Talking Maths in Public Podcast Series 2, Episode 2 - Transcript Katie Steckles: Welcome to the Talking Maths in Public Podcast, a community podcast for members of the Talking Maths in Public Network, which is a UK organization bringing together maths communicators of all kinds. My name's Katie Steckles, and I'm a maths communicator and member of the Talking Maths in Public team. In this podcast, we'll be hearing from various members of the community, sharing their maths communication projects, recommending their favorite bits of maths comm, and discussing how we can communicate maths engagingly and effectively. In this episode, we'll be hearing from Ben Orlin, who's written several popular maths books and likes to get his readers involved in the process. We'll also hear from Max Hughes and Hari Krishnan, who both run hands-on maths centres in the UK under the umbrella of MathsWorld. To see links to the things discussed in this episode and find more episodes, you can visit talkingmathsinpublic.uk/podcast. First up, I spoke to mathematician with bad drawings, Ben Orlin, about his career in mathematical writing. -- Okay, so I'm talking to Ben Orlin, maths... I guess maths celebrity, maths teacher, maths author...? Ben Orlin: Celebrity was a way fancier word than I was expecting. I like maths guy Katie Steckles: Maths human Ben Orlin: Related in the orbit of maths. Yeah. Yeah, that's right, yeah. Katie Steckles: And so you're... I guess people may have heard of you from what was originally a blog, Math With Bad Drawings, which has been going for approximately a million years now, I believe. Ben Orlin: That's right. No, yeah, it originated back in the ancient days when a blog was like a live cultural object a thing that people actually did. Yeah, so yeah, a blog, and then since then it's been a series of books has been my main focus. Katie Steckles: Yeah. And so one of the things we wanted to talk to you about was your kind of most recent book, but I guess this is not the first one you've done, so your first one was the book of the blog, the actual Math With Bad Drawings book. Ben Orlin: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It was the, probably half the material or so of my first book that I did called Math With Bad Drawings, came from the blog. And a lot of it re-fashioned, repurposed slightly to make more sense in book format. Katie Steckles: Yeah, I think this might be this if people have seen bits of your content from that it's just like fun little drawings, cartoons, observations about kind of maths and about how people interact with it. Ben Orlin: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's like the child of like a college humor magazine and a math textbook that was mostly raised, I think, by the college humor magazine. It seems like the math textbook gave some genetic material but then maybe didn't have such a role in the upbringing of this book. Katie Steckles: Yeah. I feel like the target audience for that kind of stuff was kind of me, that I would see these things and be like, "This is brilliant." "I love this, this nice observation, this witty comment about how maths works." But I guess were you pitching that at a range of people? Ben Orlin: Yeah, I think I... My thinking about audience has always been very almost deliberately naive and unsophisticated. So I think, yeah, I think probably to a large degree it, it's good to see you, Katie, I want Katie to like my stuff, so I think probably to a large degree, that's like what I've been doing is trying to make something that is gonna amuse Katie. And then, I don't know. Yeah, I guess when I did the book, to some extent when I was doing the blog back in the day when blogs could, a post could go viral on Facebook, you could just see when something resonated, and weirdly, when it resonated, it would resonate with lots of audiences. It would be like an early post I did. Oh, one that wound up in the book is and was pertinent to later work I did, was this game Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe which I stumbled across. It wasn't a game I invented, but I stumbled across some people playing it, thought it was cool, wrote up the rules, and people loved that. It just clicked with a lot of different audiences. Teachers liked it 'cause they could play it with their students. Students liked it 'cause it was a fun game. Parents liked it. Mathy people liked it 'cause it was this interesting combinatorial object you could explore. And so I was looking for those things, I don't know, I guess in Hollywood these are like your four-quadrant films. I don't actually know what the quadrants are - apparently, in Hollywood, they've got some secret two-by-two grid of something. But so I think early on that's what I was looking for was just things that clicked, that had a kind of virality to them. I think over time I figured out who my audience was, and it was a weird hybrid audience. I did a poll maybe five years into my blogs, at 2018 or so, and got something like 1,000 responses. And it was broke down pretty neatly where maybe about 20 to 25% of my audience was students, like current high school students or undergrads. 20 to 25% was teachers, mostly, middle school, high school, undergrad. Another quarter was, sort of people in software or tech kind of fields, but who had some, some older relationship to mathematics. They'd gotten a degree in physics or something, and they still liked staying in touch with the subject. And then another quarter were totally miscellaneous random people who, didn't have any relationship to mathematics but just enjoyed the blog or enjoyed dipping into it, had their own idiosyncratic reasons for reading. So I think somehow I pigeonholed myself as trying to stretch myself across all four of those audiences. Katie Steckles: Yeah. Ben Orlin: Which I don't totally recommend for other people trying to do math communication. I think trying to sculpt out like who is your crowd and then serve that crowd makes more sense. But that was just the place I found myself in, was with a weird hybrid audience. Katie Steckles: Yeah, and this is often the case with stuff online, that, if you're, like, going to a building where there is a room full of people and you know that they've all come there because they go to the same school or they've turned up to this event and they've bought a ticket you've got a sense of who's in the room, and you can even get a show of hands or whatever. But online you just put stuff out there, and the audience is whoever ends up reading it. And, the way that things are discovered has changed over time. But in general, if someone sees a thing that is a funny thing that's got some maths in it, they will send that to other people they know that enjoy funny things with some maths in, right? So it kind of spreads organically in some ways, and it also shows up in places that people go looking for it. Ben Orlin: Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly, I think probably the experience of math popularizing or just sharing math publicly is complicated and made strange by the gravity of school math. It's so much of the way people interact with math is through school. You spend this decade in math classrooms. And so you have this army of mini math evangelists out there called teachers, of whom I've been one. I currently teach at different levels. And yeah, whereas I think if you're popularizing other subjects, maybe this is true of any school subject, but a lot of a lot of science communication seems to exist to me more in separate, fun science-y spaces. There's the universe of podcasts and YouTube channels and things like that are, I'm sure teachers use them, but it feels like it stands almost free from the educational structure. And in mathematics it seems like they're braided together in a much stranger way, or at least that's been my experience in my career. Katie Steckles: Yeah. I know what you mean that people very strongly associate maths with school, because for a lot of people that will be the main place that they encountered or interacted with it. And you know when that classic encounter you have where you meet someone, you say you're a mathematician, they say, "Oh, I hated maths at school." And I'm like what did you think of it not at school?" "How have you enjoyed maths in the rest of your life?" I don't know. Yeah. Ben Orlin: Yeah. It's so hard for people to answer, though. I think in a way that you can be... someone can say "I hated reading