Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
When I read this I thought, ‘Yes, this is the game I want to play.’ That’s what I try to do in the work that I do, to combine my love of music, to explain why music and mathematics have these common themes, to bring mathematics alive through the theatre, write the books I do. That’s my ultimate aim, to become a master of the glass bead game. I just think it is a magical book.
Now, Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game is a novel but there’s a lot of – not exactly maths – but a lot of pattern in there.
There’s the ideas of mathematics, of philosophy, of music all brought together in this game, the glass bead game, and it’s interesting you picked up on the word ‘pattern’ because that’s what mathematics is about, pattern-searching. And it’s why there’s this link to music very often because the way you listen to music and make sense of it is to find patterns, relationships, structures, evolving structures, common themes changing, mutating. I think all of those ideas are very common to how people do mathematics as well.
When I read that book I thought, ‘Yes, this is the game I want to play.’ That’s what I try to do in the work that I do, to combine my love of music, to explain why music and mathematics have these common themes, to bring mathematics alive through the theatre, write the books I do. That’s my ultimate aim, to become a master of the glass bead game. It’s the book I took on my desert island when I was asked to do Desert Island Discs. I just think it is a magical book.
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Marcus du Sautoy is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. In 2001 he won the prestigious Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society, awarded every two years to reward the best mathematical research made by a mathematician under 40. In 2004 Esquire magazine chose him as one of the 100 most influential people under 40 in Britain. In 2009 he was awarded the Royal Society’s Faraday Prize, the UK’s premier award for excellence in communicating science. He received an OBE for services to science in the 2010 New Year’s Honours List. He wrote and presented a four-part landmark series for the BBC called The Story of Maths. He has a regular column in The Times called Sexy Science.
