Maths for Kids / Maths is Not Boring: The Kids Maths Podcast

Have you ever wondered how you might be connected to a baker in Peru or a fisherman in Japan? It sounds like magic, but it is actually math! In 1929, a Hungarian writer named Frigyes Karinthy came up with a wild idea: that every single person on Earth is connected by just a few invisible handshakes! Decades later in 1967, an American scientist named Stanley Milgram decided to test this theory in real life. He asked people in the middle of the United States to mail folders to a specific stockbroker in Boston, but they could only pass the mail to someone they knew personally! Believe it or not, the folders that successfully made it there took an average of only five or six steps! This incredible pattern is called a Small-World Network, and it explains how funny jokes, catchy songs, and even the common cold spread so incredibly fast. Join Mira and Finn on this mind-expanding episode as they uncover the hidden web that links the entire world together! You will never look at a crowd of strangers the same way again!

Have you ever played a game of Battleships, looked at a secret pirate treasure map, or watched a little red pin drop on a smartphone map? If so, you have used coordinates! But what exactly are they, and who invented this amazing invisible grid? Join Mira and Finn as they uncover the magic of the Cartesian grid!

Travel all the way back to the year 1637 to meet René Descartes, a brilliant French thinker who loved sleeping in until noon. Legend has it that while he was staring at his ceiling from his cozy bed, he watched a tiny fly crawl across the roof and wondered how to describe exactly where it was. His big idea? You only need two numbers—how far across, and how far up—to pin down any spot on a flat page!

Discover how this one simple idea built a magical bridge between shapes and numbers, and how another clever thinker named Pierre de Fermat had the exact same idea at the same time. Tune in to find out how an invisible web of lines secretly runs our modern world!

Imagine you are a Roman general holding a piece of parchment, but all the words are a completely jumbled mess! Did the messenger drop it in a puddle? No! You are holding a top-secret message locked by Julius Caesar himself! Join Mira and Finn as we travel back two thousand years to Ancient Rome to uncover the amazing mathematical secret behind the famous Caesar shift. Discover how sliding the alphabet over by just three letters created a giant game of hide-and-seek between clever code-makers and code-breakers! We will find out how Caesar's great-nephew Augustus used his own sneaky cipher, and how this brilliant ancient trick started a race that lasted all the way to Alan Turing and the brilliant code-breakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. But the race isn't over yet! Did you know you use super-powered secret ciphers every single day? Find out how the exact same idea protects the text messages and video calls you make right now! Get ready to crack the code and discover the incredible math hiding right inside your pocket!

Have you ever noticed that manhole covers on the street are almost always round? It turns out, this isn't just a random design choice—it is a life-saving piece of maths! If a manhole cover were square, it could accidentally tilt and slip diagonally right down the hole, crashing into the dark sewer below! But a circle is a special shape with "constant width." That means no matter which way you turn it, measure it, or tip it, it is exactly the same distance across. It can never fall in! But hold onto your hats, because circles aren't the only shapes with this math magic. In the 1870s, a German engineer named Franz Reuleaux discovered weird, bulging, curved-sided shapes that also have constant width! Even though they have corners, they can roll completely flat! Join Mira and Finn as they uncover the incredible secrets of Reuleaux polygons. You will even learn how the bumpy, seven-sided British fifty pence coin tricks vending machines into thinking it is perfectly round! Get ready to look at the streets and your piggy bank in a totally new way!

Have you ever tried to guess how many sweets are in a giant glass jar? It is super tricky! Usually, if you ask just one person, their guess is way off. But what if you asked hundreds of people and put all their wrong guesses together? Could they magically find the exact right answer?

Join Mira and Finn on a time-traveling trip back to a bustling country fair in Plymouth, England, in the year 1906! Right in the middle of the fair was a massive, heavy ox. A curious scientist named Francis Galton watched as 787 people paid a tiny coin to guess the giant animal's weight. Some guesses were way too high, and some were way too low. But when Galton lined up every single piece of cardboard and found the exact middle guess, something unbelievable happened! The crowd’s middle guess was 1,207 pounds, missing the real weight by less than one percent!

Discover the amazing mathematical magic of estimation, learn what a "median" is, and find out why the "wisdom of the crowd" means that we are always smarter when we work together! You will be a master at guessing games!

