from 1921 on the potential of something called atomic energy.

Nowadays, everyone knows that the peculiar behavior of radium is due to the fact that its atoms disintegrate, setting free the large amount of energy which all atoms are supposed to possess inside themselves. The disintegration of radium is not controllable, but goes on at a constant rate, which man can neither increase nor retard. Ever since the nature of radioactivity has been understood,

it has been a dream of scientists and novelist alike that man would one day learn how to control atomic disintegration, such as that of radium and how to utilize the vast stores of energy inside of atoms, stores so large that the total energy of the world's coal beds is tiny in comparison. And of course, out of that, we got the atomic bomb, which I'm sure you covered also. That's right. And it's so interesting that, you know, we have the discovery of radioactivity, but we have to bring ourselves back because at the time we didn't know about fission. We didn't know about fusion in the sun. And so there's so much context that we have today when we listen to that, that they didn't have then. And it's amazing to see how far we've come.

Yeah, because I was reading one of the articles about that, about surprising news about what is powering the sun. We really don't know what it is. They seem to think back in those early days that it was actually the splitting of the atom or something, but the term fusion was not even a that. That's right. And that article you're referring to, you know, it's so interesting to read because I think it also mentions that the sun is perhaps hundreds of billions of years old. And we now know our universe is about 14 billion years old. So it's, again, so many little pieces that over a century add up to create our knowledge and understanding that we have today. And so many times when you go through these articles and you see what was written and the projections, people get projecting into the future so wrong, so many times.

Yeah, I mean, I think they do. I think they do. Certainly, you know, there are elements where I think there's an article and I, you know, I don't have the details, but that said we would be flying around the world in or across the country in two hours, you know, and it's, you read these things that you're like, well, sort of right. We've definitely seen improvements, but we're not there yet. and that's not the direction things have gone.

I kind of, when I read it, I'm struck by both the power and the limitations of human imagination. You know, in some ways, you're like, wow, if I could really bring myself back, it's amazing that they knew so much and got so much right, but also what was wrong really stands out to you. You know, you speak about what was wrong, and we were just talking about nuclear power. And then, again, what you have on the other side is you have a history of coal. fusion, where everybody bit into that back in the early 90s. I know we even talked about it on Science Friday. And then it just went, you know, so many predictions for it and then just totally

dismantled. And you also have, you also have elements like gravitational waves, where there were early searches for gravitational waves and claims of discovery that then proved to be wrong, but the basics of that is right. And we've now detected gravitational waves today with with the LIGO and Virgo detectors. So it's really amazing how things sort of come and go and then come back in some ways. Nancy, other publications have long histories, too. I'm thinking of Scientific American, Popular Science, and they each have their own flavor. What flavor would you describe science news as having?

I think our flavor is that, you know, we've always. focused on just like straight up, here's the news as we know it. We're obsessed about accuracy. Clearly, our mission from the beginning was to counter misinformation or disinformation about science or just lack of understanding and really say, you know, this is how it works. This is what we know. This is what we don't know. And we're still really doing that today. And I think you know, as science has grown in extraordinary ways over the past century, you know, it's hard for us regular civilians to keep a grip on this. And a lot of our readers love the fact that we cover across the fields of science, because even if they might be a scientist themselves, it's really

hard to keep up. And as someone who was an English major, I particularly love our coverage of physics and astronomy because, who boy, I'm not a physicist, but it's fascinated and I love reading about it and trying to learn about it. And I get to do that every week. It's wonderful. Yeah, me too. It's great. You know, it's almost impossible. I know how many tens of thousands of pages you have. It's almost impossible during our discussion to cover all the things that have happened, all the advances that have happened in the last hundred years from the invention of the birth pill to genetic engineering that didn't exist, you know, before the late 60s and the 70s, and all the things that came out of that, all the general relativity and all the physics that came,

the discoveries of different kinds of stars and black holes. It's impossible, just impossible. But you have it all in one spot that people can look through themselves. Tell us how we can do that. Well, yeah, www. www.sciensnews.org. That's our site. And from there, you can access our archive, all of those reports. And also our Century of Science page is www. www.science news.org slash century.

