We love to claim that we’re engineers and yet sometimes we have no clue how technology we use really works and what its limitations are… quite often because understanding those limitations would involve diving pretty deep into math (graphs, queuing and system reliability quickly come to mind).

On the other hand, mathematicians love to work on abstract problems that seem totally disconnected from reality until someone figures out how to use them for something totally unexpected like asymmetric key systems.

We discussed these topics in a lively chat with Rachel Traylor, mathematician firmly grounded in reality (she worked at Lockheed Martin and Dell EMC). You can enjoy it as Episode 96 of Software Gone Wild, and discover more of her work @ The Math Citadel (I would highly recommend reading her blog posts).

Even more fun

• Hardy and Ramanujan in A Brief History of Mathematics (the podcast I mentioned during our chat)