Dear students,
I am Mike Vuu. I read Mathematics at the University of Oxford — a bachelor's and then a master's degree — and for years now I have spent my days doing the thing I love most: teaching maths to young people who are deciding, often without realising it, whether maths is something they can do.
I built IvyfordMath because I kept meeting students who had been taught to fear the subject. They could follow steps, but they had never been shown the why underneath them. They could get the answer, but they had never felt the small, quiet joy of an argument that simply had to be true. Somewhere along the way, maths had stopped being a place to think and had become a list of things to survive.
I wanted to build the opposite of that.
My belief is simple: mathematics is not a set of procedures to memorise — it is a way of reasoning that anyone can learn to enjoy. A good proof is a small adventure. A hard problem you finally crack is a real victory. So I wanted a place where the reasoning is the game, not a chore bolted onto one. Where you pick a creature, level it up by solving real exam questions, and — this matters to me — see a worked solution every single time you get something wrong, so a mistake becomes the most useful thing that happened all day.
This is also, quietly, a letter to my own children. I want them to grow up believing that effort compounds, that getting stuck is the beginning of learning rather than the end of it, and that the people who become good at hard things are simply the ones who kept going one honest step at a time. Everything in IvyfordMath — the practice, the reasoning challenges, the small rewards — is built around that one conviction.
So here is what I promise you:
- Every question is one I would put in front of my own students.
- Every mistake comes with a real explanation, not just a red cross.
- And I will keep showing up — reading your messages, running the contests, and improving this place — for as long as it helps you learn.
You don't have to love maths yet. You only have to be willing to take the next step. I'll handle the rest with you.
With belief in you,
Teacher Mike Oxford Mathematics · Founder, IvyfordMath