Weierstrass

“For us, it's much easier to answer this yes-or-no question than to answer how many big clusters do we see of this or this size,” says Benedikt Jahnel, a mathematician at the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics in Berlin.

Weierstrass wanted to know whether there was a limit to how not differentiable a continuous function could be, and this example shows that it can be pretty darn non-differentiable!

Since Weierstrass first published his curves, other mathematicians have defined more such monsters, and even proved that in a sense, most continuous curves are nowhere-differentiable.

You’ll have to check out the episode to see why Orlin thinks molecular gastronomy is the ideal accompaniment to Weierstrass’s function.

Orlin decided to talk not about a theorem but about a favorite mathematical object, Weierstrass’s function.