And that's where over a year and a half, we started this project last January, and it will continue through March 22. We'll be highlighting a subfield of science each month. and doing original reporting perspectives, as well as highlighting some of the people in science who we're calling them our unsung characters who were under-recognized at the time and now, and just didn't, their stories weren't told and we're hoping to tell them. So we invite everyone and hope you'll check it out. We have to take a break.

We'll be back with more conversation with the editor-in-chief of Science News, Nancy Schutt, and Elizabeth Quill, Enterprise Editor, and Archive Rangler, for the magazine. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're looking back on 100 years of science with the publication Science News. My guest, Sir Nancy Schute, the editor-in-chief, and Elizabeth Quill, Enterprise Editor for the Magazine Science News. A beth, you're not always looking at the super serious. Here's a clip from 1921 about the Great Frontiers in Fruits. The favorite fruit of Americans of the generations to follow us will be the avocado or alligator pear. That this large, meaty, tropical fruit will be a common daily food of the future is the opinion of David Fairchild,

in charge of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's work of introducing new and useful seeds and plants into this country. A few crackers and an avocado sprinkle with a little salt make a hearty and well-balanced lunch declares Mr. Fairchild, although over 1,200 acres of avocado trees are now planted in Florida and California, the tropics of the United States, the alligator pear is still a rich man's fruit. Eventually, Mr. Fairchild believes that it will be just as well-known and as popular as oranges and lemons. No mention of guacamole there anywhere. What's so wonderful about that is that is from 1990. So we, the public, were a little slow on getting on the avocado train, but we sure as heck are there now.

You certainly are. You know, one thing that surprised me, many historians, and you mentioned this before, we started talking about black holes. They credit John Wheeler, the famous physicist, with coining the term black holes in 1967, but you have an instance of it in your publication in 1964. Space may be peppered with black holes. This was suggested at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Cleveland by astronomers and physicists who are experts on what are called degenerate stars. Degenerate stars are not Hollywood types with low morals. They are dying stars or white dwarfs and make up about 10% of all stars in the sky.

The faint light they emit comes from the little heat left in their last stages of life. It is not known how a star quietly declines to become. a white dwarf. You know, that really answers a question that has been plaguing me for decades, because John Wheeler, who is credited with not making up the term black holes in 1967, but saying that he heard it in a question at a conference where someone in the audience asked him about black holes and then he went on to use it. Well, your article explains how that could happen, that you had it in your publication three years before then. Somebody sees it and then asks John Wheeler about it. Yeah, that's right. And our research suggests that Wheeler himself did speak at the

symposium from which our report came, but no one there recalls him naming black holes back then. So we never really got to the bottom of who first said it, but we're very proud that we're able to kind of point to our article to say, here it is, and to uncover this kind of quirky bit of history. Nancy, you have a story about a person who washes dishes and Einstein. Can you tell us, please, that story? Oh, this is one of my favorite gems and of the many gems in our archive, where in 1936, in the spring of 36, a dishwasher from a restaurant dishwasher named Rudy Mandel showed up at the science news offices in Washington, D.C., and he, he, he, he, he, he, He said he had a theory about how gravity could distort light like a lens.

And he very much wanted to talk to Albert Einstein about this. And the editors listened to Mr. Mandel and they said, okay, here, we're going to buy you a train ticket. Get on the train, go up to Princeton and talk with Professor Einstein about your theory. And the two men got together. It sounds like they had a lovely conversation. and sometime later, Einstein published a paper outlining what we now call gravitational lensing. And he thanked Mandel in the paper. Do we think that Einstein got the idea for gravitational lensing from a dishwasher?

I mean, it was, you know, the concept was out there, but I think that, you know, who knows? It might have sparked Einstein to do some more thought and work on it. And I love what it tells us about what life was like in the 1930s, that a dishwasher would wander into your office as a journalist and you would say, hey, go talk to Albert Einstein. And Einstein and the dishwasher would talk. Yeah, Einstein would see people. Yeah, and Mandel was an engineer. And he really did the persuading to Einstein to take it seriously, right?

I mean, Einstein knew that gravitational lensing was possible, but he didn't think it would be, and others didn't think it would be such an important effect. But Mandel really said, hey, look closer at it, pay more attention to it. And looking at another very important story, your reporters covered the Scopes trial, right? Absolutely. Beth, do you want to do that one? Nancy probably has even a little bit more of the details than I do, but the famous trial to determine whether evolution and modern science could be taught in schools. We were very involved in that.

