Anyone logging on to Vi Hart’s blog of quirky maths-related videos must feel they are far away from long, dull afternoons of trigonometry. “Maths is just cool,” says the 24-year-old “mathemusician”, a San Francisco Bay Area-resident who now works full-time for Khan Academy, the California-based online video-lecture resource. “But it’s taught all wrong. What most people think maths is, is not what mathematicians think it is: algebra, arithmetic, multiplying things. I want to show people that maths is full of life.”

Trained as a musician — she has a degree in music and has never taken a college maths course — Hart became fascinated by maths when she went to a mathematicians’ conference with her father when she was 13. “Straight away,” she says, “I wanted to speak and present papers at these conferences. At my first one I played a piece of music in which all the notes had been turned into binary numbers:0 for a pause, 1 for sound. It felt like it contained a hidden code.”