books in English class but I actually do like reading these other books." Or like Katie Steckles: Yeah ... Ben Orlin: "I hated science class, but I actually, I like gardening or I like nature walks or something." You're not gonna be like "I hated taking integrals in school. But actually I love taking integrals in my own daily life." Katie Steckles: Yeah. Yeah. Ben Orlin: It's, yeah, there's something about it. Yeah. Maybe it's that the everyday experience of mathematics are too buried or scattered. We don't sort them as mathematics. We don't recognize them as mathematics. Katie Steckles: Yeah, there's that sort of classic category error that that as soon as you say maths, people are thinking arithmetic, or they're thinking doing your taxes, or things that are not fun, enjoyable parts of life or culture. But I guess to segue nicely into some other things that you've done like one of your books has been about games, right? Maths and games, and that's something that people very much don't necessarily associate with maths. It's just a fun thing that you do with your friends. But you've managed to put together an entire book which, if I'm being honest, is absolutely massive, and I can't emphasize enough how big this book is. If you've ever seen a copy of Ben's book about maths and games, it's huge, right? Ben Orlin: It's physically large. Yeah. It's funny, this is particularly, I find anybody I talk to in the UK has this response. I think it's maybe just you guys are just a little more pressed for space out there, and you're like, "This is gonna take up half my garden." Katie Steckles: Yeah. Ben Orlin: I can't... What am I gonna do with this book? It is a physically large book. Katie Steckles: Do we know for sure that it wasn't they just printed the UK edition, like, in centimetres instead of inches or some kind of error that Ben Orlin: Right that's probably what it was. Yeah. Metres I think. Yeah. That's what the book is actually nine meters by 11 meters. Yeah. So it takes up... You would want a school copy more than a private copy. So the games book, the pencil and paper games and I think, yeah, my editor had asked me, because the opening chapter of my first book is about, about that game Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe, and that was a popular chapter. People liked talking about that. They liked the game. And so my editor asked me, "Could you do a whole book of these?" And I was like "well, that one game, I kinda have to stretch it to make that into a book." So I probably gotta find some other games. Katie Steckles: It's got layers to it, but not that many. Ben Orlin: Right, I could say a lot about it, but yeah, maybe not 300 pages. Yeah so I got to do a very fun couple years of research of just searching around and trying to find lots of pencil and paper games. And I had a question as I was finding them of is this a Math game, with a capital M, capital G, or is it a vaguely mathy game? Like where's the line between your traditional board game or your classic tabletop game and a game that qualifies as math. And I decided that obviously there's no principled line, so if I just put them all in a book and on the cover I wrote math games, that kinda made them math games. That sort of qualified. And because, a lot of these games, they're strategy games, they're games that involve a little bit of randomness sometimes. But there's lots of mathematical structure in each of them. And are they narrowly exclusively math games? Probably not but there's certainly mathematical thinking one does in those games. Katie Steckles: Yeah, and whether it's like the structure of how the game works is something that you can then do some fun combinatorics on or think about the maths behind that or the symmetry or the patterns or whatever, or whether actually playing the game, you're making these decisions, you're using mathematical thinking skills to decide what your best move is gonna be. Whether there's a probability involved or some kind of logical game theory, if I do this, what's the other player gonna do sort of thing. But yeah, I think 'cause they are all of these just pen and paper, you don't need any equipment. You just, maybe some coins or something but you don't need anything to play them, so they... I think there's a lot of appeal in that, that it's the sort of thing that, if you're on a long train journey or, you need to entertain a child at short notice, you've got- Ben Orlin: yeah. Exactly, yeah. We don't have as many trains in the US so I think of it as the waiting in the restaurant with meal kind of book. But yes ideally we would have more trains around here, and then people could be playing the games in this book on trains. Yeah, I think that's right. I think math is this federation of lots of different topics. So there's lots of different things that can feel mathematical, and still have quite a different flavor, right? A game where it's very geometric, where you're drawing shapes is gonna be very different in flavor than a more numerical game where you're trying to get numbers that add up to 15 or something like that. Katie Steckles: Yeah. Ben Orlin: But they all have a mathematical aesthetic or a mathematical spirit. Katie Steckles: Yeah. And I almost wonder if the fact that it is very deliberately those very approachable low-level pen and paper things has helped with the appeal of that. 'Cause if you had a book that was like serious mathematical games for absolute, math nerds or whatever that you wouldn't necessarily reach as many people as if you've got something that looks like it's quite approachable, and it's got your kind of drawing style where it's all kind of cartoon stick figures and hand-drawn things on the cover. And obviously it's massive. But that kind of people might look at that and go, "Oh, this is gonna have some things that my kids will wanna play in it. I'm gonna have a look. I'm gonna give this a try." Which, they might be put off if it was more... I'm just saying, it is overtly mathematical, right? You've definitely put the word math on the cover. But at the same time, they're like, how much maths can there be in noughts and crosses or tic-tac-toe? How difficult can that possibly get? I'm gonna give it a go sort of thing. Ben Orlin: Yeah. Yeah no, exactly, yeah. Yeah, and that is, I think to circle back to the audience question, that's the book I have that probably best suits my multiple audiences maybe. It's one where yeah it's very kid-friendly. I think that's one where as I was writing it, I was conscious of the fact that this was gonna be a book that, some of the readers, a lot of the readers maybe were gonna be eight years old. And so whereas I would be willing in my earlier books to sprinkle in, that was my third book that I did. And so earlier books you'll find the occasional damn or like a, the occasional four-letter word for dramatic effect. And like I'm not someone who swears a lot, but yeah, and I'm trying to write comic books. These are kind of humor books, so I'm trying to throw in some, you know - if that's the right word to get the laugh, I'll do it. And then in that book I was like, no, I actually don't. I'd like this to be a little more kid-friendly, so I try to keep all the language and the examples a little more eight-year-old accessible. Whereas in my first book which does have a lot of nine and 10-year-old readers, I think, for... it surprises me that it does, 'cause my choices of chapters were not remotely picked with that audience in mind. There's a chapter about weird insurance schemes. You know all these things that Lloyd's will do, where they'll insure you against alien abduction, or they'll insure your, I don't know, against the birth of twins, you know when you're only expecting a single child. Or the electoral college in the United States. These aren't topics that I would've thought of as, these are the ones that the 10-year-olds are gonna love. But I'm a teacher at heart and a teacher by background so I think the kind of silly kid-friendliness comes through. Katie Steckles: Yeah. And to what extent are you thinking about kind of the level of maths? 