We were on the scene and we were supporting scopes today, you know, or in recent decades, at least, that kind of involvement would probably be considered over the line for journalists. But at the time, we really saw ourselves as proponents of science and of the public understanding of science. Yeah, it's a great example of Science Service, which we really saw ourselves as proponents of science. was our name then, helped cover the defense costs for John Scopes, the teacher who was on trial. And the editors of Science Service sent telegrams to scientists on behalf of Clarence Darrow, who was Scopes' defense attorney trying to get scientists to testify. And it is just something no journalists would even think of today. But it is pretty cool that the photographs that

our editor took of Clarence Darrow questioning William Jennings Bryant at the trial are in the Smithsonian Archives. Yeah, it is unfortunate that one can think of some journalists who might cover it that way today. One of the big examples of a whole society getting something wrong, and we talked about how getting things wrong was part for the course, was DDT. Here's a clip from 1945. DDT can send malaria mosquitoes, typhus lice, and other disease-carrying insects to join the Dodo and the dinosaur in the limbo of extinct species, thereby ending these particular plagues for all time. One of the most promising carriers for household use of DDT seems to be wall paint. Since flies, mosquitoes, and other domestic pests need only to touch it with their feet

in order to pick up enough to kill them, a DDT carrying painted surface turns the whole interior of a room into a big death trap for them. Several well-known commercial firms are already manufacturing DDT paints. Boy, did we get that one wrong. I mean, the law of intended consequences, not knowing what they are, really bit us on that one, didn't it, Beth? Yeah, that's right. I mean, I remember when I first uncovered that story in our archive and I was just like, wow. You know, we were often, perhaps you could say, had too much zeal in our coverage of chemistry and of new materials. I mean, even, you know, our coverage of plastics is similar. They have. certainly around us everywhere, but have also become global pollutants. And it's interesting the way we covered it and to see how we might do it differently today and to know in hindsight what we know. There are a lot of stories like that that just stand out. And I think they're an

opportunity to kind of have us take a pause and say, what are we missing today? What are we as journalists not critical enough today? And where might our blind spots be? And where might we be overly enthusiastic now? And I think that's an interesting lesson to take from a lot of this coverage and a lot of this history. Nancy, one of the things that both science and science journalists have been struggling with over the century is being more inclusive to a wider range of science and scientists. How have you grappled with that? When you go back in our archives, It's really instructive to see, you know, how the vast majority of the bylines are from men who were white men. And we have had many brilliant women as reporters and editors at Science News over the decades.

But it was really, you know, a man's game for a really long time, as was science. And I think that's changed a lot. science is changing, journalism is changing, but we still have a long way to go. And we're trying to do a lot with science news and really thinking about, you know, who's doing the science, how do we make sure that everybody's voices are heard, trying to make sure that we're really inclusive in our sourcing. And also looking at what science can tell us about diversity and race and how science is or isn't doing a good job on diversity and inclusion. You know, we at Science Friday are celebrating our 30th year this year.

And so, you know, I just opened up your magazine to November of 1991. We started on the radio in November. And I looked at the stories that you covered during our first week of the broadcast. And I saw something that we did, a few things that we did, like the discovery of, you had the discovery of the first pluripotent. stem cell, which is huge now, right? Definitely. Definitely. Congratulations on your anniversary as well. That's wonderful. Yeah. But every issue, you know, every issue you look at, you can find something similar. You can find something where it's like, wow, that was a moment in time that changed things going forward. And that's what's amazing about this archive. And that's why for our centennial, we want to

really invite readers into it and give them the chance through the Century of Science project to explore what's there and to find what bit most interests them. And looking back, another thing that struck me is how some of the ideas we take for granted we're still open for debate, like in this story about spiral nebulae. Spiral nebulae may not be other universes. Distinct changes in the structure and form of the nucleus of the well-known Spiral Messier 99 are recorded by Dr. Lampland at the Lowell Observatory. The nebulae of the so-called spiral family are very numerous throughout the depths of space,

but scientists have not yet been able to determine their size, distance, and composition, or discover what laws govern their motions or how they are related to the stars and planets. Astronomy is always a fascinating thing to look back on because we get new tools, We get new telescopes, we get all kinds of new devices we can look out and see further into space and back in time. It's always changing, right? That's right. And that's one of my favorite stories, or that class of stories is one of my favorite, because, of course, it was a question at the time of, what were those spiral nebulae, and were they other galaxies outside of the Milky Way, or were they

