Marcus du Sautoy balances a football on his head, possibly not what you might
expect from an Oxford professor. Nor would most senior academics challenge a
visiting photographer to a game of keepy-uppy, boast of their aggressive
style as a defensive midfielder or sport plaster casts after breaking bones
during a tough game against some writers from Germany. And we won’t even
mention the pink shirt and the green trousers.
Du Sautoy, 43, a mathematician, is the new head cheerleader for British
science, a position more formally known as the Oxford University professor
for the public understanding of science, which he inherited from Richard
Dawkins. From now on it is his job to ensure the public heart beats a little
bit faster when confronted with stuff like quarks, osmosis or the periodic
table.
So it’s a surprise to learn that he doesn’t like science: so imprecise and
unreliable, not at all like mathematics. Happen to mention this at the job
interview did you, professor?
“I became a mathematician and not a scientist because science often goes
wrong,” he says. “You do an experiment 100 times and you get the same
result. You do it for the 101st time and something different happens. No one
would be my lab partner at school because all my experiments went wrong.
Maybe I’m a bad choice for this job.”
A bad choice? Not if he can do for science what he is doing for mathematics.
He has written two popular books on maths and has another on the way. He
made the first television series on the subject in living memory, BBC4’s The
Story of Maths. Two years ago he gave only the second annual Royal
Institution Christmas lecture to deal with maths. He writes a weekly
newspaper column in The Times called, slightly to his embarrassment, Sexy
Maths.
Yet the odds appear to be stacked against him. Britain’s schools are 24th in
the international league table of achievement in maths – behind Estonia, the
Czech Republic and Iceland. Not that adults do any better. According to one
assessment, 47% wouldn’t reach even the lowest grade at GCSE.
The worst thing is, we don’t seem that bothered. There’s a feeling that maths
is just too difficult for our pretty little heads. The night before I meet
du Sautoy, he appeared on Richard Bacon’s late show on BBC Radio 5 Live. “I
am just about keeping up,” Bacon simpered halfway through. He’s not alone.
Even Melvyn Bragg struggles with maths on the In Our Time series for Radio
4, and the columnist Simon Jenkins suggested last year that children would
be better off learning Latin if they wished to develop analytical minds.
Rather unexpectedly, du Sautoy says that Jenkins is half right. He studied
Latin and enjoyed its rigour (but was driven away by its irregular
conjugations and vocabulary). “But if you don’t do maths there are so many
jobs that you can’t do,” he goes on. “A nurse or a vet, for example, needs
to have a concept of equations to be able to work out how much of a drug
should be used in a particular setting. A misplaced zero can kill somebody.
“Even if you never use a sine or a cosine in everyday life, maths gives you
such a clarity in the way of thinking.”
Du Sautoy struggled with maths as a child growing up in Henley-on-Thames,
Oxfordshire. Actually, he seems to have struggled with everything. “I could
barely spell,” he admits. “I just wanted to kick a football about in the
playground.” This was despite a relatively academic background. His
grandfather was chairman of Faber & Faber and a friend of Benjamin
Britten. His godmother is Valerie Eliot, the widow of TS Eliot. But his
parents – his father was an ICL executive; his mother worked in the Foreign
Office – were advised that young Marcus wasn’t grammar-school material.
So he went to Gillotts, the local comprehensive instead, where his main
academic interest was languages because he wanted to be a spy (he thought
his mother was a spy at the Foreign Office and she strung him along,
pretending she kept a gun hidden in the house).
All that changed at the age of 12 when a maths teacher asked to see him after
class. He assumed he was in trouble, but instead the teacher suggested he
read The Language of Mathematics by Frank Land. And that was that. He
decided to become a mathematician. From school he went to Wadham College,
Oxford, and became a fellow of All Souls and professor of mathematics.
Maths, according to du Sautoy, is the ideal subject for anybody who is lazy or
has a bad memory (because if you forget something, you can work it out from
first principles): “If you do maths, you can get away with hardly doing any
work at school and winging it in exams.
“I came a cropper in my first year at university because I was basically
carrying on from school: I did loads of music, a lot of theatre and sport
and, frankly, not enough maths. I got a second. When it came to the next set
of exams I did put in a lot of hard graft because I knew to be a
mathematician you need a first.”
