Yes, I know I’m a Geek

I like Math. I know that’s proof positive that I’m a nerd, but I’m OK with that. I like it anyway.

I’ve been interested in Math and Science since highschool and, even though I have a degree in Music and Theology, I tutor highschoolers in those disciplines in the evenings.

I like to play around with math software like SageMath and Geogebra as well as math typesetting software like $\LaTeX$ .

Festival of the Spoken Nerd

You can imagine my delight, then, when I discovered Festival of the Spoken Nerd on youtube. This British trio are a mathematician/stand-up comic (Matt Parker), a physicist/musician (Helen Arney) and a science presenter (Steve Mould) with a live comedy show that’s an awful lot of fun for math and science geeks like me.

I watched several videos from their live shows on YouTube and then bought a couple of the show videos they have for sale on the website. Awesome! Fun for the whole family (I’m afraid I’ve corrupted my sons with a love of math and science as well ;-) ).

Their show involves such shenanigans as:

Giant smoke rings,

extended jokes about graphs and spreadsheets,

and smashing wine glasses.

Stand-Up Maths#

What I enjoyed most, though, was Matt Parker. His inimitable and infectiously jovial manner and his obvious love for teaching anyone who will listen about math are hard to resist. He never fails to make me laugh.

Matt has a YouTube channel called Stand-Up Maths on which he shares everything from his annual Pi-day $\pi$ calculations (here is his latest offering ) to finding knots in the London Underground .

He has travelled to Boston to see the bridge measured in Smoots,

to Sydney in his native Australia to calculate the angles of parking spaces,

and to Los Angeles to find the location of a spike in crime and Null Island.

I always smile when I see that he has a new video. His channel is one of the few for which I have notifications turned on. He also has a second channel that goes more in-depth into the topics he covers.

Author Extraordinaire#

Not only does Matt participate in a live comedy show and maintain a YouTube channel, but he’s also an author. He published ‘Things to Make and do in the Fourth Dimension ’ in 2015, and more recently a book about historical math mistakes called ‘Humble Pi ’.

He’s been promoting Humble Pi for quite awhile which such videos as

and

Take some time to look Matt up on YouTube and at his website standupmaths.com . I hope you’ll enjoy his brand of comedy and education as much as I do.