Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty, recently faced off in a friendly yet fiercely competitive math challenge. The event was organised under The Richmond Project, the couple's charitable initiative focused on promoting education and numeracy skills across the United Kingdom.
In the video, the pair sat by buzzers as a volunteer read out a series of math problems, ranging from simple fractions to factorisation. The rules were to hit the buzzer first and answer correctly.
“I feel really nervous, especially competing against you,” Murty said, to which Sunak responded, “I feel great because it's win-win for me.”
From the very start, Sunak was quick. Asked to simplify the fraction 12/18, he buzzed in with the correct answer: “Two-thirds.”
Murty protested, saying, “I screamed it,” to which Sunak laughed.
The next question “What are the prime factors of 40?” saw Sunak once again claim the point, responding, “Two and five.”
Murty joked, “He's drawn a factor tree! Who does that?” Sunak said, “People who've done prime factorisation homework with their kids.”
Asked to convert 20 per cent into a fraction, they both answered “one-fifth”. “I yelled it! What more should I do?” Murty exclaimed.
After the competition, Sunak told his wife, “I thought you did very well. I was getting stressed, not about the maths, but about losing. Badly.”
Both Sunak and Murty have strong academic backgrounds. Sunak studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at the University of Oxford's Lincoln College, graduating with First-Class Honours. He later earned an MBA from Stanford University in California as a Fulbright Scholar.
It was at Stanford University that Sunak met Akshata Murty, daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy. She was pursuing her MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Murty completed her undergraduate degree in Economics and French at Claremont McKenna College in California.
Earlier this year, Sunak and Murty returned to Stanford as commencement speakers for the Class of 2025.
Murty called Stanford “nothing short of transformational,” recalling how the campus changed both their lives. She shared a memory that an admissions officer once predicted, from their essays, that they were destined to be together. “Twenty years and two daughters later,” she joked, “Stanford turned out to be a great matchmaking service.”
