Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your first book is G H Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology, which is about the beauty of maths.
Yes, it really appealed to me when I read it as a kid because I was interested in music, I played the trumpet, I loved doing theatre, and somehow G H Hardy in that book revealed to me how much mathematics is a creative art as much as a useful science. In fact he probably goes further, he really revels in the beauty of the subject and says he’s not particularly interested in the applications. That really appealed to me at the time – I was still hankering after something that made a lot of logical sense and wasn’t too ambiguous but was creative. That book really brought mathematics alive for me.
It also contains two beautiful proofs, quite simple proofs that someone at school or an adult can understand. One is the proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers and I thought it was a piece of magic that, with just a little bit of finite logic, you can capture the infinite.
There’s also another side to that book which is really special, which is C P Snow’s introduction. This is a beautiful piece of writing about the biography of G H Hardy and particularly about his meeting with the Indian mathematician Ramanujan. That’s a story that plays into another book I chose, which is the script for A Disappearing Number, performed by the theatre group Complicite.
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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.
