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

Have you ever thought about how sharing a pizza is actually a magical mathematical promise? Welcome to the incredible world of fractions! Join Mira and Finn as we travel back over 3,500 years to ancient Egypt to solve a very hungry mystery: how do you share seven round loaves of bread fairly between ten people? (Hint: you can't do it without breaking the bread!). Discover the amazing Rhind papyrus, a gigantic sixteen-foot scroll filled with ancient puzzles copied out by a clever scribe named...

Have you ever looked closely at a bathroom floor, a brick wall, or a beehive's honeycomb? They are made of shapes that fit perfectly together with zero gaps! This mathematical magic is called a tessellation! For decades, mathematicians wondered about an impossible puzzle: could just one single shape cover an endless floor without the pattern ever repeating itself? They called this mystery the "einstein" problem (which means "one stone" in German). Many experts thought it was completely impos...

Have you ever wondered where the equals sign came from? Most of us think those two little horizontal lines just mean "ta-da, the answer comes next!" But the true story is much bigger, and it starts all the way back in 1557! Join Mira and Finn as they travel back in time to meet Robert Recorde, a brilliant Welsh doctor and mathematician. Robert was writing a magnificent book called The Whetstone of Witte, but he got completely fed up with writing the words "is equal to" over and over again wit...

Have you ever flipped a coin and wondered if you could guess what it would land on? If you toss a coin once, it’s completely wild—anything could happen! But what if you tossed that same coin ten thousand times? During World War II, a mathematician named John Kerrich was stuck in a camp in Denmark with a lot of time on his hands. So, he and his friend decided to play the longest game ever! They flipped a coin 10,000 times and wrote down every single result. Did they get exactly 5,000 heads an...

Have you ever opened an empty box and tried to take three things out? It sounds impossible, right? For thousands of years, humans thought zero was the absolute bottom of everything! But what if there is a whole hidden world hiding beneath nothing? Join Mira and Finn on a mind-bending mathematical adventure to discover the secret underground world of negative numbers! Travel back 2,000 years to ancient China, where brilliant mathematicians used special black wooden counting rods to track numb...

Have you ever wondered how long the coast of Britain is? Well, the answer depends entirely on the size of your ruler! If you use a giant ruler, you'll get one number. But if you use a tiny ruler, you have to measure every single zig-zag, cove, and rock, making the coast seem magically longer! This wild, mind-bending trick of nature is all about something called a fractal. Join Mira and Finn as they zoom into the infinite, never-ending world of fractals! We'll solve the mystery of why Spain a...

Have you ever wondered why we count in tens? Look down at your hands—you are holding the answer! Because we have ten fingers, most of the world uses a magical mathematical superpower called "place value" built all around the number ten. But not everyone did it this way! Did you know the ancient Maya counted in twenties because they used their toes, too? Or that the ancient Babylonians counted in sixties, which is exactly why we still have 60 seconds in a minute today? In this mind-expanding e...

Imagine a whole universe completely flat like a piece of paper! There is no "up" and no "down"—just forwards, backwards, left, and right. In 1884, a headmaster named Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a mind-bending story called Flatland about this exact idea! The people living in Flatland are flat shapes: triangles, circles, and a very confused square. Because they are totally flat, they can only ever see each other's edges as straight lines! But what happens when a solid, 3D sphere from our world v...

Did you know there are definitely two people in London right now with the EXACT same number of hairs on their heads? And nobody even had to count them to figure it out! This mind-bending math magic is called the Pigeonhole Principle. It is super simple: imagine you have four sleepy pigeons, but only three wooden boxes for them to sleep in. No matter what, at least one pigeon is going to have to share a box! That simple idea is actually a mathematical superpower, perfected by a German mathemat...

Imagine you are standing on a brightly lit game show stage! Three colorful doors are in front of you. Behind one is a shiny new car, but behind the other two... are live, chewing goats! You pick a door. Suddenly, the host opens a different door to reveal a goat! He smiles and asks: "Do you want to stick with your first choice, or switch?" What would you do? Most people think it’s a fifty-fifty chance and doesn't matter, but they are WRONG! In 1990, a puzzle genius named Marilyn vos Savant wr...

