Matt Parker Audiobooks

When the numbers go wrong: Humble Pi, by a comedian who does mathematics for a living

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

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Who is Matt Parker?

Matt Parker (born 1980) is an Australian recreational mathematician, comedian, author and YouTube personality based in the United Kingdom – a job description that would have baffled careers advisers a generation ago and which he has more or less invented for himself. A former teacher, he has become one of the country’s best-known popularisers of mathematics through his tours and videos.

The publishing milestone deserves its own sentence: Humble Pi was the first mathematics book to reach number one on the Sunday Times bestseller chart, and Parker is a New York Times bestselling author besides. Persuading a nation that cheerfully claims to hate maths to buy a maths book in those quantities takes a very particular talent.

Matt Parker in audiobooks

Humble Pi is the Parker title in our catalogue, and it plays directly to the strengths of a man who performs for a living: comic timing, a teacher’s clarity and a communicator’s instinct for the story hiding inside the numbers. Mathematics in audio sounds improbable until you hear it handled by someone whose whole craft is explaining out loud – then it becomes obvious. This is ideal listening for the numerate and the maths-phobic alike: funny, curious and entirely painless, and a rather cheering reminder that no subject is unlistenable in the right hands.