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
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 an...
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 even...
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 in...
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. The...
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 q...
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...
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 als...
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 think...
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 be...
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 fr...
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...
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 meas...
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 aski...
Compared to What? — The Most Misused Number in Modern Life
Raise 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, Bosto...
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. T...
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 ...
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