Surprises from rubbing the wrong way
A public lecture by Tadashi Tokieda
February 7, 2024
Wolfensohn Hall

Friction, stickiness, jamming, . . . we tend to poohpooh at these conditions as spoilers which dull life. This lecture, however, will perform many tabletop demos and share a maximal diversity of counterintuitive phenomena that pop out of these conditions, and to understand them via minimal, sometimes profound, models. Some of the demos are such that you can enjoy them with friends and family as easy magic tricks.

Tadashi Tokieda is a professor of mathematics at Stanford. He grew up in Japan as a painter, became a classical philologist (not to be confused with philosopher) in France, and has been an applied mathematician in England and America. He is active in outreach, especially via the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the youtube channel Numberphile.