Why do the rest of us find maths so damned difficult? I must declare a
personal interest here: I studied maths to A-level, but did so badly that
memory has suppressed the grade I got.
My interest was revived by watching du Sautoy’s Christmas lectures with my
children. I read his book about prime numbers, The Music of the Primes, and
took it to our meeting in the hope that he would explain a couple of points
about the relationship between zeta function and imaginary numbers. I’d love
to pass on what he told me, but you know how it is – pressure of space and
that sort of thing.
Our problem, according to du Sautoy, lies in our maths curriculum, which is
frightened of the difficult stuff: “Primary school isn’t too bad – they play
about with numbers in an exciting way. But we fail to excite children from
11 to 14.” He likens it to learning scales without playing any music (he
plays the trumpet and piano and is learning the guitar).
Du Sautoy wants children to know about things such as the Fibonacci sequence,
in which every number is the sum of the previous two numbers (so 1, 2, 3, 5,
8 etc). Schools might even tackle one of du Sautoy’s specialist subjects,
the Riemann hypothesis, one of the great unsolved puzzles of maths. There is
a $1m prize for the person who finds the proof, hinted at by Bernhard
Riemann in the mid-19th century. Although the slightly depressing news is
that, even if there is a solution to Riemann’s hypothesis, we might be too
dim to grasp it.
“There is the worry that maybe we have a brain which is complex enough to
formulate the conjecture but the solution might be beyond us,” says du
Sautoy.
He is obsessed with prime numbers. He notes that his age, 43, is a prime. The
football team for which he is the slim, balding midfield enforcer have prime
numbers on their shirts. More practically, prime numbers are used to encrypt
internet traffic.
He spends half his time researching problems like this (symmetry is his other
passion) and the other half explaining wider scientific issues to the
problem. Where does he stand, for example, on climate change?
For the first time as we talk, a slight air of panic sets in. Unlike his
predecessor, this is not a man who courts controversy. He skips nimbly
around the politics and talks instead of glaciers and CO2 and plankton.
“It’s a complex system,” he says of the climate, “and it’s science that will
help us know what to do next.”
A friend of du Sautoy once described him as “very right-on, but nice with it”.
That is not a fair description. It’s true that he sometimes wears outfits
that wouldn’t look out of place at the Glastonbury festival, but he’s much
too amusing to be right-on. He says he’s conscious of his own carbon
footprint but it’s clearly not a big issue: it doesn’t rule his life. I
mention in passing that his house has conventional lightbulbs, which are
about to be phased out.
“Do we?” he looks around in surprise and suddenly realises why his wife rushed
out earlier in the week to buy “hundreds of lightbulbs”.
He met his wife in Israel, where they were flatmates. They have a 12-year-old
son plus twin daughters, adopted from Guatemala after the death of a second
son at birth in 2000. They live together in a nondescript street in Stoke
Newington, north London, which is perhaps not what you might expect of a
celebrity academic. He kept rooms at Wadham College, where he was formerly a
fellow, but it’s in north London that he feels most comfortable.
“We like it here,” he says. “It’s a very multiracial area so we don’t stand
out as we do in Oxford. The twins look very Mayan. People don’t actually
stare, but we do feel sort of conspicuous.”
That might, of course, be those pink shirts and green trousers.
He is full of optimism about his new job. He expects to extend his media
profile as a mathematician into other areas of science, but also hopes to
persuade scientists from different disciplines to talk to one another more
often.
As I leave, I wonder whether his optimism is not misplaced. Is he not
preaching largely to the converted – Bragg’s audience on In Our Time,
watchers of Horizon, sudoku lovers and fans of Brain Training (of which he
does not approve: too easy).
In his defence, he claims that he is reaching a wider audience. “On that Radio
5 show we spent 10 minutes discussing the idea of zero divided by zero. And
I was listening to Radio 1 recently and they were playing darts to choose
lottery numbers. Then one of the presenters piped up and said, ‘You can’t
score 23 at darts because it’s a prime number’.
“That’s when I thought I might just be getting through.”
