Tom Crawford, the Oxford professor who teaches math in his underpants

A translation of an article about my work in Spanish Newspaper ’20 Minutos’. You can read the original article (in Spanish) here.

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  • The teacher has his own YouTube channel, Tom Rock Maths, where he tries to remove the fear of this subject.
  • This young Briton bases his teachings on making students understand the concepts, not memorize them.

Although mathematics was the subject that brought many leading students into college, high school, and university, Tom Crawford aims to show that this subject is not the serious and boring subject that everyone believes.

This first and second year professor at the University of Oxford uses rare teachings in his classes so that students do not memorize the concepts, but understand and learn them from the roots. For this, his most famous method of seduction, never better said, is to stay in shorts.

The British teacher has a YouTube channel called Tom Rocks Maths in which he wants to get students to stop having “fear of mathematics”. “Fear comes from the way people are being taught” explains Podium Podcast. Therefore, he prefers to teach while stripping, although not in college, only on his channel.

Everything comes from when he worked for Naked Scientists, a producer specialized in scientific news for different radios and podcasts internationally. Thanks to this project, he created The Naked Mathematician and Equations Stripped  in which Tom Crawford clears mathematical operations layer by layer while removing clothes.

But this is not his only weapon, because his rock style, his sense of closeness and the application of mathematics in different areas of life make him have thousands of followers on social networks.

As the mathematician demonstrates, this subject is present in more aspects than we think. The content suggests Netflix or artists recommended Spotify are mathematical. In addition, the professor was this November at the famous Student Residence in Madrid, where Einstein also was in 1923 to give a talk on the multiple numerical concepts that are applied in sport.

The trajectory of the ball, the control of the performance of each player or the planning of team strategies for a match are just some of the examples that demonstrate that mathematics is very present in sport.

 

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