#25 Mathematics

Episode twenty-five of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is entirely about mathematics, and it is every bit as soporific as that sounds. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a bedtime podcast, or simply something deeply monotone to drift off to, this episode will do the job with the quiet efficiency of a very reliable calculator. We cover the history of mathematics from the Lebombo bone - a forty-three-thousand-year-old baboon fibula with notches in it - all the way through to Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and we do it in the most unhurried, meandering, and gently sleep-inducing way possible. Along the way we spend time with zero, pi, the golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence, Euclid's Elements, Srinivasa Ramanujan and his famous taxi number one thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz arguing about calculus, the Monty Hall problem, the Riemann hypothesis, statistics, number theory, and a classroom radiator that sounded like a small animal getting comfortable. This is a podcast for people who enjoy falling asleep to calm, slow, slightly nerdy talk. It is also for people who find mathematics interesting in a distant, theoretical way but have no particular desire to do any of it. If you have ever been lulled toward sleep by the sound of someone explaining something you don't quite need to understand, this is the podcast for you. It is suitable for people dealing with sleeplessness, insomnia, racing thoughts at night, or anyone who simply enjoys monotone spoken word as a sleep aid. It is also perfectly suited to people who sleep just fine but like having something playing quietly in the background that it is completely acceptable to miss entirely. Nothing important happens. Nothing is resolved. The numbers just keep going, and so does the podcast, until it doesn't. We are enormously proud of how boring this is. If you would like to suggest a topic for a future episode, ask a question, or simply send a message into the void, you can reach us at [email protected]. We currently have forty-four subscribers, which is a number that is, fittingly, the sum of the first nine integers. Subscribe if you like. It will take three seconds and you will feel mildly satisfied in a way that is difficult to explain. Keywords for the algorithmically inclined: sleep podcast, bedtime podcast, boring podcast, fall asleep fast, sleep aid podcast, insomnia podcast, mathematics history, history of numbers, Ramanujan, Euclid, pi, golden ratio, Fibonacci, Gödel, calculus, number theory, sleep meditation alternative, monotone voice sleep, talk me to sleep, boring facts, sleep stories for adults.