Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What about George Gamow’s One, Two, Three…Infinity? That goes beyond maths into science as well, doesn’t it?
Yes, one of the things that really excited me when I read this – again when I was at school – was this idea of infinity. Gamow was a physicist first of all: mathematics is the language of physics and you can see that through this book. It was where I read for the first time the idea that there could be different sorts of infinity and that was just mind-blowing. I thought infinity was something you just couldn’t understand.
Also the book explores how mathematics feeds into the other sciences and that’s why I found it exciting. There’s another book by George Gamow which also turned me on, which is Mr Tompkins in Paperback. It’s a set of physics lectures which this guy, Mr Tompkins, goes to and always falls asleep during the lecture and then he dreams he’s in a world in which the speed of light is 30 miles an hour so he can see the effects of relativity happening on the streets.
Gamow’s a very inventive, top-rate scientist, as is G H Hardy, and I like top-rate scientists talking about their subjects in a lay way. I guess both of them were role models for me because that’s what I try to do: to do top-rate mathematics and then communicate it. I think we’ve all been living a little bit under this spectre that if you attempt to communicate your subject outside of the ivory tower, then you’re going to be knocked as being a second-rate mathematician. I’ve really been trying to prove that wrong in what I’m doing.
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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.
