The Mathsaurus website and YouTube channel has been created by Kevin Olding (MMATH LLB MSc MRes FRSA) (and soon PhD hopefully!) whilst teaching and researching mathematics.
He graduated from Magdalen College Oxford with a first class undergraduate and masters degree in Mathematics, before deciding to take the law conversion course leading to a degree in Law. After a brief legal career in the city of London he left to teach mathematics in secondary schools, spending 7 years teaching ages 11-18 at two of the UK’s best known 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 on a module for their BSc Economics. He left full time teaching to study for a PhD in Stochastic Control (Probability) applied to some problems in Mathematical Finance at the University of Bath. He also has a degree in Law and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
He completed his PhD in 2022 and you can read his thesis here.
The 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 it has expanded further with a separate website dedicated to online courses, many free or substantially free, including many aimed at helping students to prepare for the UKMT and Mathematical Association’s various maths challenges.
Feel free to get in touch using the contact form on this page – I’ll do my best to get back to you as soon as I can!