170: Marcus du Sautoy on how to see the stories in numbers

About this episode

Giles Edwards interviews mathematician Marcus du Sautoy about the stories behind numbers and their connections to creativity and science.

This week we rented the top 3 maths movies of all time – A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game and 3 Men and a Baby – all in order to be mathematically competent enough to share a pod with one of the world’s greatest number nibblers, Marcus du Sautoy. So highly acclaimed and awarded, we could have filled the entire podcast by listing out his many achievements, Marcus is perhaps best known as a Professor in Mathematics, Fellow of the Royal Society and Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. But, as well as being one of the very smartest people on the planet, he’s also one of the most engaging and enlightening speakers on the unexpected stories to be found in numbers, having written for several national newspapers and appeared on a number of mathematically-inclined TV shows including Mind Games, The Story of Maths and The Code (not to be confused with The Cube). By now you’ve probably run out of fingers to tally up all the brilliant things he’s done, so we shall just wrap up by saying he’s also the author of a series of superb books examining the relationship between maths, creativity, music, games and more – including Blue Prints, The Music…

People in this episode

Host: Giles Edwards

Guest: Marcus du Sautoy

Topics covered

• mathematics
• storytelling
• creativity
• science communication
• education

Keywords

• mathematics
• storytelling
• Marcus du Sautoy
• creativity
• science

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Oxford University

Books & works: A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game, 3 Men and a Baby, Mind Games, The Story of Maths, The Code, Blue Prints, The Music of Primes, The Creativity Code

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