Chalkboard Ultra podcast

A podcast investigating the most interesting concepts, problems and people in all of mathematics.

Chalkboard Ultra is a podcast that was ran by myself and Louie Leventhall between October 2023 and July 2025. In that time we released 41 episodes plus two yearly hightlights from each academic year.

Listen to our podcast for free:

Spotify playlist Apple Podcasts playlist Purple Radio

A Spotify link to each episode can be found at the bottom of this page.

The reins have now been handed over to Cassia Pearce, who will continue the podcast during the next academic year.

To keep up with our schedule and uploads, you can give us a follow on Instagram and BlueSky.

Me and Louie on our first day of recording; October 25, 2023.

The podcast started when we realised there was a barrier between students and lecturers at university; while they were teaching us content, their real research was hidden ‘behind the chalkboard’ so to speak. Louie and I decided to bring more light around their subjects and provide a space for them to talk about their research and, perhaps more generally, their jouney as an academic.

We often wrote scripts for some of the ‘filler’ episodes, which span a variety of maths-related things we find interesting. These include the infinite monkey theorem, how time travel really is possible and why some people believe that numbers can decide our fate. During the first year of the podcast we invited a lot of our friends on to talk about some interesting parts of research they have done for their degrees. This continued in its second year, though with more focus on conversations with lecturers and PhD students.

A full list of our episodes can be found below*. My personal favourite is Episode #9, where we spoke to the organisers of the annual 24 Hours of Le Maths competition. It was the most I have ever laughed during a recording and sadly more than half of the conversation had to be cut out (because it was, well, not entirely PG). I still have the unreleased file on my computer somewhere as a blooper reel, and it got played during the third year of the competition while we were well over sleep deprived.

Louie’s favourite episode is a bit more serious, it’s Episode #15, which was our leap day 2024 special. It was a very fun discussion on the flaws and quirks of the Gregorian calendar as well as ways to reform it.

Achievements

We were runners-up for the ‘Best Podcast’ title in Purple Radio’s 2023 Christmas awards.

We featured in a blog post on the Aperiodical, which you can read here.

Series 1

  1. Shakespeare by Chance

  2. A Temporal Perspective

  3. The Science of Uncertainty

  4. Maths in Motion (with Dr Adam Townsend)

  5. Electric Feel (with Hailey Login)

  6. A Sum of Surprises

  7. The Six Degrees (with Dr Clare Wallace)

  8. The Problem with Secret Santa

Series 2

  1. Maths on the Podium (with Finn Hogan, Morgan Kendall and Sam Shepherd)

  2. Chance Would Be a Fine Thing

  3. Hidden in Higher Dimensions

  4. The Epoch Bites Back (with Tom Johnson)

  5. The Mathemagician’s Apprentice

  6. Strategy, Stalemate and Survival (with Oliver Ensor-Adams, Jacob Harris and Woody Jeffay)

  7. The Calendar Conundrum

  8. Damn Lies and Statistics (with Olivia Sharpe)

  9. A Wonderful Day for Pi

Series 3

  1. The Physicist from Pisa: Part 1 and Part 2 (with Dr Daniele Dorigoni)

  2. Sam Shepherd on the Art of Polylogarithms

  3. Cat’s Cradle (with Madi Hammond)

  4. Optimal Transport (with Will Ford)

  5. Chalkboard Ultra’s Yearly Highlights

Series 4

  1. Where the Wild Things Are

  2. The Paradoxes of Choice

  3. Hearing the Shape of a Drum (with Dr Katie Gittins)

  4. Veni Vidi Computavi

  5. Foundations of Probability (with Prof. Matthias Troffaes)

  6. The Everything Burger (with Dr Nabil Iqbal)

  7. Nothing for Christmas

Series 5

  1. Brave New World

  2. In Conversation with the MathSoc Presidents (with Cassia Pearce and Lydia Purcell)

  3. Swing Batta Batta (with Andrew Mullins)

  4. A Random Walk in the Park (with Prof. Andrew Wade)

  5. Grurple Maths (with Hannah Woods)

  6. Deep Dives in Deep Learning (with Dr James Liley)

  7. All the World’s a Stage (with Dr Sam Fearn)

Series 6

  1. Doctor Who? (with Alistair Severn and Thomas Shaw)

  2. Don’t Sweat It! (with Luci Mullen)

  3. A Statistical Consultation (with Prof. Darren Wilkinson)

  4. The (Teaching) Fellowship of the Ring (with Dr Jamie Mason)

  5. How Did We Get Here? (with Dr Sara Uckelman)

  6. Chalkboard Ultra’s Second Yearly Highlights

*Our true fans will recognise the jingle change for each series.