'Cause you're not necessarily shying away from the more complex ideas in maths, but are you trying to make sure that everything could be understood by a kid of that age? Ben Orlin: Yeah, I think so. Although mostly so that it could be understood by a typical adult. It turns out that, like the typical adult, you know, even a fairly well-educated, thoughtful adult, you can't really assume anything past, maybe year eight mathematics. That's where most people's memories leave off, I think. So particularly anything that involves algebra, anything that involves you know, needing to reason with variables and not just recognize, maybe you can look at one equation that has variables in it. Although I'd probably write out the whole word rather than a variable standing in for it. But anything beyond that, anything that involves manipulation of those algebraic expressions, like, no, adults don't remember that. They don't know how to do that. So I think in all my books what I've tried to look for is what I think of as ground floor ideas. Mathematical ideas where the way to access them is not through other mathematics or through already being invested in this or that mathematical process or question, but something where you can come in on the ground floor through your interest in something else, through your interest in flowers or through your interest in paper. These being obviously the things people love most. Flowers and paper. Katie Steckles: Yeah. If you get some flowers wrapped in paper, that's like oh, my God! Ben Orlin: That's it, yeah. That's my plan for my next book. Katie Steckles: Yeah. But I like that because not only have you got that kind of low barrier, entry, this is a very classic education thing, but low barrier, high ceiling, right? You can start from those simple ideas. And actually there's a lot you can do with them. You can build to get to more interesting ideas as well. Ben Orlin: Yeah, that's right. And the games book wound up being a fun cheat code for this almost, because what you get to do with a game is you get to make up an arbitrary set of rules that people haven't seen before, and then... or, find a rule set out there that people haven't explored that game. And then these are brand-new rules, so they're pretty simple, like a 10-year-old can get into them and start playing the game and enjoy it. But also these rules will have logical consequences that even a sophisticated mathematician hasn't explored or thought about. So it was the games were a very easy way to get into that low floor, high ceiling space, and anybody can start playing the game. But of my books, it's definitely the one that when I talk to the professional mathematicians, research mathematicians, the rest of my books they can kind of skim through, and they smile at the jokes but they know all the math that's in there. And that's the one where they're like, "Oh, man, I lost an afternoon trying to figure out how to solve that game." 'Cause particularly it's not like I picked games that I knew how to solve or even that I thought were solvable. I tried to pick games that were, they get you into a pretty large combinatorial space, and there's not gonna be some kind of simple theorem that tells you this is how to solve the game. So that, that one I think is my nerd snipeiest book for for people who know a lot of math. Katie Steckles: Yeah. And so like I have a slightly insider knowledge on this because I was one of the people who did this, but for that book, and I think you've done this for your more recent book as well, you crowdsourced some of the insight there, right? So you had these ideas for games and these things that you wanted to put in the book, but you didn't know what it was like to play them a lot, right? There's only so much you can play the games yourself. So you did this kind of crowdsourced feedback thing, right? Ben Orlin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I was very conscious of it when I was working on that third book, the games book. My first two books were what you'd call like a reading book. You sit down and you read it. And there's a couple, carefully placed little puzzles in those books, but only to give you the impression that there are puzzles in the books. Really there's you know two questions in each book. And they're books you just sit down and read the way you'd read any kinda popular science book. And then the games book was totally different. It was a book that you really wanted people to play. It's like you're gonna ... every chapter is introducing a game, and I don't want people to just idly read those games and go, "Oh, that was fun to read about." It's meant to be played. And so I needed play testers. And actually the online crowdsourcing was a result as all things are of the pandemic. I'd been having in-person play testing sessions, been inviting over friends so I could watch them play the games and get feedback and see how they went. And then there was a novel coronavirus that emerged and started, yeah. You've heard the story. And so everything switched online, and so I realized that actually was potentially more powerful. I could go recruit a list of email addresses from people who were willing to play test the games at home while they were trapped there with whoever happened to be in their house. And then get them to fill out Google forms with some scores. How did you like this aspect of the game? How did you like that aspect? And then a bunch of places for more detailed feedback of what was your experience like? Were there any really fun moments? And yeah, that was great. That was really fun to get. Each week I could email out a game or two and get people filling out these forms. And there's a lot of quotations from those forms that are in the book. People would have fun little comments or turns of phrase or make an observation about a game that I hadn't thought of, or even if I had thought of it they just phrased it beautifully, and it's nice to quote someone else rather than having the book just be my monologue. Katie Steckles: Yeah, and did you get lots of good stuff from that? Was it really useful? Ben Orlin: Yeah no, super useful. Yeah, I think in my own assessment of the games I was gonna be making both false positives and false negatives. There were some I remember one game that I'd come across in Sid Sackson's Gamut of Games, which is like a classic 1960s book by a game designer. And there's this one where you put some coins down on the table, and you shift them around until they make a symmetric shape. You sort of put down a formation that has one gap, kinda like the 15 Puzzle, and then you're supposed to rearrange the coins until they form something with bilateral symmetry, which I found very aesthetically pleasing and really, I was sure that was gonna be like, one of the first games in the book and kind of like a featured game. And people didn't really like it. It was like, it was like a little under constrained. It was, like, kinda too easy to get it to be symmetric, so then you'd wanna be counting how many moves if you really wanted a meaty puzzle. But I think maybe I'm just not very good at the 15 Puzzle, so this was, like, a much easier version that I found very pleasing. But people who actually were familiar with these kinda sliding tasks didn't find it very interesting. So that was one that for me it was a false positive. I thought it was gonna be a great game, and it wasn't. And then there were some others that I thought were sort of minor games. I almost didn't even send them out. And then actually those were ones people really liked. Those wound up being favorites in the book. Yeah, I remember one that was actually one that I designed. Most of the games in the book are not my design. There was one called Dandelions where it's an asymmetric game where one person is planting seeds and the other person is blowing the wind that sends the dandelions across the field to fill in the rest of it. And it's, I thought it was a limited game 'cause you can't play it every day for a year or something. It's very far from being chess or Go. It's just like there's not that much depth to the game. But it was a pleasing mechanic, and it's a fun thing to dive into, and it evokes the dandelions in the field. And so that was one of people's favorites. And then, and since the book has been published, that's one of the ones I hear about the most when I get emails from readers. That's one that connects with people. Katie Steckles: Yeah, I remember that. I now have memories of playing that, yeah. Ben Orlin: Yeah. So this was good. And, I think this is probably true with any act of writing that I've done, that I'm gonna get false positives and false negatives. There are blog posts where I'm like, "I nailed it. I nailed this topic," and just crickets. It's not an interesting blog post. And