Getting Triggy With It: Matt Parker Does the Maths
Sometimes the numbers just don’t add up; the planned performance of Getting Triggy With It of Monday 4th August having been unavoidably cancelled for precautionary reasons of safety due to the persistence of Storm Floris, impacting all shows at the Pleasance Courtyard and several other venues around Edinburgh, the audience invited to return the following evening required additional seating to be added beyond the planned capacity.
The venue already considerably larger than mathematician Matt Parker’s last Fringe show, 2019’s Humble Pi, in the interim his profile and his ambition have increased geometrically, a man who throws himself into questions and conundrums and problems with the helplessness of one trapped on the cusp of a black hole, knowing he will inevitably be drawn in and fascinated by the process even as he calculates the easiest way to approach it.
Applying his skills to children’s card games to reverse engineer them before having a stern word with Wordle, there is always an answer even if the route is not always obvious, Parker admitting that while he is known for his videos and best-selling books he is equally acknowledged as being terrible at coding, results sometimes obtained by obstinacy rather than optimisation, though that often makes the outcome more entertaining.
Throwing himself into unlikely cul-de-sacs of improbable discovery with automated ancillary Robo-DJ, spinning the decks with “a song statistically equivalent to” Hanson’s 1997 hit MMMBop and eyeing moustache-twirling global domination, there is so much crammed into the hour that the big ideas, prime numbers and pointed puns blur together, the information superhighway turned up to a giddy and sometimes dizzying maximum.
Getting Triggy With It runs at Beyond at the Pleasance Courtyard until Monday 25th August and will be touring in early 2026
