© Shigeru Tanaka/AmanaImages/CorbisSymmetrical patterns like this one are one of Marcus du Sautoy's passions.
What made you apply for the Simonyi chair?
It encapsulates the two things I'm passionate about: discovering new scientific results and communicating them to other people. If you don't communicate your ideas to other people, the ideas don't come alive.
How to you feel about having to fill Richard Dawkins's shoes?
I'm not particularly daunted by it. I would almost say that I'm at the opposite end of the scientific spectrum from him. But I think mathematics is a fantastic choice for this chair because it underlies so many of the other sciences.
Will you be as confrontational as he is?
I certainly intend to defend science but I see this position as more about helping to create connections with society and scientists, to help encourage dialogue, to involve people in doing science and to get people so excited that they want to become scientists. I see it more as an ambassadorial role rather than creating controversy for controversy's sake.
Like Dawkins, you're an atheist. Will you be launching your own assault on religion?
Absolutely not. I think it's important for me to go in a new direction. Also, the joy of being Simonyi professor is that you can choose what you want to put your energy into. For me there are so many things to talk about in science: why it's exciting, entertaining and how it impacts on society. We have to make decisions about important scientific issues, and unless members of society are informed about them they'll be unable to get involved in that debate.
How will you set about communicating scientific ideas to society at large?
There's a limit to what one person can do. So one of the important jobs is to find ways to encourage more of the scientific community to get involved in telling society what is important about science.
I also want to expand the activities that I've been involved in already. I did a series recently for [TV channel] BBC4 called The Story of Maths. I think the BBC has been surprised that you can do maths on television and how excited people have been by it - the series had fantastic viewing figures.
I want to use that to say, "Look! There's an appetite out there for hard science. People want to get pushed outside their comfort zones - they want television and radio that stimulates them."
Do you think you will be able to reach the average Big Brother viewer?
I think that our brain is evolutionarily programmed to do mathematics. Because that's the way that you survive this world. Those who managed to understand geometry were able to avoid things being thrown at them and able to hit things that they wanted to aim at. Those who could count were able to assess whether to fight or flee - they could work out whether they were bigger than the other lot. So those who can do mathematics have survived.
When people say, "I don't have a brain for mathematics," I would say that's not true - that everyone has a brain to do mathematics. [Popular chef] Jamie Oliver has done Anyone Can Learn to Cook in 24 Hours - maybe I should do it.
You're keen on using art to promote science.
Yes. Next year is the 50th anniversary of the "Two Cultures" lecture that C. P. Snow gave, in which he said that people in England had become a society in which you were either a scientist or you were in the humanities, and never the twain shall meet. I think that's breaking down. There are interesting examples of scientific and artistic projects: I worked with a theatre company called Complicite on their play A Disappearing Number about the mathematicians G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. They wanted to engage in the mathematics and were asking me tough questions like "So what is a mock theta function?" and I had to go back and do some research to be able to answer that. So there's some healthy breaking down of those boundaries between science and arts. It will be one of my roles to see that science is integrated into everything we do.
Which areas of research are you most excited about?
My own research is in the area of symmetry. It's an extremely important area of mathematics because it feeds into the other sciences. For example, understanding what's happening with fundamental particles in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN - that comes down to symmetrical objects in higher-dimensional spaces. Viruses as well: the behaviour of a virus has been understood through its symmetrical structure.
Talking of symmetry, you're naming mathematical symmetries for charity...
Yes. Common Hope is a charity I'm supporting that gets kids in Guatemala off the street and into education. Provided they go to school, their family gets healthcare and housing.
I thought, people love having their names on things - craters on the moon, comets - why not symmetry groups as well? So I've created all these beautiful new symmetrical objects that have amazing connections to things called elliptic curves. If somebody donates some money to Common Hope, I'll name an object after them. You can buy one at firstgiving.com/findingmoonshine, and then I list all the named objects on my blog. I've raised about $1500 so far.
Anyone famous you've named one for?
There is the Roger Highfield Group - which somebody has named after the editor of !
How did your love of maths begin?
I wanted to be a spy when I grew up. So I started to try to learn languages. But I got very frustrated because they had all these irregular verbs and strange spellings. I hankered after things that made sense, with logic and structure. Then when I was about 12 or 13 a teacher took me aside after a lesson and recommended some books to me. One of them was called The Language of Mathematics and this made me realise "Oh God, mathematics is this fantastic language - it describes the world. And it doesn't have irregular verbs!"
I see this Simonyi professorship as paying back all those people in previous generations who bothered to tell a schoolkid at the age of 12 what an amazing place the mathematical world is.
Did you have any role models?
If I was going to choose somebody it might be Christopher Zeeman. He's an incredible mathematician, but he's also somebody who has communicated his science to people beyond the scientific community. He was the first mathematician to give the Royal Institution Christmas lectures - in 1978. My dad took me up to one of them and I watched the rest on television. He was so passionate about what he was doing, and I remember coming away saying, "Yeah, that's who I want to be when I grow up."
What's the one thing you'd most like to achieve during your tenure?
If the likes of [radio presenter] John Humphrys, who interviewed me recently, will stop asking "So what's the point of science?" and start to ask interesting questions about science itself, that would be a good sign.
© David LeveneMarcus du Sautoy
Profile
Marcus du Sautoy was born in London in 1965. He has been a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford since 2001. In 2004 he was named one of Esquire magazine's 100 most influential men under 40. He is author of Music of the Primes (2003) and Finding Moonshine (2008), and has presented several TV programmes. In 2006, he gave the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution in London.
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