others, I'm like, "Oh, I wanted to do a blog post this week," and I toss something off, and it turns out to be people's favorite thing I've done that month. So to some extent it always helps to have readers and people giving you feedback. But especially for games where there's so much gonna be happening on the other end of the book in that other room where I don't get to be, that I really need some feedback in advance of what's the experience gonna be like. Katie Steckles: I think that's part of it, yeah that you're putting this out there, and you want people to interact with it. But, everyone comes to this with a different background, different approach to playing these games, different level of both maths intuition and also determination to win the game. There's only you, you can only do your kind of take on it. And it's a really nice form of kind of audience feedback, which I guess is rare for a writer of books, right? To actually get specifically messages from your readers going, "Oh, this was what I thought of this particular idea." And you can then even, as you say, put it in the book. Ben Orlin: Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. I think it was, It's funny 'cause I didn't do anything like that for my fourth book. It was not, it wasn't that kind of book. It was much more a kind of reading book again. And I think that was just a completely foolish own goal on my part. I think I should have continued to be, like, bringing in readers to give feedback on whatever I'm creating. Book writing is a very slow process. Having, done a few years of writing online, where you get very rapid feedback and now a few years of book writing, where it's a very slow production cycle. There's a lot of sitting alone at your computer. Yeah it's good to be in dialogue with the actual people who you're trying to be in dialogue with. Katie Steckles: Yeah, I think there is definitely that. With most books, you just kinda launch it off into the world, and then, maybe someone will talk to you at an event or whatever about what they thought of it. Or you might get an email or something. But it's not that same level at all of, comments under a blog post or, interaction immediately, yeah. Ben Orlin: Yeah, no, exactly, yeah. And I think the books I've been working on, too, lend themselves to that kind of feedback. When I think of people who write literary fiction or memoirs it's some of the sort of people who are, writers with a capital W. I think this kind of crowdsourcing process tends to make less sense for them. Because what you're looking for is something coherent and complete and with a particular aesthetic vision. And you might not know you've got the right pieces in place until it's really been polished up. So really what you want there are, like, a few trusted readers that you're going to. A handful of people who you can really rely on. But my books are very modular. It's like I could, if this game doesn't work, I can swap it out for a different game. And yeah, as you were saying before, like the amount of work I'm expecting that person, the reader, to do on the other end of the book is much larger than, reading a memoir. Reading a memoir, I know what the experience is gonna be. You're gonna read it, you're gonna think some thoughts, you're gonna go away. Whereas a game book, like you're gonna go off and then play this game with your sister or your brother, and it's gonna... I don't know. There's hours of time potentially there that I don't really know what you're doing. You could be going off in a totally different direction than I anticipated. Katie Steckles: And I think there's possibly also an aspect of ego for some writers, that they're just like, "How could anyone possibly tell me how to write this book?" "This is just my creation that I'm gonna craft and send out there for people to enjoy." But I think with something like this, as you say, there's an element of the enjoyment of the game that happens entirely outside of your hands, right? It's the way that people play it, and the games that they have, and the interactions they have based on it. And the amount that you put in is just "Here's the structure, here's these rules," and whatever commentary you give around it. But that part of it is for them. Ben Orlin: Yeah. No, I think that's right, yeah. Yeah. There's also I think there's the perpetual war between my ego, which would like things to be exactly perfect the way I've sculpted them, and I'm gonna give you this beautiful polished thing that came out of my mind, and then the actual empirical experience I have, which is that often doesn't work and it turns out to be bad. So yeah, and teaching is also a good discipline in this, where every teacher knows you can have the most gorgeous lesson that you've planned and the most perfect explanation that you're very satisfied with, and then the human beings in the room, it doesn't help them and it doesn't work for them. And then you can cling, it's like "but in the abstract, this would've been a great explanation." And yes, but if it doesn't explain anything to anyone, then it's hard to ... it's not clear what ground you're standing on to defend it. Katie Steckles: Yeah. And I think there's also an aspect of this is what maths is like, that, like there are these ideas and these notions and games or whatever there are, but actually a lot of the richness of it is in the way that people interact with it and a particular puzzle or a game or something might mean something totally different to one person than it does to someone else. It's really nice that you give people the freedom to do that for themselves. Yeah. Ben Orlin: Yeah, no, I think that's right. And also the audience problem again. I might be picturing a slightly different reader or slightly different audience member than the ones who are actually gonna be picking up the book. And so that's why it helps to kinda send some messages out in bottles into the internet and get some people to give feedback on these things to see, is the audience member I'm picturing actually a good stand-in for the reader that's gonna wind up picking up the book. Katie Steckles: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm getting the impression you're doing this again for another book now. Ben Orlin: That's right, yes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so I'm working on a book called "Puzzle Planet" is the tentative title. It's a companion to the games book. Hopefully a smaller sibling. I'll try to have the the trim size of the hardcover be something that a human, one human can lift ideally. A coffee table book maybe in the sense that it goes on your coffee table rather than that you put it in your living room as a coffee table and then just put your cups right on it. Yeah so it's a book of puzzles which, there's a reason I did the games book first, which is that I think it was probably easier to write. Games are just like, everybody loves a game. Games are fun. Puzzles people also love, but the way they love movies or something, like everybody's got their particular taste. And it's very personal. It's very, people... And if it's not your kind of movie people get very snippy about it. So I'm finding this feedback is taking a little more patience from me to be like, "Okay it's okay that these people have different tastes than I do. This puzzle I thought was great, they don't like it. That's okay if the readers don't like it that's fair. I think the games, if you just look on sort of your five-point Likert scale I think the games just came out with higher numbers probably on average than the puzzles. Oh, actually that's probably true across the board, but some of the favorite puzzles are... Yeah, actually as I think about this, I have to go back and look at my other, my old spreadsheet. But actually I think the favorite puzzles are out-competing the favorite games. Which would probably fit with my puzzles just being kinda higher variance. Yeah. Katie Steckles: I absolutely love that you've got data analysis on this. This is something that's Ben Orlin: Oh, tons, yes ... Katie Steckles: that's produced some stats that you can now play with. Yeah. Ben Orlin: Oh, man. Yeah, it brings up a lot of really interesting statistical questions for me. So I've got to give the sort of background, I've got something like 70 puzzles that I wanted to play test. And many of them are kinda multi-part, like I've grouped it as one puzzle, but actually it's introducing a sort of Sudoku-like