Matt Parker Australian Comedian Born 1980 in Perth

Early life

Matthew Thomas Parker was born on 22 December 1980 in Perth, Western Australia, and grew up in the northern suburb of Duncraig. He showed an interest in mathematics and science from an early age. At the University of Western Australia he began with mechanical engineering, moved to physics and finally settled on mathematics. While a student he wrote comedy for the student magazine Pelican, produced sketches and enrolled in a stand-up course.

Career

After university Parker taught mathematics in Australia for a time, then moved to London and carried on teaching. He later worked in education support, arranging maths talks with universities and other organizations, and returned to the classroom for one year before leaving it. Since then he has devoted himself to helping people communicate mathematics, speaking at schools and working in the media. He served as the Public Engagement in Mathematics Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. In 2014 he set up Think Maths, a team of speakers who run workshops and talks in schools.

His public profile grew through video. His YouTube channel, Stand-up Maths, passed one million subscribers, and he appears often as a guest on other channels, including Numberphile. He has presented videos on unusual calculators as a member of an imaginary "Calculator Appreciation Society".

On stage, he co-wrote the comedy show Your Days Are Numbered: The Maths of Death with Timandra Harkness in 2012 and performed it in Australia and across Britain. He has also toured solo, with Number Ninja finishing in July 2013 and Now in 4D starting in late 2014, and as a member of Festival of the Spoken Nerd alongside Helen Arney and Steve Mould. The trio also record the podcast A Podcast of Unnecessary Detail. He co-hosts a second podcast, A Problem Squared, with Bec Hill.

Parker has written three books. Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension appeared in 2014, Humble Pi followed in March 2019 and reached number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and Love Triangle was published in 2024. He has appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage, written occasionally for The Guardian, and assisted Hannah Fry in several segments of the 2019 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

In recreational mathematics, he introduced the idea of a grafting number. The "Parker square", a near-miss attempt at a magic square of squares, became an internet joke and a shorthand for an effort that falls just short. Every odd-numbered year on 14 March he runs a Pi Day challenge in which he works out digits of pi by hand. In 2024 he led hundreds of volunteers at the City of London School through six days of calculation that produced 139 correct digits.

In October 2017 he started a petition asking the government to change the football pictured on UK road signs to a geometrically correct shape. The government declined, and he started a second petition in 2024 suggesting that real footballs be changed instead.

Recognition

In 2018 Parker won the Euler Book Prize. That year he and fellow online mathematics communicator Vi Hart also shared the Communications Award of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics, given for sharing the excitement of the subject with a worldwide audience. In 2020 he received the IMA-LMS Christopher Zeeman Medal for communicating mathematics. In August 2024 the main-belt asteroid 314159 Mattparker was named after him, in a citation that highlighted his Pi Day challenges.

Personal life

Parker married the solar physicist Lucie Green in July 2014, and the couple chose wedding rings made of meteoric iron. He lives in Godalming, England, with a Labrador Retriever named Skylab, who has her own YouTube channel.