When I was about 8-10 years old, I came home from school, sat down on front of the TV with a jar of peanut butter in hand, and watched after-school programming. Sure there were cartoons, Sesame Street, and talk shows, but the show I really looked forward to watching was Square One TV.
Square One was aired on PBS from 1987-1992. It aimed to do for mathematics what GhostWriter did for linguistics and Bill Nye (and Beakman) did for science… make learning hip and cool by giving it the MTV makeover. It must have worked on me because it planted memes in my mind decades before we called them memes, ideas that stuck in my mind for 20 years, to this day. I’d say that it was Square One that turned math for me from a tediously repetitive subject spanning acres of looseleaf paper into a fun and intriguing academic pursuit.
A Square One program started with fun variety show stuff… music videos, comedy skits, animations, and quirky recurring characters. All-American good guy Dirk Niblick of the Math Brigade would teach his dear ol’ Mum about probability. Mathman would munch numbers in a Pacman-esque labyrinth, and run screaming from the cantankerous Mr. Glitch. A music video would drive home the concept of remainders. And each episode ended with the next installment of the recurring Mathnet plotline, where two hard-boiled mathematicians used math skills to solve crimes in a a Dragnet parody.
Thanks to the magic of YouTube (and those who posted these videos there), we can now step back twenty years and relive the fun of one of my favorite kids’ shows. If you were a little nerd back in the late Eighties or early Nineties, then you’ll surely enjoy the videos I’ve dug up and listed here. Be warned… these videos are sluggish on slow Internet connections, so those of you still on dial-up would do best to skip this one and check back later for my next update.
This list should be comprehensive of what’s on YouTube as of this post’s datestamp, but let me know if I missed anything.
Music Videos
- 8% of My Love
- Action at the Fraction Bar
- Apple Rap
- Archimedes
- Burger Pattern
- Change Your Point of View
- Combo Jombo
- Count On It!
- Draw a Map
- Estimation (recommended!)
- Ghost of a Chance
- Graph of Love (with bonus cartoon intro)
- Less Than Zero (recommended!)
- Metric Electric Lover
- Neighborhood Super Spy
- Nine Nine Nine (recommended!)
- One Billion is Big
- Palindromes
- Perpendicular Lines
- Rhythm
- Round It Off
- Sign of the Times
- Square Song
- Tessellations (recommended!)
- Timekeeper
- Triangle Song
- Wanna Be (recommended!)
Comedy Sketches
- Adventures of Spade Parade
- Callous – Gum Drops (parody of Dallas)
- Callous – 101st Anniversary Box
- Common Multiple Man
- Diet Lite Wet
- Frank Lloyd Wrong Building (recommended!)
- General Mathpital – Doubling Area (parody of General Hospital)
- Grempod & Blotmo at Home
- Harry’s Hamburger Haven
- Koatrack (parody of Kojak)
- Mathcourt – Geometric Area (parody of People’s Court)
- Mathcourt – Better Baseball Team
- The Mathematics of Love (recommended!)
- Moderately Frightening Stories
- National Geometric (parody of National Geographic)
- Oops – Adding Fractions (There were a whole bunch of these!)
- Pauline’s Perilous Pyramid
- The Queen’s Bed
Game Shows
Mathman (recommended!)
- Less Than 0.5
- Rectangles
- Role Reversal
- True or False
- 5X + 2
- Glitch Eats Pentagons
- 45% Has Elapsed
- Multiples of Six
- Decimals Greater Than One
Dirk Niblick
Other Stuff
- Symmetry animations
- Math Mimes
- Probability (recommended!)
- Patterns
- Percentages
Mathnet
- Treasure of Monterrey Bay: part 1, part 2,
part 3,
part 4,
part 5,
part 6,
part 7 - Case of the Willing Parrot: part 1 and part 2
- Case of the Great Car Robbery: part 3
- Case of the Missing Baseball: part 4
Nifty Wikipedia Thing: Oklahoma City sonic boom tests
Movies I’ve Seen:
Some Like It Hot (1959) ~ cross-dressing comedy classic
Dr. Strangelove (1964) ~ Kubrick’s classic Cold War critique
The Dish (2000) ~ cute Australian space race film
A Sound of Thunder (2005) ~ they turned the eponymous Ray Bradbury short story into a Michael Critchton monster flick
Syriana (2005) ~ gritty realism and political fables are not substitutes for storytelling
Stardust (2007) ~ underrated fantasy tale from Neil Gaiman
What I’ve Been Reading:
"Lord Jim" by Joesph Conrad
The Ryanarium 
Leave a comment