challenge, and then there's four or six in that type that would appear in the book. And so I sent these out to people and asked a few questions. I wanted to know, the ultimate question was overall how much do you like it? And I gave a five-point scale, which I think statisticians will tell you there's not a huge amount of psychological validity to this, particularly when you start averaging people's numbers. What does that really mean? But I think we all know what a five-point Likert scale means. Five means I loved it. Four means, yeah, I liked it. It was good. Three is like a shrug. Three's like, "Eh, it was fine. It was good." And then two and one are like, "That was bad. I don't like it." And so it's like even though in theory this could differ from person to person, and some people have higher standards, lower standards, whatever. Some people are more generous with their fives, some people are very stingy. You get an impression, especially if you get a large enough sample size. So I've been sending out the puzzles. I took my 70 puzzles, broke them into 10 batches or so, 'cause I wanted to be able to iterate. And then got, about 300 or so play testers to sign up. Sent them each one of the batches, and then looked at the feedback, and now I'm on a second round. I sent additional batches to everyone. And one, one immediate statistical question that arose is how do you rate... How do you weigh the number of ratings versus the number on the ratings? This is like if you're looking on Goodreads or something, do you want a book that's been rated 8,000 times or a book that's been rated, 180 times but it has a higher score? It's not totally obvious when you're sampling from this large world. Yeah, so I don't know. So I'm trying in my head to... I think I could probably come up with some kind of... I'm sure there's a statistical method out there to, you know Katie Steckles: Yeah ... Ben Orlin: adjust for... you could easily adjust for the regression to the mean that you get if you assume that these are being randomly assigned. And so you might get, something with fewer ratings might have a very abnormally high or abnormally low score just because of small sample size. Katie Steckles: Are you sending each puzzle to the same number of people but not getting as many responses for some? 'Cause that's also information, right? Ben Orlin: Yeah, that's exactly right. Yes, no, exactly, yeah. So I think it's not it's not just a random sample. Yeah, there's a selection effect. Katie Steckles: There's a secret sixth rating, which is "I didn't even bother to fill in the thing." Ben Orlin: Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. That's right. Yeah like I didn't try that one. And it's hard to know what to do with that. Some of the puzzles are obviously easier to tackle, and some of them are obviously more involved. So if people aren't... there's one in particular that's a sort of Sudoku-style puzzle where you've got these waffles that you're decorating. So these grids which are waffles, and you're supposed to decide where on the grid the blueberries go. And it's a pretty involved puzzle, and the people who've done it love it. They think it's great. It's one of my highest rated puzzles. And also it's only got about a third as many ratings as some of the other puzzles. Katie Steckles: Yeah. Ben Orlin: What do you do with that? And then on the other hand, also thinking about it for a book, what do you want to include in the book? Do I want to include the puzzles that are so enticing everyone tries them, and then they all go, "Eh, yeah, that was fine"? Or do I wanna include puzzles that are less attempted, but the people who do attempt them think they're great? Like a book is inherently a kind of communication for a niche audience. Like, when you create a book, you're not trying to write it for everyone 'cause people don't buy books. A book is a special thing. It's gotta be something that's special for the people picking it up. So anyway, mostly this data has been good for generating lots of unanswerable questions about the philosophy of such data gathering. But it's also been very useful for seeing yeah, which sorts of puzzles are appealing to people and then seeing, yeah, their particular feedback. There are at least a couple puzzles that the first round of feedback I got, people had a confusion or it became clear from their feedback, like I hadn't explained one of the constraints clearly. Katie Steckles: Yeah. Ben Orlin: And so there's at least two or three puzzles that on the second round of feedback, the sort of scores shot up for it because I was able to make adjustments based on the first round, and then people actually liked it once they saw what the puzzle was. Katie Steckles: Yeah it is incredible how much you can think that a set of instructions is coherent and completely, rock solid and absolutely unambiguous, and then someone'll come back and say, "Wait, you mean this?" And you're like, "Oh, I didn't, but I see now why you thought I meant that." Yeah. And this is part of the process of writing instructions for anything, right? It's just, yeah we've done puzzles for things where you're really constrained on space, so you've only got a few words to describe it, and then it's really challenging to actually get a description in there that conveys everything without being ambiguous. And obviously, if you've got mathematicians looking at it, they will find every possible way to misinterpret what you've written. Ben Orlin: Yeah. Katie Steckles: Yeah, but I guess the fact that you've got people literally telling you that and, they're in the mindset of "I'm here to test this puzzle" they will be looking for things like that, I guess Ben Orlin: yeah. No, exactly. And in fact, some of the most useful ones are people who in their feedback they'll say, "I almost thought you meant this, but obviously that wasn't it." And it's like no, that is actually what I meant. Yeah. That's it, yeah. 'Cause I've had quite a few comments of that form. There was one, a river crossing puzzle that I did that was, I just gave a new kind of a theme over the top of an old river crossing puzzle. Not THE old river crossing puzzle. That one is from the ninth century, and at this point I think people have pretty much seen the thing Katie Steckles: Yeah, it's been done Ben Orlin: with the goats and the cabbage. Yeah. Yeah, it's been done. But some other ones that were, like, invented in the 19th century that most people... So anyway, I've got one or two puzzles like that, that I'm deciding whether to include in the book that I've rethemed. And, there's one where it's like, can you have these people together for just a moment when they're getting out of the boat on the far side of the river? And the answer is no, you shouldn't, because then the puzzle's really easy. And so you'd like, it needs to be the case that no, even for a moment, even when you're just getting out of the boat and the boat is just parking for a moment on that side of the river, you can't have this combination of people. But then yeah, that's one where several, I'd say the majority of people who have done that one, who have commented on it have been like, "Yeah it's a really easy puzzle. I assume this is the rule, right?" It's like no, that wasn't the rule. But it's also, yeah, like with teaching, it's like as a teacher I always wish that it were, I could just teach and that was somehow independent of the experience of the students. I could just do a great job and it's like, eh, nobody learned anything, but I did a great job. And see that's not teaching. And similarly that's not book writing. If you're right, if I'm writing a book for a totally imaginary audience that never picks up the book or possibly is born or exists, that's not clear that I've done what I've set out to do. Katie Steckles: Yeah, that's the job of communication, is to go to where people are and make sure that they're comfortable with what you're saying and that they understand it and follow it, and yeah. It's not easy, is it I guess Ben Orlin: no yeah. Katie Steckles: Yeah. Ben Orlin: No, and it can certainly be frustrating when it's like when you have that satisfaction of having made a thing you're really proud of, and then it turns out it doesn't do what you wanted it to do. That can be frustrating. Part of the reason actually that I think this process has worked okay is I'm sending out so many puzzles. I had this batch of 70 before I got them out there, that