Is this Premier League striker a secret maths genius?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chelsea striker Liam Delap has recently stunned fans on Instagram by apparently doing incredibly complicated calculations in his head, finding what’s known as the cube root of some very large numbers.
But is he really a human calculator? Or is there something else going on? Tim Harford speaks to Rob Eastaway, mathematician and author of ‘Maths on the Back of an Envelope’ to learn about the trick you can use to pull this off - and while he’s here we also ask him about the trend of more goals being scored in the Premier League.
Presenter: Tim Harford Producers: Nathan Gower Series Producer: Tom Colls Editor: Richard Vadon Programme Coordinator: Brenda Brown Sound Engineer: James Beard Credit: Video of Liam Delap from Chelsea’s Instagram account, chelseafc
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast, with a programme that looks at the numbers in the news, in life and in Premier League football. |
| 0:15.3 | I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:20.5 | Occasionally you meet people who have minds like calculators. |
| 0:25.1 | Prodigies, professors, Premier League footballers? |
| 0:29.4 | 79,500, what? |
| 0:32.2 | 740 per year. |
| 0:35.5 | Yeah. |
| 0:38.0 | That was Chelsea and England under 21 striker, Liam DeLap, |
| 0:43.3 | figuring out that the cube route of 79,507 is 43. |
| 0:48.8 | Which sounds hard? |
| 0:51.2 | You may remember cubes and cube roots from school. Two cubed is two times two times two, |
| 0:58.1 | or eight. The cube root is just reversing the procedure. The cube root of eight is two. |
| 1:04.7 | Three cubed is three times three times three. That's 27. and so the cube root of 27 must be 3. |
| 1:13.3 | And yes, 43 times 43 times 43 is 79,507, or, as Liam Delap would put it, the cube root of 79,5007 is 43. |
| 1:26.7 | And in case you think that was a fluke, |
| 1:28.6 | here's another from Chelsea's Instagram feed. |
| 1:32.2 | 778,68,000. |
| 1:36.5 | May too. |
| 1:37.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:37.9 | How? |
| 1:39.2 | How? |
| 1:40.4 | How'd you do it? |
... |
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