Marcus du Sautoy may be one of the most famous mathematicians of his generation, but as a passionate supporter of “the Arsenal”, he’s just as happy to talk about football.
“You can actually apply the same analysis Google uses to calculate page ranks to the network of a football team; the links between pages become the links between players,” Prof. du Sautoy told Times of Malta.
“This was done with Spain’s World Cup team: the ‘page rank’ was shared around the whole team, so there was no one player on which everything depended.
“But with England, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard were the only hubs. If you took them out, they couldn’t play. Who won the World Cup? The team with the better maths.”
Since publishing his bestselling book The Music of the Primes in 2003, Prof. du Sautoy has established himself as one of the leading voices in the popularisation of maths, with a number of BBC series, newspaper columns and engaging public presentations.
In 2008, he was also appointed to the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, succeeding the inaugural holder, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion.
He was in Malta last night to speak at an interdisciplinary conference on the theme of “Scale”, co-organised by the Humanities, Medical and Science (Hums) Programme of the University of Malta.
“I think the reason a lot of people don’t like maths is that they don’t know what maths is about. That’s the tragedy of our education system. We’re missing out on telling children the really exciting stories,” he says.
One of those stories, encapsulating the excitable wonder with which Prof. du Sautoy talks about his subject, is the subject of his first book: prime numbers.
I think the reason a lot of people don’t like maths is that they don’t know what it is about. We’re missing out on telling children the really exciting stories
“The ancient Greeks proved there are infinitely many of these numbers. That’s a wonderful example of mathematics using finite, logical arguments to touch the infinite. I think that’s a really exciting story: the fact that finite minds can conceive of infinity.”
Prof. du Sautoy suggests that by “banging on” about utility and limiting maths to times tables and long division, we are missing an opportunity to open children up to the wonder of high-level mathematical thought.
Instead, he argues that we should have the bravery to expose children to tough ideas to give them something to aspire to, much like introducing someone learning a musical instrument to Beethoven.
“I think there’s a lot of exciting maths that actually isn’t that technically difficult, which you could expose kids to at much younger ages. Provided you don’t say it’s difficult, you can go a lot further. Let’s give people access to the top floor and they can work their way down.”
In engaging with adult audiences, who as decision-makers are at risk of passing down their own distrust of mathematics to the next generation, Prof. du Sautoy says he is a big believer in the power of storytelling to convey complex ideas.
He compares a mathematical proof variously to a murder mystery and a complex symphony, his talks readily exploit the “sometimes quite mad” stories of the historical figures behind great discoveries, and he has even collaborated with theatre companies and stand-up comedians.
“You only start to see the beauty as you see the maths evolving and playing out in front of you. The excitement of mathematics is being taken on an intellectual journey with twists and turns and surprises and tension and drama and suspense.”
Prof. du Sautoy acknowledges that science has come back into the mainstream in recent years, helped by a crop of charismatic, media-friendly scientists and buoyed by pop-culture phenomena like The Big Bang Theory.
“People are beginning to understand that those who know their mathematics have got power in this society. The Facebooks and Googles of this world were all created by mathematicians, who understood how to manipulate ideas and data.”
Now, he says, the key is to eliminate the silo mentality that sees children going from science to history to art lessons without realising the links between them.
“The really exciting developments and progress are all going to come from realising those interconnections.”