Perhaps you already know who Matt Parker is. Perhaps, like me, you did a maths degree – and perhaps, like me, you’ve pretty much forgotten it all. Perhaps you’ve followed Parker’s YouTube channel for many years, to keep that little flame of knowledge burning in your soul. If that’s you, you can stop reading here. You’ll enjoy the show with probability 1.

But perhaps your mathsy friend or partner is trying to drag you along – in which case, here’s what you need to know. Matt Parker’s a self-styled “stand-up mathematician”, combining comedy with science communication in a break-out YouTube channel and, now, a couple of best-selling books. In the flesh, he’s likeable and energetic, radiating enthusiasm for his topic and keeping his material skipping lightly along. Calling it “stand-up” is stretching the term a little, but it’s certainly delivered with plenty of humour.

The educational content is well-judged: visual enough to be accessible if you don’t know much maths, surprising enough to be interesting if you do. You will need some background to follow along, and you’ll get slightly more out of it if you understand the basics of coding too. But when all’s said and done, this audience is self-selecting – there’s an almost conspiratorial feel when we laugh as one unit at jokes that would earn tumbleweed in any other room.

One fairly long section is a retread of an oldish video, and – while it was fun and engaging to see it narrated live – I can’t help feeling that paying Parker fans deserve something new. But I’ve no such criticism of a second segment, which took a peek behind the scenes of another film to reveal the off-screen back-and-forth between Parker and his fans. And if you do follow him on YouTube there are knowing in-jokes to enjoy, with his notoriously intern-level Python code an entertaining recurring theme.

No tech-leaning show in 2025 would be complete without a mention of AI, and Parker duly has fun with an automated version of himself built on the same principles as ChatGPT. You’ll even leave with an inkling of how that technology actually works, delivered through the unexpected medium of a classic 90’s earworm. Of course he can only cover the very basics of the technique, but it feels increasingly important for society to understand what these human-seeming chatbots are really doing inside – and it’s liberating to be taking a lighthearted first step along this long and challenging road.

Most impressively of all, and certainly most courageously, Parker demos his creations live: this might be the only Fringe show in history where a terminal prompt intentionally appears on the giant screen. It all comes together in a clever final sign-off, which combines some previously arbitrary-seeming motifs with a touch of visual flair. All in all, this is definitely a show for a specific type of punter – but if you’re in that niche, pi has never been so tempting.