🎓Who I Am — Credentials at a Glance

  • 18 years’ experience tutoring school-level maths (KS1 to A-Level)
  • Pioneered online Dyscalculia tutoring in 2015
  • PhD in Mechanical Engineering – Imperial College London
  • Innovated multisensory systems for online tutoring
  • Featured in international press, trusted by professionals, teachers & SENCOs

I’ve attended 20+ maths education conferences and run CPD sessions for teachers.
This isn’t a job — it’s a lifelong obsession with how to explain the hardest ideas to the most anxious learners.

🕉️ Mathematics Is My Inheritance

Vidya — विद्या — a Sanskrit name meaning “knowledge,” “wisdom,” or “the light of learning.”
It was my mother’s name. My first teacher.

Atul Rana Online Maths Tutor Profile Photo

I come from the culture that gave the world zero, place-value, and positional number systems — key foundations of modern mathematics. I was raised with mantra, rhythm, and symmetry — where pattern isn’t just taught, but lived.

Many of the tools I use today — like Dienes blocks and Cuisenaire rods — are modern echoes of ancient insights seeded in the soil of India. They may look contemporary, but their logic is timeless.

I bring this heritage into dialogue with everything I’ve studied. Engineering at Imperial College. Music through self-inquiry. Tango in the elite studios of Buenos Aires. Across each of these, I found the same underlying truth: structure is beauty, and limits reveal pattern.

Tutoring Experience

  • 2006 onwards (starting online in 2012).
  • Residential live-in tutoring at homes.
  • Tutoring at independent boarding schools.
  • Teaching assistant volunteer at London primary and secondary state schools.
  • Specialist marker for a major exam board.

Other Roles in Education

  • BitPaper – (September 2017 to date) Social Media Coordinator for interactive digital paper whiteboard. BitPaper is used by thousands of tutors worldwide.

Qualifications and Work Experience

My story – A terrible start at maths while growing up all over the world

Voluntary teaching, PhD at Imperial College and rock singing

In 2005 I graduated from Imperial College London with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Tribology department. My PhD was sponsored by Smiths Aerospace and the DTi. I looked at sealing mechanisms for actuator seals in aircrafts. And as part of my PhD I built an experimental rig made out of glass and used optics for peering into the sealing mechanisms.

In 1999 I had completed my undergraduate degree there in Mechanical Engineering. In that time I had been a teaching volunteer for two local state schools, a primary and a secondary. I had run undergraduate laboratories and tutored one to one guitar to students. My biggest passion at university was to be a musician. I bought an acoustic guitar at the late age of 19 and taught myself until I could play songs. A few years later I formed a rock band at Imperial College and I have now been singing and playing guitar in it for 17 years.

Rolls Royce and my days in software development

After a degree and PhD from one of the top universities in the UK I got some really cool jobs, I have worked for Rolls Royce Plc and in the City of London designing Economic Software models. But I left my city job voluntarily (at a time when people were hanging on to their jobs because of the recession) to tutor children.

Why I love tutoring

I enjoy tutoring because of the difference I can make to children’s lives, and by that to their families lives. I do this because of the many letters, emails, texts I get thanking me of the difference I make. I do this because of the things I myself learn from being involved with different people and families. I have taught in state schools, independent schools and even in a village in India where my grandfather grew up. I amass new and fascinating experiences year on year, and things always get better and ever more interesting. With online tuition I’m connecting to different parts of the world in real time.