much closer by and part of the Milky Way? And it really speaks to our, I mean, it was just later that decade that Hubble showed that there are distant galaxies outside of our own. And so it's fascinating to kind of see the back and forth of the coverage and to hear what the scientists, what astronomers were thinking. And to put that in context and to really be a witness to the fact that our view of our place in the universe was changing. I'm I reflato and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. That started a whole discussion, Hubble and then Fred Hoyle and then George Gamow. They all started discussing the Big Bang, which was another supposedly derogatory term that Fred used to describe how the universe began. And there was a huge debate that still goes on today.

Yeah, so often in these stories, it's like you can almost feel the scientists, like they want to solve this question so badly and they don't have the data or the technology or the tools to do it. And one of the thrilling parts about looking back at the century is to see when they get the tool, whether it's the Hubble Space Telescope or whether it's sonar so they can put, you know, survey the ocean floor and discover plate tectonics, you know, that they couldn't really figure it out until they had the technological. tools to do it. That's right. And think about all the things that have been discovered about the deep ocean floor that way never knew about before a hundred years ago. The vents. Plague tectonics

was a big discussion in the early 20s, as you say. How does the earth move? But we then created these deep diving vessels where people could go into them and see things they had never seen before. And I don't think people could have predicted things like that about what you, you know, you would see if you actually had the tools to do it. Yeah, and I was just blown away by the fact that, you know, plate tectonics was still controversial in the 1960s. Yeah, yeah, they were still talking about that. It took a while for that idea to catch on, didn't it? It's really fascinating. Some of those tools that we're talking about and that Nancy mentioned, you know, not, weren't just set within one scientific discipline either, but there were certain tools that came around that really transformed

multiple fields at a time. You know, I'm thinking of something like the electron microscope or you think of radiometric dating that really had implications for biology, for material science, for human history, for understanding of the universe. And it's amazing to see how that one technology or one innovation can just open wide the doors of scientific inquiry. You know, we look back over the years and saw how science journalism started out 100 years ago. with the scope trial, at least in terms of what you were covering in the range of years,

and then has morphed into other science journalism. Can you predict? Can you make a prediction about the future of science journalism, Nancy? Oh, gosh, that's easy, Ira. Well, you know, journalism. Well, can you make a prediction about where you would like it to go? I would hope that science news is going to be around for another 100 years and that we will continue to do are, you know, deep dives and explanation about how science works and the advances that make it happen and how it affects society and how we understand it. And just as science has been

transformed by technology and discoveries in the last hundred years, so is journalism. We're in a huge era of ferment and destruction. Some of it creative. Some of it not. But I am. confident we're going to have science journalists a hundred years from now, and I hope science news journalists will be doing an even better job than we are today. And of course, we have run out of time. I'd like to thank my guest, Nancy Schutt, the editor-in-chief, and Elizabeth Quill, the enterprise editor for the magazine Science News. Happy anniversary to both of you and all the staff there who I've known and enjoyed talking to over the years. Thanks, Ira. Thank you. You're welcome. Also, thanks to Cyphrys Aene Niro, Nadja Ortelt, Kyle Viturbo, Socha Garcia, and Diana Montano for being the voices of those science news archive clips.

That conversation recorded this past October. When we come back, mathing up your Christmas. Yes, from the right way to wrap your garland to theory behind how to dominate one of those family games of Monopoly. Stay with us. Hey, Ira here with an exciting message. Science Friday currently has a... dollar-for-dollar donation match in effect. This means that any donation made through December 31st will be doubled, including yours.

Now, I don't have to tell you that the need for Science Friday is stronger than ever. So please head over to sciencefriady.com slash support to make a gift. We depend on the generosity of fans and listeners. Again, that's ScienceFriday.com slash support. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, and we're opening up the SciFRI archives and turning their way back machine to 2017 for this conversation about mixing some math into your merriment.

