The Joy of Why

Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine•quantamagazine.org

“The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologist and author Janna Levin take turns interviewing leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time. New episodes are released every other Wednesday.

Quanta Magazine is a Pulitzer Prize–winning, editorially independent online publication launched and supported by the Simons Foundation to illuminate big ideas in science and math through public service journalism. Quanta’s reporters and editors focus on developments in mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and the basic life sciences, emphasizing timely, accurate, in-depth and well-crafted articles for its broad discerning audience. In 2023, Steven Strogatz received a National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications partly for his work on “The Joy of Why.”

Last refreshed: June 25th, 2026 at 10:33 AM ⓘ

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Episodes

What Is the Positive Grassmannian and Why Does It Show Up Everywhere?

What links certain mathematical models of traffic flow, shallow-water waves, and quantum particle scattering? The surprising answer lies in a corner of the algebraic combinatorics world that goes by the name of positive Grassmannian. In simple terms, the positive Grassmannian is a shape that classifies other shapes. Remarkably, pieces of the positive Grassmannian can be reassembled in forms that reveal shared structures in these and many other seemingly unrelated mathematical systems. That we kn...

Jun 25, 2026•52 min

What’s the Future of Gene Editing?

One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is a form of immune system that evolved in bacteria more than a billion years ago to defend against persistent viral threats. Under attack, bacteria can snip a small fragment of a virus’s DNA, store it in the CRISPR region of their genome, and then use it to recognize and destroy the same virus if it returns. The CRISPR-Ca...

Jun 11, 2026•51 min•Season 5Ep. 1

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