The Mathsaurus website and YouTube channel has been created by Dr Kevin Olding MMATH LLB MSc MRes PhD FRSA.
After growing up in Bournemouth, he graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford with a first class undergraduate and masters degree in Mathematics. He then completed a law degree, but soon decided to return to maths, teaching for 7 years at two of the UK’s leading independent schools – Westminster School and Dulwich College, where he was also Deputy Head of Wellbeing.
Whilst teaching he studied in the evenings for a Masters degree in Applied Statistics and Stochastic modelling at Birkbeck College London, winning the Winton Prize for best overall performance, and also lectured a second-year mathematics course for BSc Economics students. He left full-time teaching to study for a PhD in Stochastic Control (Probability) applied to Mathematical Finance at the University of Bath. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Kevin completed his PhD in 2022 and you can read his thesis here.
Mathsaurus was initially created whilst Kevin was teaching full-time, occasionally setting students videos to watch for their homework to free up time for problem-solving in class. Many people now refer to this approach as ‘flipped learning’, which makes it sound rather more energetic than it really is. In fact, at its heart it’s a modern twist on a quite traditional approach, of setting ‘prep’ rather than homework – and so expecting students to arrive prepared for their lessons, ready for a serious discussion and problem-solving session.
Since leaving teaching the website has continued to grow and in 2021 he started making online courses, including many free courses aimed at helping students to prepare for the UKMT and Mathematical Association’s various maths challenges. As of Summer 2025 these have been taken by over 45,000 students.