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.
Episodes
16 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...
The Earthquake that Needed a Number
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 compa...
Scientific Notation and Exponents | Office Hours 6
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, w...
The Teaspoon That Almost Measured a Molecule
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 calculati...
The Decimals and Conversions Toolkit Episode | Office Hours 5
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...
How Do You Measure Earth Without Leaving the Ground?
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 r...
Chase the Total — The Averages Toolkit | Office Hours 4
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:<...
The Average Pilot: What Averages Reveal—and What They Hide
The Average Pilot: What Averages Reveal—and What They HideIn 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 w...
Thinking in Percentages | Office Hours 3
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 i...
Compared to What?
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 d...
The Right Dose: The Math Between Medicine and Poison
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 b...
The Fraction Inside Your Heart
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—...