SciBar: Stand Up Maths Mathematician Matt Parker

image: British Science Association
 

You started as a maths teacher. How did you get into stand-up comedy and how did that turn into stand-up mathematics?
At university I studied mathematics, which should come as no real surprise, but while I was there I joined the short film society, wrote for the student comedy newsletter and did things for community television. I was always doing creative comedy writing. When I graduated, I realised that I had to get a job. One of my favourite bits of university was tutoring, so I did a teaching qualification and went into teaching. After a while, I started to miss that creative outlet, so, I started doing stand-up because and there are loads of great transferable skills between that and mathematics. I looked at doing public speaking training, but it’s very corporate, it's very, ‘how to give a business presentation’.

I found an evening course in stand-up comedy. I thought, "That's the ticket -- I'll do the course, learn the techniques, I'll get all those fantastic transferable skills and I'll take them off to do maths lectures. How hard can it be?" We met up once a week and we'd do little bits of performance and get feedback. It's all very supportive. I signed up for an open-mic night and I loved it. Before I finished the course I'd already started gigging on the London stand-up circuit. When I finished, I was teaching 90% of the time, so I did stand-up in the evenings.

That wasn't mathematical humour?
That was standard comedy. There are hundreds of clubs in the UK and most nights they bring in four comedians; a compare, then an opening, middle act and headline act. You work your way up the ranks. You start off as a middle act, then you become an opening act or compare, and then you become a headline act. I did the circuit long enough to become a compare. I loved it. It was quite random: the audience want comedy – they’re drinking, they don't want mathematics. So, I’d talk about being a mathematician. All of my comedy ended up being very much, "I have a logical view on life and people don't live up to that" and hilarity ensues when life isn't as logical as I think it should be.

I was doing a gig in Plymouth at a comedy club, and a maths department showed up. I was like, "Why is there a maths department here?" and they said, "Because you do maths stuff". I did, but no-one had ever shown up to see me do maths stuff. People just came to the comedy night. Then I realised that this was what I wanted all along. That’s when I stopped teaching and started doing stand-up that was explicitly nerdy and mathematical.I still visit schools, though. I average a school a week.

Is that on a specific subject?
It depends. I've got a menu. I'm talking about the fourth dimension this week; abstract geometry with sixth formers. There's no comedy in that because with teenagers, if you say, "I’m going to be funny" they go, "No, you're not". The worst thing a teacher can do is say, "hey, this week we've got Mr Parker and he's going to make maths fun!"

That's a lot of pressure...
For teenagers, you've got to impress them by accident. I love that. I can't do primary school. I've got friends that do primary school stuff and they're too easy to please. I want a challenge. I get the teenage mind. I know that in that audience, somewhere, about five percent of them are me when I was at secondary school. And they're my target audience. If I can keep the rest of the class focused and not messing around, then I amuse the 5% who are me, that’s my career in a nutshell

You seem to be very busy – you have your YouTube channel, Festival of the Spoken Nerd, there's your solo show. How do you come up with new material?
I’m very fortunate to have the problem of too many outlets for my material, which is a great problem to have. I'm constantly doing stuff for my weekly YouTube post, and sometimes that's things I've done in a comedy show. It works both ways; I think, "I can put that on YouTube" and sometimes I do things on YouTube and think, "that would work in a comedy show". Things go backwards and forwards between them all. With Spoken Nerd, we average a new major show every two years, and that's two hours of material. We tour it in various forms – Edinburgh, the South Bank festival. I do a thing called "An Evening of Unnecessary Detail" in London, which is me and my friends in a comedy club doing nerdy stuff. We did that last night, the theme was "Casio" and people came and talked about their favourite calculators, which was brilliant.

Whenever I see something interesting or I have an idea, I'll work out what it's most appropriate for and I'll make a note of it. When I need new stuff for Spoken Nerd, I'll open up that file and piece it together. About 10% of what I record is useful, so I'm constantly archiving ideas. Every fragment of a creative idea, I write it down.