when some of them flop, that's okay, 'cause there's others that are also doing well. If they were all flopping, I think that would be pretty discouraging. Yeah. And then my editor would probably be disappointed to hear, having paid me in advance on this book, 'cause oh, turns out nobody wants any of these puzzles, they're all terrible. That's not true, so I can handle the disappointments because there are some that are, people are liking better than I thought they might, or that are, going just as well as I hoped they would. Katie Steckles: And are you planning to whittle that down to, like, how many are you gonna fit in the final thing? Ben Orlin: Yeah, see, what I'd like to write on the cover is that there are 101 puzzles, 'cause that's a nice number. So I need to somehow put in a number of puzzles that I can count in such a way that it is 101. Katie Steckles: What's that in binary? Five. Ben Orlin: In binary? It's already in binary. I'm only doing five puzzles, actually. Katie Steckles: Yeah, five puzzles. But yeah. It sounds fantastic, and I say I got the impression you were doing this. What I meant was I got the email asking for people to test the puzzles, but I've been far too busy to join in and get on that. But I imagine the people who are doing, are having a fun time with it. And when they see the book come out, it'll be really nice to feel like they've contributed to that as well and made it what it is. Ben Orlin: No, for sure. And I've been going, people are saying really interesting things in the surveys too, so I'm trying to bold some of the feedback. I feel that sometimes people give very interesting feedback, which convinces me I should cut that puzzle, and then it's oh, sorry, you gave a great quote, but I can't get you into the book now, 'cause you convinced me not to include the puzzle. But that's okay. And then there's some of the puzzles, and just a lot of the ones actually, this might just be the kinda hardcore group I've recruited, but they don't like anything they've seen before. So if there's a classic puzzle, you rearrange the coins, turn the pyramid upside down, they're just like... It's like me trying to take a shot in basketball, and they're just slapping it down. It's like them getting blocked. No, we've seen that before. You gotta impress us with something new." Yeah, so it's been very good feedback, and it's been a nice group of people to get to hear from. Katie Steckles: Yeah. It sounds like an absolutely fantastic process, and this is just how you're gonna write all your books from now on, just crowdsource everything and make sure it's just right. Ben Orlin: That's right. Yeah. That's right, yeah. Katie Steckles: So we can put links in the show notes to all of the books you've done so far and anything else you wanna let people know about. But it's been really nice to chat to you, and yeah we look forward to seeing it when it comes out. Ben Orlin: Yeah. Thanks, Katie. I appreciate it. Katie Steckles: If you want to get involved in Ben's new book, Puzzle Planet, you can visit Ben's website at mathwithbaddrawings.com. Up next on the Talking Maths in Public podcast, the UK now has not one, but two hands-on maths discovery centres, one in Leeds, and now a new one in London. I chatted to Max Hughes and Hari Krishnan about their roles as the managers of the two centres. I'm joined by Max and Hari, who are both the heads of UK hands-on maths discovery centres, and we're here to chat about the story of this and how that's gone and how that's come to be and what is a hands-on maths discovery centre. First of all, if you wanna tell us a bit about yourselves. So first of all, Max, what's your background? Max Hughes: Yeah I'm Max. I am currently the manager of MathsWorld, London, and I suppose my background's in maths and in maths communication. So grew up in Bognor Regis on the South Coast and then headed to Leeds for my maths degree, where I was interested in doing maths communication. In 2019, I went to my first Talking Maths in Public, and the rest is history. Katie Steckles: Excellent. And Hari, do you wanna just say a bit about yourself? Hari Krishnan: I am a little bit different than Max. I studied engineering in my undergraduate and also in my postgraduate. But when I joined MathsCity, I get to explore the whole new maths communication side of the whole STEM And I really enjoyed it. Currently, I'm working as a manager at MathsCity, so it's good going so far. Katie Steckles: Yeah. I think this is what we're here to dig into. So I guess the origins of this are MathsCity was the first of these centres that existed, and that's in Leeds. And I guess, Max, you were the first person to, out of the three of us here, to be involved in that. Do you wanna tell us a bit about the history of that and how that came to be? Max Hughes: Yeah. MathsCity, so it was started long before I got involved. I think the first kind of people who were interested in it were Geoff Wain and Professor Margaret Brown worked together to set up the charity, which I think was registered as a charity in around 2013. So Geoff had been involved with the Pop Maths roadshow in 1992, so that was, like, eight years before I was born. And then eventually, yeah, 2013, the charity was set up, the business was set up and things started happening. I've got some kind of old pieces of paper here. There's a parliamentary reception in 2014 where, I don't know, Matt Parker and Rob Eastaway and folk were there hosting things, who are friends of the podcast. And so yeah, that was set up. They did lots of different things. But it was almost this kind of perfect primordial soup waiting for a spark of life to happen, and I think that spark of life, lots of people would say, came in 2019 when Dr. Katie Chicot was appointed the CEO who's got this perfect mix of everyone and started yeah, setting up the centre in which got to around 2020, and another roadshow was about to be set up, but I think they were all ready in maybe Winchester, I want to say, to have this roadshow of touring exhibits, and then 2020 happened, so that didn't go ahead. And because of 2020 though lots of shopping centres had really bad business. No one was going into city centres anymore because there was a big pandemic happening, and a space became available in Trinity Leeds which was a permanent space where MathsCity could open, and that's when I started being involved. As a student, I was an explainer when we first opened. Katie Steckles: Fantastic. So what is MathsCity, 'cause, we keep talking about this, but if someone hasn't been there what's the kind of experience that people can expect to have there? Max Hughes: It's a hands-on maths discovery centre. Every exhibit is, as I say, it's the home of hands-on maths, we call ourselves. We've got different zones focusing on code breaking, problem solving, mind and machine. We've got our chaotic earth section in our Leeds centre. So everything's hands-on, interactive, and good fun. We want to show that maths is a fun thing that you can explore. Katie Steckles: Yeah, and I guess, this is an existing established thing that you have science centres that are kind of hands-on interactive places where you can go and investigate things and play with these cool exhibits and demonstrations, and I guess this is kind of a maths version of that. Hari Krishnan: That's what I tell to people that, over the phone if I am explaining to someone about MathsCity "have you been to Wonderlab in the Science Museum Groups?" Which is everywhere in the country. There's one in Glasgow, London even in Manchester, and one in Bradford, I believe. Easy way is, most of the people have experienced a science discovery centre part of it. And I would say the MathsCity is purely focused on mathematics. Even though there are some other science elements to it, but what we wanted to emphasize is maths is fun. You can also interact with maths as well. Like people say that, "What is interaction in maths?" Yeah, there is. Come and visit us to see what we have here. Katie Steckles: Yeah. Exactly and, people think of maths as being whatever it is they learned in a classroom at school. It's partly about kind of opening that up for them a bit and showing them that there's more to it than just sitting down and doing a calculation on a piece of paper. Hari Krishnan: Exactly. Exactly. Max Hughes: Yeah, and it's new for the UK, but it's not new for kind of the world. There's been centers like that, so we are very much modelled on things like Mathematikum in Germany, which opened in 2002, MoMath in 2012. So we're the first people to do it here but it's very much a worldwide phenomenon that we're almost slightly behind on. Katie Steckles: Yeah, if New York can have MoMath, we should definitely be able to have something in the UK. 