Story Problem
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.
Story Problem
Latest Episodes
Exponential Growth — Look for the Operation, Not the Answer | Office Hours 9
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...
The Nuclear Reaction — When the Curve Turns Up
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 wer...
Reading the Carbon Clock — Three Moves for Exponential Decay | Office Hours 8
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 fra...
The Carbon Clock: Exponential Decay and Radiocarbon Dating
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 ...
Logarithms: Ask the Exponent | Office Hours 7
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. Yo...