Please don’t Delete: Maths Dialogues
A cycle of meetings to talk about moments in the history of mathematics and aspects of its method. With a style that is not necessarily technical, the aim is to highlight the cultural, aesthetic, creative, playful and didactic value of hypothetical-deductive thinking and the actuality of the landscapes it is able to draw.
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Last Meeting
On 22/10/26, the 12th meeting of the cycle Please don’t Delete: Maths Dialogues was held with Marco Malvaldi as speaker.
Title: Reverends, networks and crimes
Abstract: What is the probability that the lawn is wet if it is raining? And what is the probability that it has rained if the lawn is wet? They are not the same thing, and we all know that. We can work from one probability to the other by correctly applying Bayes’ theorem, and that is something we already know.
Finally, we can apply Bayes’ theorem in a structured and sequential manner, within a decision tree that incorporates prior probabilities, such as when we’re trying to reconstruct the facts of a case in civil or criminal proceedings. And that’s a right mess. To ensure that this approach truly helps us, rather than merely resulting in a deluge of numbers that may agree with us in some incomprehensible way, we need to understand how to assemble and dismantle that network. How its hierarchy is organised, how its modules communicate with each other, and how to approximate our beliefs about the world as accurately as possible, in as much detail as is sensibly achievable.
The meeting will be held in Room U1-10 (U1 Building | Piazza della Scienza 1, Milano) and will be introduced by Prof. Gianmario Tessitore, Director of the Department.
The video of the meeting will be published shortly
Marco Malvaldi studied chemistry at the University of Pisa, where he graduated, obtained his PhD and worked as a research fellow. He established himself in Italian fiction with the “BarLume” series, featuring the investigations of barman Massimo and a group of elderly customers, which later became a popular television series produced by Sky Cinema. Alongside his crime fiction, which also includes the “Artusian” novels featuring Pellegrino Artusi, from “Odore di chiuso” (2011) to “Il borghese Pellegrino”, he has for years been engaged in disseminating scientific knowledge, from the mathematics of “Le due teste del tiranno” to “Il secondo principio”, “La direzione del pensiero” and “Scimmia Sapiens”. He has co-authored a series of crime novels and children’s books with Samantha Bruzzone, and the novel “Vento in scatola” (2019) with the inmate Glay Ghammouri. His most recent publications include “La regina dei sentieri” (2024), “Piomba libera tutti” (2025) and, in 2026, “L’uomo vestito di arancione. Sei casi al BarLume”, “Scimmia Sapiens” and “La scala di seta”.