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

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!