Matt Parker
Award-winning comedian and best-selling maths author
About Matt Parker
Matt Parker’s YouTube videos on the Numberphile and Stand-up Maths channels have been watched over a hundred million times, which you’ll have to trust him is a lot. Look at all those zeroes: 100,000,000. It’s not a billion of course, and several million of those are videos where he unboxed calculators, but let’s not get lost in the details.
His background in maths and programming, combined with experience as a performer, makes Matt an engaging, entertaining but technical keynote speaker for conferences and corporate events. He is a popular host and after dinner speaker and his many audiences have included financial, accounting, insurance and networking companies including events at the Houses of Parliament, the Royal Society and the Royal Institution. He has been the entertaining keynote speaker at conferences for database developers, financial consultants and of course teachers. He can also host conferences, award ceremonies and company sports days (but not all at once).
In 2020 Matt won the prestigious Christopher Zeeman Medal, the UK’s top prize for maths communication. He has previously held world records for both the Rubik’s Cube and Space Invaders. In the pursuit of a good maths video, Matt has: flipped a coin 10,000 times; driven around the Silverstone racetrack on a MotoGP bike; memorised π to hundreds of digits and been bitten by a bullet ant in the Amazon rainforest.
From time to time he writes for The Guardian and is forever popping up on BBC Radio4.
To book Matt Parker, contact The Speakers Agency on +44(0)1332 810481 or email enquiries@thespeakersagency.com
Talk topics examples:
How AI actually works
In this highly entertaining talk Matt will give you an understanding of why AIs feel so human but still get some things so wrong. Matt explains Large Language Models and breaks them down to their basic parts and demonstrates exactly what is going on behind the scenes. AI is just maths and you’re using it blind if you don’t understand how it actually works. Complete with an interactive “MattGPT” this talk is as
informative as it is hilarious and is tailored to audiences of all levels. From the AI fluent to those who are curious to have more than a token understanding.
When Spreadsheets Attack! (And other maths disasters.)
Matt Parker wrote the book on maths mistakes: the #1-best-seller Humble Pi. Everything is built on maths but most people only notice when it goes wrong. In this funny and informative talk Matt will explore
the greatest mathematical near-misses and mishaps involving planes, trains and autocorrect. From unit errors crashing a plane to faulty spreadsheets losing people millions of dollars, there is a lot we can learn
from when maths goes wrong.
Quantum-explainia
Will the arrival of large-scale quantum computing change everything? This requires knowing what both ‘quantum’ and ‘computing’ are. Matt Parker is perfectly placed to explain how classical computing works; he once bought 10,000 dominoes to make the world’s slowest computer and demonstrate the fundamentals of binary computing. He will then be a comforting tour guide to the world of quantum, thanks to his unique skills in maths and communication before putting everything in context with the story of how people who comment on his youtube videos outsmarted MIT.
Further talk synopsis and other talk outlines available on request
