"I'm obsessed with spreadsheets at the moment," says Matt Parker, a maths fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, who moonlights as a stand-up comedian. "In my new show I'm going to be showing my all-time favourite. It's pretty spectacular. You may have your own favourite spreadsheet, I don't know."

I don't, as it happens, but Parker is finding there are many like-minded souls out there. He did his first gig in early 2009 and quickly gained attention for a series of offbeat videos – how to split a restaurant bill; an algorithm for whether to use a budget airline – that went modestly viral on YouTube. He now does solo performances, including a spot at the Cheltenham science festival next month, and is one-third of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd, which will perform its Full Frontal Nerdity show at the Udderbelly in London this summer and in Edinburgh throughout August.

Aged "two to the power of five" – or 32 – Parker, originally from Perth in Australia, is developing an impressively eclectic CV. In November he helped organise the breaking of the world record for mass Rubik's Cube solving. More than 2,000 people, mostly school children, packed into the O2 Arena and 1,414 were successful. (Parker's personal best for the Rubik's Cube is a minute: "not great in Rubik's Cube circles; if you're not down to 30 seconds it's a bit embarrassing.")

He also recently bought 10,000 dominoes to create the world's largest computer that runs solely on dominoes. By setting up two rows, he could input any two numbers – between zero and 15 – and, depending on where they bump into each other, it would add them up. "It's a very, very inefficient oversized integrated circuit," he explains. "It's basically what you get on a chip in a computer."

This story will find its way into his comedy routine – "it's not funny yet but I'm working it up" – and he plans to do a scaled-down experiment with 1,000 dominoes in his show. "But don't promise that," he says. "Sprung stages aren't great, and if it's carpeted I'm in trouble because it's hard to balance them."

Parker concedes that his material particularly appeals to lapsed maths nerds but he believes that more of us have a dormant interest than you might think. "Why, when we're buying fuel, do many of us round it up to a whole number of pounds or tens of pounds?" he asks. "It's because we have a sense of 'Well, that looks nice.' A lot of people think they don't like maths but they do like order and patterns and problem-solving and puzzles. It's a human thing we all have, it's just some of us take it to a ridiculous nth degree and become mathematicians." Tim Lewis

Matt Parker performs Stand-Up Maths 2013 at the Cheltenham science festival on 8 June (standupmaths.com)