Show Notes
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 th...
More from Maths for Kids / Maths is Not Boring: The Kids Maths Podcast
Have you ever played a game of noughts and crosses (or tic-tac-toe!) and ended up in a tie every single time? You weren't playing it wrong—you were actually playing it perfectly! Join Mira and Finn as they uncover the mind-bending math behind solved games! A solved game is a game where the perfect outcome is one hundred percent known from the very first move. Discover the amazing true story from 1952, when a Cambridge student named Sandy Douglas taught a giant, room-sized computer called EDSA...
Have you ever wondered how to measure the exact size of a twisty, bumpy, lumpy dragon toy? It sounds completely impossible! But over two thousand years ago, an incredibly smart ancient Greek thinker named Archimedes solved this exact mystery using... a bath! In this amazing episode, we travel back to the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. King Hiero had a gigantic problem: he thought a sneaky goldsmith had stolen some royal gold and swapped it for cheaper silver when making his spectacular n...
Have you ever heard of a math puzzle so mysterious that famous artists hid it in paintings and giant turtles carried it on their backs? Welcome to the incredible world of magic squares! These aren't just ordinary boxes of numbers. In a magic square, every single row, column, and diagonal adds up to the exact same secret number! Join Mira and Finn as they travel back in time to ancient China, where a legendary giant turtle climbed out of a rushing river with a magical pattern of dots on its sh...
Have you ever noticed that weird little symbol on your phone's battery or your weather app? The percent sign (%) is everywhere, but what does it actually mean? Join Mira and Finn as they uncover the invisible mathematical superpower hiding in plain sight! You'll travel back over two thousand years to Ancient Rome, where Emperor Augustus created a special rule called the "centesima" to collect exactly one out of every hundred items sold at massive, chaotic auctions. Discover how thinking "out ...
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 stockb...