'Cause the, the maths communication scene here is pretty strong and, there's lots of people who'd be interested in this. And as you say, it's been a long sort of slow process to put this together. But yeah, it's fantastic that MathsCity was established in Leeds, and I guess you say it was originally in Trinity Shopping Centre. It was there for several years, I believe, and then it's moved to a new location now. Max Hughes: Yes. That's where Hari gets involved. Katie Steckles: Yeah. So Hari, tell us about the new MathsCity, yeah. Hari Krishnan: As Max said we had to move from Trinity to this new place. Katie Chicot has been instrumental in finding this new location and getting us all moved to this place. Max as well. We had quite a big bit of a, like up and down when we were moving. There's a lot of difficulties in moving the large exhibits, but we had fun. Katie Steckles: Yeah. And I guess the, the new centre is not within a shopping centre like the other one was. It's more of a kind of separate building on its own. Hari Krishnan: It is more of a separate building. We are in a ground floor of an office building. It's called the Zurich House. What people see outside is just an office block. But when you come inside, you would experience all this jaw-dropping exhibits that we have available. Katie Steckles: Yeah I guess it's difficult because you end up with, you've got stuff in the windows, like I've been outside the building and seen what it looks like, and you've got signs in the windows that say, "This is MathsCity." There's lots of pictures of shapes and cool things. But if you're not sure what that means, I guess it's slightly harder to just drop in. But I guess equally in the shopping centre location, it was a kind of a shop front that just said MathsCity on it, and if you didn't know what that was, maybe you wouldn't know what was inside. But I guess there's an element of that, that kind of wants to invite people to explore, if you hear the word MathsCity, it's quite a nice name for it because there's definitely maths going on, but it's also some kind of attraction, right? It's like a visitor attraction that involves maths somehow. But yeah, so what kind of things do you have in the current centre? What's your favourite bits in there that people can come and play with? Hari Krishnan: We have like little puzzle things that on the face of it, it seems very difficult. It all based on a tetrahedron shape where you have little connected ball things that you need to place as a tetrahedron or little shapes that you need to place as a tetrahedron, right? It sounds simple. When you look at the objects, everyone finds it Like, how does it happen? How does it happen? And I have this little explanation that for on the side of that table of puzzles, we have a ring of fire where we have a tetrahedron acrylic thing. Which I can show them how this shape could be made into this little puzzles. And once I show them, everyone was like, "Oh, that's fantastic. How does people think about it?" I'm like, "Yeah that's also maths, so if you wanted to think deeply about it." That's one of my favourite things like explaining things and also people looking at it and coming up with the different solutions. I don't give them everyone the clues, but I would like to see how different people think with that object. Katie Steckles: Yeah, and I think that's a nice thing to explore 'cause, yeah, maths is about this sort of thinking in ways that help you to solve problems and that help you to break things down and understand them. And it is really nice that you've got both this object that people can pick up and play with, and they don't... apart from you've gotta try and make this shape, there's no instructions about how to do that, so they can just try it and move it around and do different things. But then you've also got this nice analogy for it that is actually a separate exhibit. The ring of fire, is this sort of circular hole with lasers across it that you can place an object in and it will draw a line that's almost the cross-section of that object. And if you have a transparent tetrahedron, yeah, you can really see those cross-sections and see what shapes you get when you do that. And it shows that connection. I think that's really nice that people can see these connections between different bits of maths in a really visual and hands-on way. 'Cause there is something really powerful about interacting with something, getting hands-on, and actually doing it yourself rather than just being told something like this. So yeah, that's really nice. Hari Krishnan: Exactly. Katie Steckles: Fantastic. Around about the same time that Maths City moved from one bit of Leeds to a slightly different bit of Leeds it's the same distance from the train station but in a different direction, right? It's not far. But at the same time that move was happening, there was also another thing going on down in London. So Max, do you wanna tell us about Maths World and how that came about? Max Hughes: Yeah, that was a very busy couple of weeks of my life. I was helping Hari move everything from the Leeds centre to the new Leeds centre, and then a week later I moved down to London, there's a railway arch in Southwark, to set this place up. So I arrived, there was a bunch of, exhibits all in their packaging, and it was my job to turn this kind of empty railway arch into a working centre, which was very exciting. This is Maths World. It's two storeys so slightly bigger than our current centre in Leeds, and it's very exciting Katie Steckles: Yeah. Fantastic. And I think, some Talking Maths in Public members will have been to the London centre as well. But yeah there's a lot of similar... There's some things in common with what's going on in Leeds, but there's also some different exhibits that you don't have in both places. So what's your favourite thing in MathsWorld, Max? Max Hughes: Ooh, that's a good question. Yeah, we deliberately tried to pick the everyone's favourite exhibits from Leeds, so we have them in both centres. So there's the giant bubble, which everyone loves, where you can go inside a bubble which makes the shape of a catenoid. The sandpit, interactive sandpit is always good fun, and then some of the puzzles. Then my favourite new exhibit might be the elliptical billiards table where you can there's two points on that where you can always hit one point wherever you hit it off the side from the other which is very cool. And the whole codebreaking section's a really nice zone where we've connected it all together with this board of animals you need to find. So I like we're very much starting to try some real cohesive zones in the centre as well. Katie Steckles: Yeah. And I guess that's nice 'cause then there's a bunch of things that are all related to each other that people can go around and do them all, and it feels like a kind of a process. A thing that I'm wondering about is what is it like for from your perspective, as the person who's running it, what do visitors, how do they interact with it? Do they come in and try and do everything, or do they just, are they a bit cautious about it, or, what's your experience of that? Max Hughes: It really does range depending on the visitor. But I think especially with school groups, you get kids run in and try and just jump from one exhibit to another really quickly, and then when they actually realise they've got a bit of time, they settle down and actually give the exhibits the time they deserve. So I think sometimes there's lots of excitement when you come in the door. There's lots of colours. There's a big dodecahedron that's just bright and colourful in the entrance, so you get very excited. And then I think it takes, sometimes it takes a few minutes just to calm down and be like, "Ah, this is actually really cool if I focus on the maths as well." Katie Steckles: Yeah. Fantastic. And that kind of idea of making it very big and visual and interactive, I imagine that as Hari was saying, there's some people who are, like, not kind of tying that in with their experience of what maths is. It doesn't really feel like you're doing maths while you're there 'cause you're