Simon Singh

speaker

239 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2013 last heard Jan 2015

Simon Singh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · WS MoreOrLess: The numbers of 2013 - part 1 · 28 Dec 2013 podcast

Now, that's my number of the year.

And it's my number of the year because nobody knows the pancake number for 20 pancakes.

Yeah, very much so, because what you're looking at is you're reordering data in a way.

You can look at it from a computer scientist's point of view.

They would want to know, look, we've got a pile of data, it's in the wrong order.

How quickly can we reorder it?

So computer scientists are interested.

And biologists are interested because you can get...

sequences of genes.

I think it's something like the cabbage and the turnip have very similar genes, but in a different order.

They've been pancake flipped.

So the speed at which that can happen from an evolutionary point of view depends on the number of flips required to reorder them.

So evolutionary biologists are interested too.

And Simon, why did you get interested in pancakes in the first place?

So I got interested because... Apart from that they're completely delicious.

Yeah.

Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

Well, there are two people, two famous people who've tried to tackle this problem.

One of them is Bill Gates.

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