When you think of the holidays, there are certain things that mark the season. There's a Christmas tree dripping with tinsel and ornaments, a smell of holiday cookies wafting from the kitchen, or maybe it's coming up with a complex formula to figure out the best way to wrap your presents. No? Wait, wait, that last one's not on your list? Well, maybe my next guest will help you put it on the list. She says it should be. She's going to tell us how math can make our holidays merrier

and how seeing every day from a more mathematical angle adds more merriment to your holidays. Hannah Fry is a mathematician at the University College London and an author of the book, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus, subtitled the Mathematics, of Christmas. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. I mean, there is nothing more magical than a formula. I think we can all agree on that, surely. Absolutely. And you've taken

it to the, you've taken it to the extreme to applying it to all. Oh, you've studied the growth of cities and cattle and tuberculosis and now you've taken your math and you've applied it to Christmas. Yeah, I'm almost trying to prove a point that it does apply to anything. That's, yeah, that's somewhere deep down. I think that's what I'm trying to do. Yeah, so you see math, everywhere. I mean, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Or maths, as we might call it across the pond there. Indeed. And I'll try and keep the, keep the S off whenever I refer to it in this conversation. How did you get interested in maths? I think I always have been, but I think I started off just liking puzzles and liking the challenge of not knowing exactly where something was going to turn

and then having a moment where it all clicks into place, that sort of aha mode. moment. And I think that really I got into maths as though it was a sort of playground, the puzzles and games that you find when you're a kid. But then actually, when I was about 12 years old, during one summer holiday, my mum gave me a math textbook and she made me do one page from it every day during the entire summer holidays. And I had a fun childhood, as you can clearly tell. But by the time I got back to school, I was so, I was so, I was. I understood everything a lot better. And I think that was the moment where there was a switch, and I realized that the puzzles that I'd already enjoyed, you could enjoy, you know, the math that you do at school in the same way. Yeah.

You know, it's the old Richard Feynman idea that you see the world more beautiful because you understand how it works by studying. I totally agree. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the great tips you have in your book. You have a way to figure out the exact length of garland or lights you need to decorator tree. I certainly do.

I mean, anyone who decorates a tree by eye is an amateur, frankly. I think, you know, you're going to need to get out your measuring tape. You're going to need to get out, you know, your protractor. You need to do this properly. Now, unfortunately, the simple version of the formula requires that you have a perfectly cylindrical tree, which is, although mathematically beautiful, I mean, it's physically difficult. shall we say, to find a perfectly cylindrical tree. But there is another formula that you can use,

which imagines as though the garland wrapping around your tree forms the shape of an Archimedes spiral. So if you know how many loops you want your garland to take, then we've worked out a formula for exactly how long that garland needs to be. And we have an excerpt. This is very important stuff. It's very useful and important. As my math teacher used to say, it's an elegant solution.

We have an excerpt on our website that shows the equations for wrapping your tree, and it's on our website at sciencefrily.com slash Santa. Of course, so mathematicians and scientists, they use the perfect situation. But we know there's no such thing in real life as the perfect situation. Let's talk about the main event, the presence, the gifts. Some people say you can save paper by wrapping on the diagonal. Is that true? Well, no, it's not, actually. It's a little bit of a little bit of a myth.

You can do some nice things if you wrap presents on the diagonal, especially if you've got a present that's square. You can make all of the corners meet perfectly in the middle of that square and only have to use one piece of tape. That's kind of nice. But the idea that sort of wrapping diagonally is more efficient. Actually, when you work out the maths, it's just not the case. You may as well just wrap it in the normal method of keeping the edges of the box

parallel with the edges of the paper. Now, I can wrap a gift that is a rectangle, if it's a square, it's pretty easy for me to do that. But what about those odd-shaped things? Any strategies for tackling that? Well, I mean, there are some shapes that are just, you know, mathematically always going to be more difficult to wrap. And there's a reason for that.

It comes down to something which is called the Gaussian curvature. The Gaussian curvature basically measures how curvy some something is on its surface. And it's composed of two different numbers. And if you can imagine if you were standing on the equator of the earth, you would be measuring how curvy the earth was north to south and how curvy the earth was east to west. And if it's curving away from you, it's positive.

And if it's completely flat, it's zero. Now, the real trick to understanding why some presents are more difficult to wrap than others is knowing that you multiply those two numbers together to get the total goussin curvature. But the Gaussian curvature of a surface doesn't change no matter how much you warp it or distort it. And this is the reason why when you eat pizza, you know how sort of you kind of fold it to get it into your mouth? We do that in New York here. Of course, right? The reason why that works, the reason why the pizza doesn't flop downwards when you do that is because of this rule about Gaussian curvature.