Have you ever wondered what happens if you wander around completely by chance? Imagine a tiny ant on a giant, endless flat grid. At every single corner, she rolls a four-sided dice to decide which way to go: left, right, forwards, or backwards! Do you think she will ever find her way back home? Amazingly, mathematician George Pólya proved that the answer is YES! Given enough time, she is mathematically guaranteed to step on her exact starting spot again!

But what if she was a bird flying up and down in the sky? The rules completely change! In 3D space, a random wanderer only has a one-in-three chance of getting home, and will probably get lost forever! Join Mira and Finn as they explore the mind-bending mystery of Random Walks! We’ll travel back in time to discover how jiggling flower pollen amazed a botanist, and how the famous Albert Einstein figured out that invisible water molecules act like wild bumper cars! You’ll never look at a spreading drop of blue ink or a flying bird the exact same way again!

Have you ever noticed that numbers have a secret pattern hiding right in plain sight? It is the oldest pattern in mathematics: odd and even numbers! But what does that actually mean? Imagine lining up a giant pile of your favorite jelly beans. If you slide them across the table in pairs and every single sweet gets a buddy, that number is even! But if there is one lonely sweet left over? That makes it an odd number!

This simple rule is so amazing that the ancient Greek Pythagoreans were obsessed with it 2,500 years ago! They believed numbers had personalities and that odd and even were the basic forces of the universe. Did you know that if you add two odd numbers together, the lonely sweets pair up, always making an even number? And what about the biggest trickster of all: zero? Believe it or not, zero is totally an even number!

This ancient math secret isn't just floating in space; it decides things in your everyday life! It organizes the houses on your street and makes sure rolling a dice is perfectly fair. Let's uncover the amazing secrets of odd and even!

Did you know the very first computer program was written in 1843, before computers or even lightbulbs were invented?! Join Mira and Finn on an amazing time-travel adventure back to Victorian London to discover the magic of algorithms! An algorithm is just a simple list of exact steps—like a recipe for baking a cake, but for math and logic!

In this episode, we meet a brilliant mathematician named Ada Lovelace. When she saw the plans for a massive, steam-powered mechanical calculator called the Analytical Engine made entirely of brass cogs and gears, she saw the future! She wrote a famous set of instructions called Note G, which became the world's very first computer program. Ada even predicted that one day, machines like this could compose beautiful music!

Find out how Ada's brilliant steps were meant to be fed into the machine using punched cardboard cards, and learn how her amazing ideas are still used today in every single app, map, and video game on your phone! Get ready to discover the magic hiding in the math!

Have you ever wondered why a metre is exactly that long? Imagine trying to build a treehouse with your friends, but everyone's ruler is a completely different size! That is exactly what life was like in France in the 1780s. A foot or a pound changed from town to town, making building and trading a total chaotic mess!

To fix this, two brilliant astronomers, Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain, set out on a wild seven-year adventure in 1792. Their mission? To create a brand new measurement that belonged to everyone. They decided a "metre" would be exactly one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. But they didn't just do math at a desk—they climbed giant church towers and freezing mountain peaks with heavy brass telescopes! They even had to dodge angry mobs during the French Revolution because people thought they were spies!

Join Mira and Finn as we uncover how these scientists dragged their telescopes across countries to create the world's very first metre. You will even discover the mind-bending secret of how we measure the metre today using the speed of light!

Have you ever looked at a ticking clock and wondered: why are there 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour? Why not a nice, tidy 100? Get ready to travel back in time almost 4,000 years to ancient Iraq to uncover a time-telling mystery hiding in plain sight! Join Mira and Finn as they explore the mind-blowing math of the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians. Instead of counting by tens like we usually do, these ancient astronomers counted in Base Sixty! But why did they pick such a giant number? Because sixty is the friendliest number ever! It can be perfectly shared into halves, thirds, quarters, and so much more without anyone getting a weird half-slice. You'll learn how the Babylonians wrote all their numbers on soft clay tablets using just two simple shapes, and discover a secret way to count to sixty using just your finger joints! The next time you watch a microwave timer count down, you'll know you are using an ancient magic called Sexagesimal!