Stand-up Maths

Stand-up Maths is the channel of Matt Parker, who describes himself as someone who does mathematics and stand-up comedy. He is also known for books and live shows about maths.

The videos take a single puzzle, claim or curiosity and dig into it properly. That might be an old calculation error, a fair way to share things, or a piece of code that runs far too slowly. Matt often writes programs to test ideas and invites viewers to improve them. The tone is funny and friendly, but the maths is real and is worked through on screen. Viewers are often credited when they find a better answer, which makes the channel feel like a shared project.

Some highlights include:

Matt shares how viewers rewrote his slow word puzzle program until it ran billions of percent faster.

A look at how a maths mistake survived for around 1,200 years before anyone spotted it.

An exploration of why some ways of dividing things fairly turn out to be mathematically impossible.

The channel has over 1.3 million subscribers.

Every branch of engineering runs on maths, and this channel shows maths as something to play with rather than just revise. The coding videos are a good taste of software engineering and algorithm design. It suits students thinking about maths, computer science or any engineering degree that values careful problem solving. It also shows that being wrong in public, and then fixing it, is part of good work.