If you bend it one way, it's going to have a positive curvature. in that direction. But when the pizza is flat, it's got zero curvature, right? So it has to have zero curvature at all times no matter what you do to it. So if you fold it in one way to make it positive, the other direction has to have zero curvature, otherwise it kind of breaks maths. So that's why when you fold it and pick it up,

that edge will remain straight just because there's the rules that Gauss found. Now, the same is true of wrapping paper. wrapping paper is flat, so it's got zero Gaussian curvature. So you can wrap it around anything that has zero Gaussian curvature very easily. So cylinders are fine, curvy in one direction, not curvy in the other. You know, a flat box is a fine, zero curvature. But spheres, if you're trying to wrap, say, a soccer ball, you're going to have real trouble because that curves in two different directions, and so it has positive Gaussian curvature.

So no matter how well you try and wrap it, you are always going to end up with wrinkle. in your wrapping paper. It's just a sort of fundamental fact of wrapping up. Wow. You know, I never thought you could link wrapping paper and pizza together. Maths can do that. Elegant. Now, now let's talk about buying presents. We know that buying presents can get a little daunting, and there are going to be tons of extended families and cousins and cousins of cousins. You say that you can use a bit of game theory to figure out what to do.

that please. Yeah, I mean, this one's a little bit tongue in cheek. I've got to be honest. It's sort of, it looks at present buying as though you're trying to get the most out of it. So as though you are, I mean, essentially, there's going to be some benefit to someone giving you a gift, right? You're going to get some joy out of that. And you'll probably get a bit of joy in giving someone a gift too. But then there's the sort of cost of the money that you have to spend on that gift and the time and effort that you have to spend on that gift. So if you decide to look at your holiday, season as trying to maximize the total amount of joy, joy of receiving, joy of giving and lack of joy of spending, then you can frame it as this very old and famous problem in game theory,

which is called the Prisoner's Dilemma, which is essentially pits you against the person, the relative that you're buying a gift for, and tries to decide what is your best strategy to sort of maximize your return, if you like, on that. on that, the present swap. Now, if you're just going to give them a present one year in a row, actually the best thing really is to not buy them a gift at all and just hope that they'll get you one anyway, and then, you know, hooray.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Yes, go ahead. If you're related to them, the chances are you're probably going to meet them for several Christmases in a row. So you don't want to do that because then next year, you know, you're not going to get a present. It's going to be just awkward.

So instead, what you can do is you can use something called tit for tat, which is a strategy that has been shown to really work in these kind of, in these prisoners dilemmas that end up repeating themselves over a number, over a number of iterations over a period of time. So essentially what you should do, both the most sensible and decent thing, is in the very first year, you should buy someone the best present that you can afford to give them. And then every year after that, you should match the value of the gift that they gave you last year. That makes sense.

Yeah. I think people kind of do that anyway, don't they? Yeah, yeah. We're talking with Dr. Hannah Frye, who is co-author of this wonderful little book, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus, The Mathematics of Christmas, co-authors Dr. Thomas Oleron-Evins. Did that get that correctly? Beautifully pronounced.

And we have people who are going to talk about this. Let me go to the phone. So David in Des Moines, Iowa. Hi, David. Hi, I'm a math professor at our community college, and I just love this. I actually have applied a little math this season as well. I did the whole Archimedean spiral to figure out how many feet of Christmas lights I needed. And I also, we do a big gift exchange, and so I wrote a program to automatically draw all the names to figure this out so we wouldn't have to spend time doing it.

Plus, we couldn't do it to some people live across the country. So those are two ways I use math. That's great. That is a man who's got Christmas sausage. Probably in the festive spirit. I know that math has lots of precise, well-thought-out theorems, but there are two that could be used when thinking about dessert. I love this in the book.

I had to cut everything evenly. The ham sandwich theorem and Austin's moving knife procedure. Are these real names? They're really real. I know. There are some actually just strangely named mathematical theorems. There's the ham sandwich theorem, this one. There's another one called the sofa moving problem. And there's one third one, actually, which I'm just going to back out of.