With so many outlets, do you find it difficult to come up with enough material?
The thing about mathematics is that there are an infinite amount of interesting things to talk about. There are loads of comedians that do politics, but there are fewer people who do music or historical comedy. When you do comedy, you mine a vein of something that you find interesting. To do stand-up well, you have to be genuinely interested about something. For me, that happens to be mathematics. I'm so lucky that mathematics is inexhaustible. There have been generations of previous great maths communicators. There was a guy called Martin Gardner, who was very active in the fifties and seventies, and he did great stuff. Before him there was Sam Loyd who was more into games, and Edouard Lucas. There are always people coming up with new maths – tens of thousands of people around the globe coming up with new bits of mathematics, some will only be interesting to mathematicians, some will be incredibly useful, some will be incredibly useful 400 years from now.

Dahn our Annie's tav...
 

So, you find a piece of interesting mathematics. How do you weave the humour into that?
You've already half answered the question, in that the mathematics comes first. Sometimes I'll think I've got a hilarious joke or a maths pun, but 90% of the time it starts with interesting maths. Anyone who's a comedian or a comedy writer will still put jokes in, you can't stop them. I come up with something that I think is interesting, then I'll just talk about it in front of an audience. Scientist-cum-mathematician-cum-comedian Dara O'Briain in his autobiography, Tickling the English, talks about his writing process in which he comes up with ideas, tries them in front of an audience, discovers that they're terrible, but somewhere, instinct kicks in and makes a joke. That's exactly how it's done. I'll come up with some interesting maths, put it in front of an audience and some part of my brain panics when they're not laughing, writes a joke and I say it and it works. Then I make sure I remember that and write it down afterwards. I talk about maths to people that are expecting entertainment and I try some stuff out, see what they laugh at and then go from there. My goal is that I want to communicate this maths and I keep adding jokes until the audience will tolerate it.

We saw a lot of people queuing to get their calculator signed. Where did that come from?
That started as a joke. I did a show many years ago with a fantastic comedienne, Timandra Harkness, called Your Days are Numbered - The Maths of Death. I was still doing normal comedy and we did this show together at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. We branded it ‘maths’ to see what would happen, and people showed up. We made a joke that I would sign calculators and someone was like, "Alright, here you go". Separately, I do genuinely collect and love calculators.  

Have you ever had someone bring you one you've not seen before, something really rare?
I had two tonight – I took photos! One I’d never seen before tonight tonight is the Casio FX-451. It's a mid-80's scientific calculator with a flexible case, but the buttons on the case are wired up so the case had buttons built in that operate the main calculator. I also had the Casio FX-85V, a turn of the millennium calculator. Surprisingly good level of precision, very nice calculator. I genuinely love Casio – they're my favourite calculator brand. Texas Instruments do some good stuff, but not as user friendly.

I’ve always collected and loved calculators since I was at school. I forget the model number, but there was a calculator in school that had buttons that weren't used on the model we had, but they were still on the circuit board. I learnt to pop open the calculator and manually activate the disallowed buttons and since that day, I've been hooked. Most people will bring me a standard, off-the-shelf Casio that they use for school which is great, I love them. When people started showing me calculators, I was like, "I can't believe this is my career". I fanboy at what calculators they've brought. I even do calculator unboxing videos on YouTube, it's so good, I love calculators – they're absolutely amazing.

A lot of adults in this country seem to have been put off maths, possibly because of bad experiences in school. What can we do to make maths interesting and relevant to the person in the street?
You're right, most people get put off maths at school because they find it tedious or they don't understand it. There are two schools of thought for how you get people who hate maths to like it. One is to say how useful it is. You're recording this on a smart phone to later type out my words, and that wouldn't work without mathematics. I find that less convincing because people don't have to do the maths themselves – your smart phone does all the maths for you. The tact I've taken is, people love things like Sudoku – it’s the same thing. My solution to the problem is to tell people that the maths they learnt at school is not actually mathematics. It possibly was but they saw it as pointless exercises with no goal. Maths is problem solving – dealing with puzzles and mysteries. My angle is, "Here’s an interesting thing to try and solve. Oh, you're enjoying that? Surprise! Mathematics!" It's reminding people that it's not arithmetic, it's logic and puzzle solving.

