Marcus du Sautoy is answering the phone and making tea while his laptop does the maths.
It’s arduous maths: hours of long division, testing massive numbers for ‘primeness”, indivisibility by other numbers. The first person to find a 10-million-digit prime number — hugely valuable to defence and commercial security systems — will win a $100 000 prize. Business teams, talented amateurs, even Chinese schoolchildren are all chasing prime numbers. Thanks to a freeware website that gives out the testing formulae in return for an eventual share of the prize, anyone can now have a stab at a problem that has eluded mathematicians for centuries. What is unusual about Du Sautoy is that he hopes that anyone will.
A popular mathematician, he recently landed the landmark British TV scientist slot — the Royal Institution (London) Christmas Lectures. With the title The Num8er My5teries, and subjects ranging from codes, magic tricks, and the shape of the universe, he hopes to turn a generation of young teenagers on to maths.
At primary school, he wasn’t particularly good at sums, he says. But a secondary school teacher spotted his interest in mathematical patterns and suggested he read the maths column in Scientific American.
When he was 13, his father took him to the Royal Institution lectures. For the first time since 1820, they were given by a mathematician, Sir Christopher Zeeman. Du Sautoy was entranced. ‘They were totally inspiring. Zeeman really pushed people; he did stuff like catastrophe theory. I came away saying: ‘I don’t understand that language, but I want to learn it.’”
Mathematics is not just sums, he tells children and adults — particularly maths teachers — and it need not necessarily be taught hierarchically. You don’t always have to get step A right before lifting the veil on step B. ‘We don’t say to children learning music: ‘You’re only allowed to play scales until you’ve got them all right’,” he says. ‘Mathematics has beauty and romance. It’s not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It’s an extraordinary place; it’s worth spending time there.”
Some mathematicians are better at posing questions, others at finding answers, he says: ‘The answer gives you the real adrenaline rush. In my own work I’ve forged connections that weren’t there before, but I couldn’t just ask questions.”
The maths he has communicated has become harder, culminating in his book on prime numbers, which centres on an almost incomprehensible hypothesis by 19th-century mathematician Bernhard Riemann on whether primes occur at random or in a detection-resisting pattern.
‘Other mathematicians said to me, ‘You’re going to try and explain the Riemann hypothesis?’ and laughed. But I don’t think there’s any mathematics which is too hard for people to understand,” he says. ‘The wonderful thing about maths is it’s a totally logical subject, and a pathway has been marked out … A lot of these things can be crystallised in something quite essential, that people can get. If I can’t explain it, I realise that’s probably because I don’t completely understand it myself.” —