I don't think I can quite say it on radio. But it's a real, all of these are real theorems. You mathematicians have too much time on your hands, I think. I know, I know. Especially in the lunchroom, right? So the ham sandwich theorem, which I imagine was devised in a lunchroom, is where you have a ham sandwich, so two slices of bread, one slice of ham.

And the question is, using a single cut with your knife, how do you divide that sandwich in exactly two pieces? So not just roughly into, the top slice of bread has to be exactly into, the slice of ham has to be exactly into, and the bottom slice of bread has to be exactly into.

And this bread and ham can be really higgledy-piggledy, it can be kind of all over the place, it doesn't have to be uniform in any direction. And the question is, how do you do that? And ham sandwich theory basically proves that as long as you've got three different items in three-dimensional space, it is always possible to make a single knife cut to directly cut them in half every single element. See, how we'd just fold in half. Or just make someone buy their own sandwich rather than share it.

That's why you're the expert and I'm sitting here talking about the indisputable. existence of Santa Claus with Dr. Hannah Fry. Let's go to the phones. We have Ryan in Sacramento, California. Hi, Ryan. Hi. Hi, Ira. I was wanting to ask you, I'm also Jewish, and I wanted to ask about the best way to beat my sister in playing Drayal. This is Hanukkah. Yes, all right. Well, we'll ask the expert. That's not in your book. I don't know the rules. I don't know the rules. I don't. I don't know the rules of Jail. I don't know. Okay.

I'd have to look into it. That's my next project. You'll come back next year and we'll talk about it. Let's talk about Monopoly. One game that you do talk about is how you always win in Monopoly. No one beat you. Tell us the secret. This is a big tradition in my household.

Every year we get the Monopoly board out, end up having a massive row. And I think if that's going to happen, it's important that you emerge the victor. You know, I think that's an essential thing. And the key to winning a lot of the victory. at Monopoly is noticing that not all of the squares are created equally, right? So some squares, some properties in Monopoly are landed on much more than others. And if you know that, that's really the kind of key to getting victory. So actually, the most landed on square is jail. I guess that's kind of unsurprising. 6.27% of rolls of the dice will end up in jail.

The most landed on square that you can buy is Illinois Avenue, which actually came as a bit of a surprised me when I run the analysis. And the lease landed on one of all at only 2% is Park Place, which is one of the big reasons why the Navy blue set is, you know, not worth going for. So anyway, if you run this through using those probabilities and add in the amount of money that you can stand to earn and all of the different elements and components of monopoly, there are essentially two key tips that you can take away. And the first is that actually the best set to go for, the best set of properties to go for, depends on how many opponents you have. So if you are only playing monopoly against one opponent, the best sets to go for are either light blue or

orange. If you've got two opponents, it's orange and red. And if you've got three or more, you want to go for the green set to be sure that you win. But never go for park place or boardwalk. There's no point. No one lands on them, so there's no point. Wow. How about building houses? How many houses? Well, so this is the second tip. Now, actually, it turns out that your return on your investment peaks at three houses. So the best strategy is when you, if you're trying to work out whether to spend money or not spend money, try and get to three houses on as many properties as you can.

And after that, don't bother buying hotels. And there's another reason why this works. Not only does it help with your return on the investment, there's also, it's a bit sneaky. but there's only a limited number of houses in the game. So if you've got three on every one of your properties, you can block other players from buying houses. That's where the word monopoly comes from. Well, that chapter on monopoly is worth the price of the book itself.

Let me tell you out of read it. The book is The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus, a wonderful book, The Mathematics of Christmas by Dr. Hannah Frye and Dr. Thomas Allerun Evans. It's a great little pick-up gift for the last minute for the holiday season. very much, Dr. Thank you for having me. Adam Frye is a mathematician at the University College of London and, as I say, the author

of The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus, and you can read an excerpt on our website at sciencefriety.com slash Santa. Merry Christmas to you, Dr. Fry. And to you. And a happy new year. That conversation from 2017. And that's about it for today. If you missed any part of this program

or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcast or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, what was your favorite read of 2021? We'll be talking about some of the best books that came out this year in an upcoming show, and we want to hear from you. Tell us on the SciFri Voxpop app wherever you get your apps. Of course, you can say hi to us all week on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,

or email us, the address, SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Send feedback and tell us what you'd like us to cover. Sending you the best wishes for the holidays from everybody at Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.