This program was recorded at the 12th Annual Wonderfest, the San Francisco Bay Area Festival of Science.
Wonderfest's broad goals are best described by its mission statement: Through public discourse about provocative scientific questions, Wonderfest aspires to stimulate curiosity, promote careful reasoning, challenge unexamined beliefs, and encourage life-long learning.
Wonderfest achieves these ends by presenting series of scientific events to the general public. At most of these events, pairs of articulate and accomplished researchers discuss and debate compelling questions at the edge of scientific understanding.
Bio
Keith Devlin
Dr. Keith Devlin is a co-founder and Executive Director of the university's H-STAR institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network, and a Senior Researcher at CSLI. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
His current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences. He also works on the design of information/reasoning systems for intelligence analysis. Other research interests include: theory of information, models of reasoning, applications of mathematical techniques in the study of communication, and mathematical cognition. He has written 28 books and over 80 published research articles. Recipient of the Pythagoras Prize, the Peano Prize, the Carl Sagan Award, and the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award.
In 2003, he was recognized by the California State Assembly for his "innovative work and longtime service in the field of mathematics and its relation to logic and linguistics." He is "the Math Guy" on National Public Radio.
Alejandro Garcia
Alejandro Garcia is a professor of physics at San Jose State University.
It's hard not to take offense as a mathematician by Alejandro's take on the field. Basically, the more "pure"-oriented mathematicians, whose work is obviously arcane to him, are the only people he would consider to be mathematicians. All other math is "not real math," and is some kind of... for lack of a better word, application of a science. That point in and of itself seems to jump out as an obvious contradiction with his thesis.
I don't see how you can separate "whether math works" from "whether math works in the universe." It's kind of like saying that if you haven't found an application of an algorithm, then there is no application of that algorithm. Not only myopic, almost tautologically wrong. Very little respect earned for Alejandro today.