just playing and having fun with stuff. Do you often get people saying, "This isn't maths"? Max Hughes: We do. I think Hari will probably get the same in Leeds as well, but you have to justify to students. Hari Krishnan: Yeah, exactly. Max Hughes: It's a kind of frustrating question, but it's a nice question because it allows us to answer exactly why everything's to do with maths. So it's a good entry point for a conversation. So I enjoy it. Katie Steckles: Yeah. Potentially, so you're expanding that perception of people of what maths is but you're also providing a really enjoyable experience that they can then mentally associate with the idea of maths as well. Max Hughes: Yeah, and I think it's like a question whether we call ourselves Maths World as well because we've got maths in the name. It might turn off some people who don't like maths, but also I think it's really important that the people here explicitly know that they've been having fun with maths, and that's in the title. So there's a bit of a balance between whether you have maths straight there in the name, but I think we've fallen on the right side just to make it as explicit as possible that the people here are having fun with maths. Katie Steckles: Yeah, and that's absolutely wonderful. So I guess there'll be a difference in potentially scale between the two centres, because London is a much bigger city, and there's a lot of visitors there, a lot of tourists. I'm assuming you've got a very different scale of kind of footfall and numbers and that kind of thing between the two. Max Hughes: Yeah. I think for the London Centre, we're getting about five times, maybe even more by the end of the year, as many visitors. So we've been open for seven months and had about 40,000 visitors. I think when I was manager of Maths City in Leeds, we were getting about 10,000 a year. So 40,000 in seven months is a big difference and it's a very stressful difference. Katie Steckles: I can imagine, yeah. Hari Krishnan: It is still the same at Maths City, around 10 to 15,000 per year. But we are happy that we are still keeping the numbers same even though we moved from a busy footfall mall to a separate building, it's been going good. Katie Steckles: And I guess, are you still, 'cause I know you do a lot of extra events for things like half-term to try and encourage people to come in. Is that something you're still doing in the new centre as well? Hari Krishnan: Yes. We are still doing plenty of new extra activities just for our half-term, whether it's Halloween, a Halloween-themed half-term, where we showed how bats could navigate. Even last week, when it was a May half-term, we got an external person coming in and doing a giant drawing machine where you can sketch yourself into a tiny A4 sheet paper, which is quite, quite nice. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. It's not what you see everywhere. It's a pretty unique thing. We're happy that we had that for the week. Katie Steckles: Yeah. That sounds fantastic. And I guess you have similar things at Maths World in London, Max? Max Hughes: Yeah, similar. But actually, Hari's been doing some very exciting things 'cause he's got this engineering background. So all of the October stuff was all kind of, he's 3D printing some very cool bits and pieces. So I'm jealous of what's going on in Leeds at the moment. But we've also been able to introduce a series of lates events in London, just because there's a bit more of that kind of culture and a bigger population to get people through the doors. So once a month we're getting a maths communicator in to do a good long kind of one-hour talk, and then people can explore the centre as well. And that can be an opportunity to get some adults in the centre without any toddlers running about. Katie Steckles: Yeah. And there's that breadth of it as well that I know, small kids will find it exciting to go and play with these things, but also as an adult, it's also quite great to just go around and you can quite contemplatively almost explore these ideas because there's no... it's not like a talk where you're being told things or a TV programme you're watching where you keep up with it. It's just you and a piece of maths that you can interact with. Hari Krishnan: This experience, I'm pretty sure Max had that as well, is how they come in as a family. They thought it's for the kids, MathsCity, it's for the kids, and the kids gonna go enjoy, and we're gonna be sitting on our phone in the corner. But that's not what happened. They come in, and they got distracted by these awesome things, and, "I wanna do this." And kids will be doing something else. And when the kid is stuck with something, they will come up to the parents and pull their hands, "You have to come with me and help me out." Or "Oh, no, I'm doing this thing, I can't come right now." Okay. It's that kind of things everyone get to enjoy at Maths City. Katie Steckles: Yeah. Oh, that's wonderful. That's really nice to hear. So I guess, other things that I'm thinking about that people might be interested to know, so I guess you're both kind of the manager of these centres. And then underneath you have a team of explainers that work to talk to people that come in. To what extent are you and the explainers involved in designing new ideas and creating new stuff and new exhibits to go in the centres? Max Hughes: We've got a bit of a say. Our content manager for Maths World UK, so the overall charity, so that's both the Leeds and London centres, is James Grime, who lots of people might know from Numberphile. And so he does lots of kind of the exhibits as well as writes all the panels. So if you're reading something in Maths World or Math City, it's written by James. That kind of, he works alongside, because we're a charity as well, we've got this kind of board of different kind of trustees. We've got a programming group as well that goes by. So it's a big cumulative decision with everyone from kind of the ground upwards. And that kind of, that panel of trustees has got years and years of experience in maths communication. So it's a collaborative effort. Katie Steckles: Fantastic. And Hari do you get to feed into anything at all? I've heard about your wonderful engineering input. Hari Krishnan: So as soon as I joined Katie Chicot said she wants to get some of my expertise in engineering into new exhibits. So we started a separate group for engineering exhibits, and we've been talking to Royal Society of Engineers and people who are part of royal Society of Engineers who are currently working in the industries to come up with different ideas that we can implement in Maths City. It's ongoing at the moment. There's been a few meetings, and I also have asked my enablers if they have any ideas to input as well, so just so that they feel that they have some input into the new exhibits. Katie Steckles: Yeah. And, that's fantastic as well, 'cause I guess the explainers are on the ground, interacting with the public in a very face-to-face kind of way. But also them feeling like they're involved as well I guess helps them to feel a bit more like they have agency and that they're helping to create this experience for people. Hari Krishnan: Yeah. The whole charity, everyone is working together to show people that maths is fun. Everyone gets to be involved, and that's a good thing. Katie Steckles: Fantastic. Thank you so much to both of you for chatting to us. And if people want to go and visit Maths World or Maths City, we'll put links in the show notes under the podcast to the websites for both and to any of the other things that we've mentioned. But yeah I really hope that these things continue to go on and get bigger and get more popular and provide this fantastic experience for people. Max Hughes: Thank you very much. Yeah, we hope so too. Hari Krishnan: Thank you. Thank you for having me as well. Katie Steckles: Thanks again to Max and Hari for chatting to us about getting hands-on with maths. That's all for this episode of the Talking Maths in Public podcast. Head to talkingmathsinpublic.uk/podcast for more episodes, to suggest your ideas for future podcast segments, and to find out more about the TMIP network. Tune into the next episode for more mathematical communication inspiration James Grime: The Talking Maths in Public podcast is presented and edited by Katie Steckles, and funded by the International Centre for the Mathematical Sciences. The music is For Her by Liderc on Pixabay.