True stories that make math and science clear. Story Problem is for curious adults, parents helping with schoolwork, and anyone ready to understand the subjects they may have missed the first time around. No notes. No prerequisites. Just listen.
The Unfinished Game — Probability, Expected Value, and the Math of Chance
Send us Fan Mail What does an unfinished card game from the 1600s have to do with Enrico Fermi and the first controlled nuclear chain reaction? In this episode of Story Problem, we look at one of the most useful ideas in mathematics: how to reason when you cannot know exactly what will happen next. We start with a simple question posed to Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat: if two players are forced to stop a game before it is finished, how should they fairly divide the money? Working through...
17 Sept 2026
Exponential Growth — Look for the Operation, Not the Answer | Office Hours 9
Send us Fan Mail The chain reaction that ran under a Chicago squash court hides one of the most useful ideas in math: repeated multiplication. In this Office Hours companion to Episode 9, we take that idea out of the reactor and make it something you can use on a savings account, a population, or any number that grows by the same percentage each step. You won't need to memorize a formula. Instead we build four moves you can run on any growth problem: identify the step, find the multiplier and...
14 Sept 2026
The Nuclear Reaction — When the Curve Turns Up
Send us Fan Mail On December 2, 1942, a small group of scientists gathered beneath the stands of an abandoned football stadium in Chicago. Nearby stood a man with an axe. His job was simple: if something went wrong, cut the rope. What they were watching was the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction. But underneath the physics was a remarkably simple mathematical idea: what happens when one event creates more than one new event? In this episode of Story Problem, we follow the numbers...
11 Sept 2026
Reading the Carbon Clock — Three Moves for Exponential Decay | Office Hours 8
Send us Fan Mail How do you solve a carbon-14 problem without getting lost in the formula? In this Office Hours episode, we build a compact toolkit for exponential-decay problems: Count. Locate. Reverse. First, count the halvings when the fraction remaining is familiar. Next, locate an unfamiliar percentage between known half-life landmarks. Finally, run the clock backward with a logarithm to find the age of a sample. Using examples involving ancient bones, Ötzi the Iceman, and the Dead Sea S...
6 Sept 2026
The Carbon Clock: Exponential Decay and Radiocarbon Dating
Send us Fan Mail How can a small piece of bone reveal when an organism lived thousands of years ago? In this episode of Story Problem, we explore how chemist Willard Libby developed radiocarbon dating and how carbon-14 acts like a clock inside material that was once alive. We begin with half-life and exponential decay: why carbon-14 decreases by half every 5,730 years and how that repeated halving produces an exponential equation. Then we work backward. When a sample does not contain a simple...
4 Sept 2026
Logarithms: Ask the Exponent | Office Hours 7
Send us Fan Mail Logarithms become much easier when you understand the question they are asking: What exponent produced this number? In this Office Hours episode, Behi explains logarithms in plain language and shows how they are connected to exponents. You’ll learn how to move between exponential and logarithmic form, understand negative logarithms, compare measurements on logarithmic scales, and make sense of the product and quotient rules. Then we work through the two challenge problems fro...
1 Sept 2026
The Earthquake that Needed a Number
Send us Fan Mail On March 10, 1933, a powerful earthquake struck Long Beach, California. Buildings cracked, schools were badly damaged, and descriptions of the destruction poured in. But those descriptions raised a difficult question: how could scientists compare one earthquake with another using something more consistent than reports of damage? At Caltech, Charles Richter and his colleagues were already working through rooms full of paper seismograms, looking for a reliable way to compare ea...
27 Aug 2026
Scientific Notation and Exponents | Office Hours 6
Send us Fan Mail Scientific notation is more than a shorter way to write very large and very small numbers. It helps you recognize the scale of a problem, organize the calculation, and check whether your answer makes sense. In this Office Hours episode, we work through positive and negative exponents, multiplication and division in scientific notation, and a practical method for setting up problems before doing the arithmetic. We also solve two problems from the Episode 6 Story Sheet—includin...
