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Meet the Hosts
It all begins with an idea, maybe some magic and math too!
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Noah Giansiracusa is a mathematician and public communicator who makes the algorithms shaping everyday life—AI, media, finance, and technology—clear and human. A professor at Bentley University and faculty associate at Harvard, he’s a JPBM Communications Award winner and the author of How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News and Robin Hood Math. Noah brings sharp insight, optimism, and a gift for making math feel accessible.
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Autumn is an engineering professor, industrial engineer/applied mathematician, artist, and marketing expert. She blends mathematics, storytelling, and organizational leadership to make complex ideas accessible and engaging. Beyond the classroom and the mic, she helps others clarify their voice and build influence, turning abstract ideas into powerful personal brands.
Breaking Math: Where Numbers Get
WILD!
Textbooks got you down? Equations making your head spin? Buckle up, because Breaking Math is here to show you the wild side of numbers! We’re your fearless guides, Autumn Phaneuf and Noah Giansiracusa, and we’re on a mission to prove math is way more than dusty textbooks and boring drills.
We didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming “math people.” For a long time, math felt like something to get through—worksheets, memorization, and right answers under time pressure.
And then something shifted.
Math stopped being about calculation and started being about structure, systems, and the invisible logic underneath technology, science, history—and increasingly, the digital world we’re all living in.
That’s where Breaking Math’s new season comes in.
We’re Autumn and Noah, and this show is about making complex ideas legible without flattening them. We talk about mathematics the way it actually shows up today: in algorithms and artificial intelligence, in cryptography and blockchain, in networks, games, data, and decisions. Not as buzzwords—but as tools for understanding how modern systems behave, succeed, and sometimes fail.
Autumn, as an engineer, has a knack for spotting math where people least expect it—inside art, storytelling, robotics, social systems, engineering, and everyday technologies we rarely question. Noah brings the precision of a working mathematician who loves unpacking ideas until the mystery gives way to clarity: social media, finance, AI, tech, algorithms, and the list goes on. Together, we translate big, abstract concepts into stories you can actually hold onto.
On Breaking Math, we talk with researchers, authors, experts, and thinkers who are building the future—or trying to make sense of it. We explore how AI learns (and mislearns), why blockchain works the way it does, how models shape decisions, and what happens when mathematical systems collide with human values.
This isn’t math as gatekeeping. It’s math as literacy, power, and a way to see the world more clearly.
If you’ve ever felt curious about AI, confused by crypto, skeptical of tech hype, or just wanted someone to explain the why behind the systems running your life—this show is for you.
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No equations required. Just curiosity.