Allen Farrington

In this first-ever guest episode of Magic Internet Math, Rob Hamilton and I (Brian Hirschfield) welcome author and thinker Allen Farrington for an unfiltered tour through math as a liberal art, why rigor matters more than vibes, and how curiosity—not applications—often drives real progress. We trade stories about learning (and unlearning) math, from the lore of the irrationality of √2 and CP Snow’s Two Cultures, to Paul Lockhart’s Mathematician’s Lament, Joel David Hamkins’ philosophy of mathematics, and the perennial tug-of-war between pure and applied work. We also dig into education: what good teaching feels like, why boredom or excessive difficulty turn students off, and how letting people “cook” can build conviction and genuine understanding.

From elliptic curves to hash functions, we connect math to Bitcoin without turning into “I f’ing love science” cosplay. Allen throws down a challenge on explaining why hash functions have the properties we rely on (beyond just how they’re built or what they do), teeing up our next series. Along the way we touch cryptography culture, modular arithmetic, the modularity theorem vs. Fermat’s Last Theorem credit, and how AI tools help—and fail—when you push past the training data. Come for the banter; stay for the foundations, the philosophy, and the mission to create shareholder value by going pointlessly deep in order to build practical tools later.

• 'Allen Farrington – Bitcoin is Venice': https://bitcoinisvenice.com/
• 'AnchorWatch (company)': https://anchorwatch.com/
• 'Joel David Hamkins – personal site': https://jdh.hamkins.org/
• 'Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics (Joel David Hamkins)': https://jdh.hamkins.org/lectures-on-the-philosophy-of-mathematics/
• 'Lex Fridman Podcast – Joel David Hamkins episode (show hub)': https://lexfridman.com/podcast/
• 'C. P. Snow – The Two Cultures (overview)': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
• 'Paul Lockhart – A Mathematician’s Lament (book page)': https://blpress.org/books/a-mathematicians-lament/
• 'The Cult of Statistical Significance (Ziliak & McCloskey) – publisher page': https://press.umich.edu/Books/T/The-Cult-of-Statistical-Significance2
• 'Learn Me A Bitcoin (educational site)': https://learnmeabitcoin.com/
• 'NIST FIPS 180-4 – Secure Hash Standard (SHA-256 etc.)': https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/fips/180/4/final
• 'RFC 1321 – The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm': https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1321
• 'NIST guidance on SHA-1 (project page)': https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/hash-functions/sha-1
• 'Andrew Poelstra – Blockstream profile': https://blockstream.com/team/andrew-poelstra/
• 'Jonas Nick – Blockstream profile': https://blockstream.com/team/jonas-nick/
• 'Peter Wuille (sipa) – GitHub': https://github.com/sipa
• 'MathOverflow (research Q&A)': https://mathoverflow.net/
• 'Math Girls (Hiroshi Yuki) – publisher page': https://bentobooks.com/math-girls/
• 'Range (David Epstein) – publisher page': https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557690/range-by-david-epstein/