Imagine a totally blank map of the world. Now, imagine you have to paint every single country, but no two touching countries can be the same color! How many colors would you need? You might think you'd need dozens, but here is a giant math secret: you only ever need FOUR! Join Mira and Finn on Maths is Not Boring as they explore the mind-bending Four Colour Theorem! It all started in 1852 when a student named Francis Guthrie noticed a strange pattern while coloring a map of England. Little d...

Imagine trying to go for a sunny Sunday walk, only to discover the path is mathematically impossible! In 1735, the beautiful city of Königsberg had two huge islands sitting right in the middle of a wide river, connected to the rest of the town by exactly seven bridges. The townspeople made up a massive puzzle: could anyone walk across all seven bridges exactly once without ever crossing the same one twice? People tried for years, wandering around and tracing maps, but everyone got stuck! It ...

Can you fold a normal piece of paper enough times to reach the Moon? It sounds completely impossible, but if you could fold a single sheet of paper just 42 times, the stack would explode past the clouds, past the satellites, and crash right into the Moon! How? It is all thanks to a math superpower called exponential growth! In this mind-blowing episode, Mira and Finn uncover how doubling something over and over makes it grow faster than you can even imagine. You will hear the incredible true ...

Have you ever tried to count... absolutely nothing? For thousands of years, humans counted sheep, gold coins, and days, but they had absolutely no number for zero! If you had three apples and ate them all, you just had an empty hand. But as math got more complicated, people realized they needed a way to hold empty spaces open so numbers like 15 wouldn't accidentally get mixed up with 105! Ancient civilizations like the Babylonians and the Maya invented clever placeholders to fix this—the Maya...

Have you ever looked closely at a snowflake landing on your mitten and wondered why it looks like a perfect little star? Join Mira and Finn as they uncover the amazing, invisible rules of the universe! In this mind-bending episode, you will discover the magical math of symmetry—the reason why spinning a snowflake, flipping a butterfly's wing, or sliding a honeycomb leaves them looking exactly the same! But symmetry isn't just a cool trick of shapes. You will travel back in time to 1915 to m...

Have you ever seen a shape with only one side? It sounds completely impossible, right? Everything in the world has a top and a bottom, or an inside and an outside! But in 1858, a German mathematician named August Ferdinand Möbius discovered a shape that breaks all the rules! By taking a simple strip of paper, giving it a single half-twist, and taping the ends together, he created the mind-bending Möbius strip! If a tiny ant walked along this loop, it would travel over the entire surface and e...

Did you know there are "rebel numbers" hiding in the world right now that absolutely refuse to follow the rules?! Welcome to the wild, mind-bending world of prime numbers! A prime number is a special number that can only be divided evenly by itself and the number one—like 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. They are the unbreakable building blocks of mathematics! Over two thousand years ago, a brilliant mathematician named Euclid proved an amazing secret: prime numbers never, ever run out. They go on for inf...

Have you ever played a game of cards like Go Fish or Snap? What if I told you that every time you shuffle a brand new deck of 52 cards, you are holding a tiny piece of history that has almost certainly never existed before in the universe?! It sounds like magic, but it is actually the incredible maths of permutations! Join Mira and Finn as they explore how ordinary playing cards can be ordered in more ways than there are atoms in our entire Milky Way galaxy. That is a massive number with 68...

Have you ever tried counting as high as you possibly can? What happens if you never stop adding one? You get to infinity! But wait... did you know that forever actually comes in different sizes?! It sounds impossible, but it is completely true! Join Mira and Finn on a mind-bending adventure to the 1870s to meet a brilliant mathematician named Georg Cantor. He shocked the entire world by proving that some endless things are actually bigger than other endless things! We will explore a giant, gl...

Have you ever wondered if someone in your classroom shares your exact birthday? It feels like it would take hundreds of kids to find a match, right? Well, get ready to have your mind blown! In this episode, Mira and Finn uncover the amazing mathematical secret known as the Birthday Paradox! It turns out, if you put just twenty-three people in a room, it is more likely than not that two of them will share a birthday. How can that be true when there are 365 days in a year?! We will learn how br...

Did you know that every single circle in the universe is hiding a secret, endless number? Join Mira and Finn on Maths is Not Boring as they uncover the wild and wondrous mystery of Pi! Whether it is a tiny coin in your pocket, a spinning bicycle wheel, or a giant planet floating in space, every circle shares the exact same mathematical magic. Travel all the way back to ancient Greece to meet a clever mathematician named Archimedes, who figured out how to trap this tricky number just by drawin...