If anyone has any idea where to find an online archived stream of the broadcast, I'd appreciate it.
While the top side of math may be a bit wigged out. Further down the esoteric scale all kinds of unsolvable problems have been solved in recent years and the trend looks to be excellerating as computers for the first time have done for mathematicians what the telescope did for astronomers, the microscope did for biologists etc. The mathematicians with the computer for the first time in history have a power tool.
I have a blog on water desalination research
http://nick2.wordpress.com/
One of the things that I'm calling for is that the federal scientists predict that the cost of water desalination will drop to 1/10th of today's cost in 10 years. Thereby making it economically possible to turn the deserts of the world green and double the size of the habitable planet. The reason this can be done with confidence is that the feds are mandating that supercomputers be 1000 times more powerful than those of today which are in turn 1000 times more powerful than the supercomputers of 10 years ago. This in turn increases the power of the power tools the mathematicians use. The feds are also funding intensely exotic mathematical research which will form the basis for future algorithms that lay at the heart of software.
The hardware and software will give the feds and sundry large companies -- at first -- the power to design materials at will.