A little after the Hay Literature Festival got off to a splendid start last week at the historic Kanakunnu Palace, perched atop a little hill in Thiruvananthapuram, Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, was engaged in a frenetic (and frantic) conversation with fans and friends. Frantic because in 20 minutes his
session was due to start. I was watching him, because I had been given the privilege, and responsibility, of introducing the superstar mathematician to the gathering. And I was anxious to meet him once before we appeared in front of the audience in the imposing Darbar Hall.
The irony of that moment didn’t escape me. I had repeatedly flunked mathematics in school and still dreaded calculation of any kind. And yet, there I was, not just sharing the stage with one of the best mathematical minds of our times, but also all set to pretend that I knew and understood his subject well. Maths, I cursed, had found a way to catch up with me.
When I walked up to Marcus, he was trying to sort out his paraphernalia — a football with wildly scribbled numbers, a pendulum, some pink balls — for his interactive lecture on matters of mathematics. Even as he talked, he tried not to hide that he was in a hurry. He wanted a few minutes to focus on his presentation. We talked, briefly, about the session and my role. “The shorter the introduction the better”, he smiled and said, and then added that his “talk” would “tickle and tease”.
And tickle and tease it did. Marcus’ theory that David Beckham chose 23, a prime number, to play for the Real Madrid piqued the audience’s interest. Explaining the significance of prime numbers in football, Marcus said that prime numbers are nature’s lucky numbers. The jerseys of all Real Madrid’s stars have prime numbers: Roberto Carlos (3), Zinedine Zidane (5) and Cristiano Ronaldo (11). Marcus knows the advantages of playing with a prime number: He sports 17, a prime number, when he plays for the Recreativo Football Club.
Marcus used the football to explain how its pentagons and hexagons helped form the myriad rotational symmetries. Just as numbers could be built out of the indivisible primes, he explained, a symmetrical object like a football, too, can be decomposed into indivisible symmetrical units. An understanding of such units of football held the key to bending it like Beckham.
Wherever he goes, Marcus’ reputation as one of the greatest scientists from the UK precedes him. At Oxford, he holds the prestigious Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, after Richard Dawkins, for whom the post was created and who has described Marcus as the “Steve Irwin of the number kingdom”. In 2009, Marcus was awarded the Faraday Prize by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating science to the public. This year he received an OBE from the Queen for his services to science. He was the mathematical adviser for the British play A Disappearing Number, based on the collaboration between two beautiful minds — India’s mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan and the Cambridge University’s Godfrey Harold Hardy. The play toured India recently.
Marcus, 45, has been to India before and delivered lectures in Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram. Being the professor of a subject which is largely perceived as abstruse and abstract, what Marcus does is incredible. Through his TV shows, Mind Games and The Story of Maths on BBC 4, lectures and writings, he has made maths a lot sexier, a lot more fun. He finds music in mathematics and mathematics in music. So, when he listens to Beethoven or Mozart, he makes mental notes of the pattern of the beats. And when he thinks about prime numbers, he is aware of their “syncopated rhythm”.
There is something incredibly exciting about the way Marcus has taken maths to the masses. He argues that people tend to focus too much on the “vocabulary and grammar” of mathematics, and have, somewhere along the way, forgotten “the Shakespeare of maths”, i.e. the aesthetics of numbers. What he tries to do is to make maths simple by deconstructing its complexities through examples and references rooted in various cultural currents.
After reading Marcus’ books on mathematics — The Music of the Primes, Finding Moonshine and The Num8er My5teries, which I did, I swear — you wish you could turn the clock back and fall in love with the subject in school. In The Music of the Primes, he tackles the history of prime number theory with a special focus on Riemann Hypothesis, the holy grail of mathematics. In Finding Moonshine, he writes about the various ways one can use maths to “find the right language to capture a structure in”. In his latest book, The Num8er My5teries, he focuses on the five hitherto unresolved mysteries of mathematics and tells you, among other things, how to “uncover” the shape of the universe, discover how to predict the future. If you solve any of the five puzzles in the book, you can win $1 million. Solve all five and you’ll win $5 million.
IT HAS been a long journey for Marcus, who struggled with maths while growing up in Oxfordshire in the late ’70s, when he nurtured dream of becoming James Bond. Having been introduced to maths as creative art in school by his teacher, who recommended G.H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology and Frank Land’s The Language of Mathematics to him, Marcus found “refuge” in the certainties that mathematics offered.
He spends his days and nights cracking the myriad shapes (symmetry) twisting steadily through hyperspace into infinity. And if you donate $10 to Common Hope, a charity organisation working for the welfare of street kids in Guatemala, which Marcus supports, he will name a symmetry he discovers after you.
Marcus plays the trumpet and piano and has now even learnt how to play the guitar. Like Richard Dawkins, he is an atheist. But, unlike Dawkins, he has stayed away from “God delusion” and avoids getting into a debate involving the supremacy of science over religion or vice versa. God, for Marcus, wears red jerseys and white shorts, plays football, and calls himself Arsenal.
Marcus can show you how to see in four dimensions. He tells you that the prime numbers were first discovered by cicadas who have a life cycle of 13-17 years (prime numbers). He will also get you to believe that Wayne Rooney solves a quadratic equation each time he goes for a kick. And he affirms that Fibonacci numbers were discovered not by Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, but by Indian musicians.
In short, Marcus will make you romance numbers even if you are a puzzled numberphobe.