24 Aug 2026
The Teaspoon That Almost Measured a Molecule
Send us Fan Mail In 1773, Benjamin Franklin poured a teaspoon of oil onto a pond at Clapham Common and watched it spread across the water, leaving an unexpectedly large area smooth behind it. Franklin recorded what he saw—but stopped just short of the calculation that could have taken him into the invisible world. In this episode, we finish that calculation. Using scientific notation, powers of ten, and order-of-magnitude thinking, we estimate the thickness of Franklin’s oil film and discover...
17 Aug 2026
The Decimals and Conversions Toolkit Episode | Office Hours 5
Send us Fan Mail Conversions can feel like a collection of unrelated rules: move the decimal here, multiply by 100 there, and somehow remember what happens when the units are squared or cubed. But beneath all of those problems is one consistent idea: Same quantity. Different name. In this Office Hours companion to Episode 5, we turn the story of measurement into a practical toolkit for working with decimals and converting units. We begin with three moves—Place It, Scale It, and Translate It—a...
14 Aug 2026
How Do You Measure Earth Without Leaving the Ground?
Send us Fan Mail A crooked pound. A revolution determined to rebuild the world. Two astronomers sent across France and Spain to measure a piece of the Earth—and a hidden error that nearly consumed one of them. In Episode 5 of Story Problem, we trace the remarkable creation of the metric system. During the French Revolution, Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain were given an extraordinary assignment: measure the distance from Dunkirk to Barcelona accurately enough to define a new unit of ...
12 Aug 2026
Chase the Total — The Averages Toolkit | Office Hours 4
Send us Fan Mail An average may look like a single number, but underneath it is always a total waiting to be uncovered. In this episode of Story Problem Office Hours, we build a practical toolkit for solving average problems using one master move: Total = average × count Once you uncover the total, even complicated-looking problems become much easier to understand. We’ll use that move in three ways: total it up, find the gap, and weight groups correctly. Along the way, we’ll work through test...
7 Aug 2026
The Average Pilot: What Averages Reveal—and What They Hide
Send us Fan Mail The Average Pilot: What Averages Reveal—and What They Hide In the early years of the jet age, the United States Air Force faced a frightening problem: skilled pilots were losing control of their aircraft, and no one could explain why. At first, investigators blamed the pilots. But eventually, they began looking at the cockpit itself. The seats, pedals, controls, and switches had all been designed around the measurements of the “average pilot”—a person who seemed mathematicall...
5 Aug 2026
Thinking in Percentages | Office Hours 3
Send us Fan Mail Every Monday on Story Problem, we tell the story behind an important idea in math or science. We explore history, meet fascinating people, and discover why the idea matters. Every Thursday, we slow down. Office Hours is where we practice thinking. This isn't a lecture, and it isn't a list of formulas to memorize. It's a chance to step inside the mind of someone who has become fluent at solving problems. Instead of asking, "Which formula do I use?" we'll practice asking better...
2 Aug 2026
Compared to What?
Send us Fan Mail Compared to What? — The Most Misused Number in Modern LifeRaise a price by 20 percent, then lower it by 20 percent, and you do not end up where you started. Mark a coat down 25 percent, then take another 25 percent off, and the total discount is not 50 percent. Why not? Because almost every percentage quietly depends on something it may never tell you: the number it is being compared with. In 1909, Boston retailer Edward Filene created a pricing system that made that comparis...
25 Jul 2026
The Right Dose: The Math Between Medicine and Poison
Send us Fan Mail Some numbers decide whether a medicine heals you or kills you. This is the story of one of them. In the 1780s, an English doctor named William Withering learned that a common wildflower — the purple foxglove — could pull a dying patient back from heart failure. There was just one problem: the same flower, in a slightly larger amount, could stop a heart entirely. Cure and poison were the very same plant. The only difference between them was a number. This episode is about the ...
18 Jul 2026
The Fraction Inside Your Heart
Send us Fan Mail More than 400 years ago, physician William Harvey faced a problem: the accepted explanation of blood flow simply did not add up. By estimating how much blood the heart moved with every beat—and multiplying it by the number of beats in a minute—he showed that the body could not possibly be making and consuming that much new blood. The blood had to be circulating. In this first episode of Story Problem, we use Harvey’s discovery to explore one of the most important ideas in mat...
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