We’ve been big fans of Matt Parker since we first saw him performing alongside Helen Arney and Steve Mould in ‘Festival Of The Spoken Nerd’ in Edinburgh. And you might know him from that sort of thing, or from his other highly successful outlets, like his YouTube channel boasting 1.33m subscribers and his best-selling books. 

Parker’s upcoming performance at the Cambridge Theatre is an accompaniment to his latest publication ‘Love Triangle – The Life Changing Magic Of Trigonometry’, and you should definitely check out both the book and the show. 

I wanted to find out more about both of those things, as well more about Matt in general. So, I spoke to him ahead of his upcoming London show. 

CM: Can you start by telling us a bit about the content of the show? I mean, the subtitle is “Matt Parker Does The Maths”, so I guess we are expecting you to “do the maths” – but can you expand a bit on what that might entail? 
MP: I realised that most people don’t have a sense of what mathematicians actually do, other than vague imagery of adding up loads of numbers.

This show is an attempt to remedy that by showing what it is like when I do the maths, be it for making overly complicated children’s card games or taking a Robo-DJ to a music festival.

And most of the time, a friend or viewer ends up vastly improving on my efforts.

CM: Your upcoming performance is in December, just. Are there any festive elements in there?
MP: I will actually have a Christmas tree onstage which is covered with 500 lights. And during the interval the audience will have access to a spreadsheet which controls the colours of those lights. I cannot imagine how that could possibly go wrong.

CM: How do you go about putting your shows together? What’s the process?
MP: Like everything in my life, I keep long lists of things which interest me. Some very tolerant test audiences earlier this year watched me throw a bunch of those ideas at a theatre wall to see what would stick.

After which, I worked with the very talented director Rhys Jones to hone the surviving concepts into a working show. 

This is also a balancing act: to make sure there are enough completely new ideas that hardcore fans have not seen me talk about on YouTube or in books, and that there is enough fun accessible stuff for the normal non-maths humans who somehow make it into the audience.

CM: I hear there’ll be talk of AI and robots in the show. People seem concerned about the idea that AI is reducing people’s capacity to think critically. Do you think that’s an issue? 
MP: I don’t think AI reduces people’s ability to think critically unless they were already actively searching for ways to think less.

In the show the concept of “MattGPT” emerges despite my best efforts, and if anything I find large language models an excuse to think more about the mathematics behind them.

CM: Why are you so fond of triangles?
MP: Triangles are the perfect combination of simplicity and potential.

Look, I’m also a big fan of more complicated shapes with more sides. No one is slighting the rhombic dodecahedron here.

But it’s amazing how a simple shape with only three sides underpins so much of our modern world, both physical architecture and digital technology.

CM: Speaking of which, this show is an accompaniment to your latest, triangle-ey book. Can you tell us a bit about it?
MP: I thought it was interesting that Pythagoras and trigonometry are the most advanced maths that everyone was forced to learn at school; and so for people who didn’t continue their mathematical journey any further, these triangle rules have become a mascot for difficult and pointless mathematics. 

I decided to deal with that head-on and write an entire ‘comedy maths book’ about trigonometry. My publishers were sceptical but ‘Love Triangle’ ended up beating ‘House Of Beckham’ – the expose about the Beckham family – to the number one best-seller spot, despite ‘House Of Beckham’ containing actual love triangles.

CM: Are you still doing Festival Of The Spoken Nerd stuff?
MP: Yes indeed. Well, we definitely have the Spoken Nerd WhatsApp group where Helen, Steve and I swap nerd jokes and links to science news stories. But in a public-facing capacity, we do also have a new season of ‘An Evening Of Unnecessary Details’ shows starting up in London again from this January.

CM: I think I’ve asked you in previous Q&As about how you got into this stuff and what made you want to perform, but can you remind us? 
MP: I’ve always enjoyed maths and performing. For a while they remained fairly separate; I worked as a secondary school teacher and a stand-up comedian at the same time – they have non-overlapping core work hours. Thankfully those career paths eventually merged, for efficiency’s sake if nothing else.

CM: And also tell us what the highlights of your working life have been thus far? 
MP: I once calculated pi live in front of a sold-out audience at the Royal Albert Hall. It was with a method that involves timing a pendulum swinging back and forth – if the length of a pendulum is exactly the same as acceleration due to gravity 9.81m, it swings exactly every π seconds. 

My volunteer to do the timing was astronaut Chris Hadfield. Normally I had volunteers out of the audience who are then nervous on stage and require a bit of managing. Chris was relaxed to the point where I thought he had forgotten his tasks. But at the last second he brought out the stopwatch and nailed the timing perfectly. 

I guess he is used to situations where if he pushes the button at the wrong time, everybody dies. In this case it would just mean a slightly less accurate value of pi.

CM: And now: aims and ambitions for the future? 
MP: I’m in the middle of a project to calculate pi on the Moon.

The people building the next lunar rover got in touch with me to see if I wanted to write some code which would run on the rover’s processor – whenever there wasn’t more important science to be done.

So I made a programme that will calculate the digits of pi on the Moon. Assuming when the mission is launched later in 2026 it doesn’t explode mid-flight, that will be the new highlight of my career.

CM: And finally: what’s the next item on your agenda?
MP: To complete the pi rule of 3 – point one four – I’m building up to break the world record for most digits of pi calculated by pi. The current record is 527 digits set back in 1874.

Amazingly, as soon as humans invented computers, no one else has tried to beat that record! Last year I had a team of about 200 people working for a week and we got 139 digits. So there is still a way to go.

Matt Parker performs at the Cambridge Theatre on 1 Dec, see this page here to book your tickets. 

LINKS: lwtheatres.co.uk | standupmaths.com | x.com/standupmaths