Relatively Prime: Stories from the Mathematical Domain

Sorry for the late episode this month, but your intrepid host and producer Samuel Hansen had to go and get himself concussed at his day job. This means he was not able to put together the episode he was planning on releasing, not to worry though he has some tricks up his sleeve. As you may know March 2017 is the month of #TryPod, where podcasts from all over are banding together to convince their listeners to help raise awareness of podcasts by suggesting podcasts to friends and family they may like. This meant that while Samuel was unable to put together a show himself this month he figured why not do a #TryPod for all his listeners and feature an episode of one of his favorite mathematical podcasts The Other Half(To be fully above board Samuel is the Executive Producer and Editor of The Other Half, but all of the genius of the show is fully down to the knowledge and skills and the two amazing hosts Anna Haensch and Annie Rorem).

After a conference Anna attended this summer, during which she and her colleagues considered whether they could legally protect the work they produced, we began to wonder: To what extent can math be considered—and protected as—intellectual property?

Already comfortable with mathematical logic and reasoning, we turned to Sarah Wasserman Rajec from William & Mary Law School to help us approach this topic using logic and reason from the legal standpoint.  As we work out an answer in Math and Patent Law, we yuck it up about upstream innovation, a very important encryption algorithm, prime factorization, and whether math is created, invented or…just a matter of eyesight.