What I did in the capital...

Back from an eventful couple of days in London.

On Monday, I filmed for the new Numberphile series.

The man in front of the camera was Matt Parker (right), who calls himself a “stand-up mathematician”.

Matt combines comedy and maths in a unique way and his contribution to Numberphile was great – stay tuned for his videos soon.

In the meantime, you can visit Numberphile and watch the preview and our first video about the number 11 (presented by Dr James Grime).

On Tuesday, I headed for the hallowed halls of the Royal Society.

The morning was spent mainly with library manager Rupert Baker (right) trawling through old documents about the French astronomer Charles Messier.

It was a tremendous success (partly due to Rupert’s better-than-mine grasp of French) and the footage will be seen in the upcoming YouTube series called Deep Sky Videos.

The films will be focusing heavily on the so-called Messier Catalogue, a collection of objects in space recorded by Messier in the 1700s.

In the afternoon we were joined by familiar face Professor Martyn Poliakoff and a new friend – Michael Stevens (pictured together).

Michael's the man behind the wildly successful YouTube channel, VSauce.

We met in the Royal Society’s secure vault and discussed some of the society’s precious science artifacts.

It was a great privilege and should result in some nice little video snippets (aka, mind-blowing science awesomeness, as I imagine Michael would describe it).

Michael and The Prof had some fun banter!

I won’t give away too much, but rest assured all will be revealed here on my blog and on YouTube.

I should point out that the Royal Society’s amazing collection of objects and documents is freely available to anyone who’s interested.

It’s routinely on public display or items can be viewed by arrangement. Visit the Royal Society website for more information.