And is there anything we can do while children are still at school? 
At school, you have to pass exams and as the teacher I had to make sure that my students passed – that was non-negotiable. There's a reason for that in that we need to have a metric that we can apply to people to make sure that they are progressing and that they're learning. Sadly, that means that a lot of the curriculum is biased towards thing which are testable, which makes perfect sense. What I used to do was spend one lesson a fortnight, around one in six, on something non-curriculum. And for teenagers, it has to be something that they actually want to learn, so I'd teach them card tricks that are mathematical, or I'd set them a puzzle or an investigation. For me, that was actually more maths than what I was teaching them in the normal lessons because maths is about thinking skills and problem solving. It’s not arithmetic, it's logic. Sudoku is more mathematical than a spreadsheet.

That was my solution, but teachers are assessed on getting kids through exams and so, personally, I would say we need to give teachers more freedom to not teach the curriculum. There needs to be a non-curriculum curriculum, by the way of having a lesson free to teach whatever you want. And we're short of maths teachers. The big issue is that at the end of a maths degree, you've got a choice, you can either go and earn a lot of money using your maths degree, or you can go and earn not that much money being a maths teacher. That's not a great decision to make. It's not sustainable, we can't have an industry of people who are only doing it because it's worthwhile and it's their civic duty. Everyone who is a well-qualified maths teacher is taking a pay cut to do it and that's not great. We need to make it better for them and we need to pay them more for doing it. We're perpetually short of maths teachers so any education initiative has to offer a lot of support.

What do you have coming up next?
Another book is in progress but it's still very early days. I'm talking to a few publishers and there's a few different ideas at the moment. There will definitely be another book out in 2017. There's too many options on the table at the moment to say what it will be about. That's ticking along as we speak. We've just done a Spoken Nerd tour and we’re in the process of looking to film that for a DVD or a download. I'm debating doing another solo tour, it depends if I can fit it in around everything else. At the moment I'm doing the weekly YouTube videos, that's keeping me pretty busy.

I've seen you at Latitude festival a couple of times with Festival of the Spoken Nerd. Anything lined up this summer?
Latitude have asked nicely again, and we’ve said, "I think we're free". We missed last year because we went and did a show in Las Vegas. A few other festivals have asked very nicely. I always love doing festivals because other people do maths communication work but most of the time you have to use a screen, but at festivals you rarely get one. I've done most of the small festivals, and almost Glastonbury but that's really hard to organise. They're so stingy. One day, we'll see. We'll line that up.

Alongside the excellent Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, there's a pop-maths book out at the moment called The 17 Equations That Changed the World. Do you have a favourite equation?
That's a very, very good question. There are so many. The famous one, that almost every mathematician will say is e^iπ + 1 = 0

Euler's identity, it's beautiful.
Exactly! It's an identity not an equation. What I would do, is turn it into an equation so I would say that my favourite equation is e^iθ = sinθ + icosθ which is the generalisation and is one of the ways that Euler's identity can be derived. The reason that people love e^iπ + 1 = 0 is that it links together seemingly unrelated areas on mathematics – it's got e, it's got i, it's got π, 1 and 0. It also has no golden ratio so I love that. The golden ratio can fuck off. But Euler's identity doesn't have that kind of general angle which is what I love about e^iθ = sinθ + icosθ and it's still an equation, you can vary θ. If you happen to set θ to π, then sinπ = -1 and cosπ = 0 so Euler drops out, but that's just one option. You can mess with it, so the generalised version of Euler's identity is my favourite equation.,

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