My guest today Sarah Hart is the Gresham Professor of Geometry. The first woman to hold that position

in its 400-year history. She has a special gift for making math interesting and accessible.

We like patterns, we like structures, we like symmetry and those things come out in whatever forms

of creative expression, we invent whether that's music or art or literature.

Welcome to People I Am Mostly Admire with Steve Leavitt.

A brand new book is called Once Upon a Prime and it dives into the magical overlap between literature

and mathematics. Back in January I interviewed mathematician Stephen Strohkats and we had an idea

to teach math appreciation. Of course about the elegance and beauty of what math can do.

In Sarah's return visit to the show I'm hoping to explore how the material in her book can actually

bring math to life.

So Sarah you were on the show back in 2021 and that was a conversation that really

sticks with me. We talked about all sorts of things but especially about the links between

music and math. It was a great conversation. I still think about it a lot actually as well.

We ran out of time in that conversation and never got around to talking about another

passion of yours which is investigating the connections between literature and math and I have to

say when you told me you were writing a book on that topic I was a bit incredulous because

off the top of my own head I couldn't come up with a page worth of connections between literature

and math much less in book. I have had a blast during this book because when people say what?

What do you mean there are connections and then it's a great joy to be able to show people

what they are. And this is why it's been so much fun. Mathematics is really our way of understanding

structure and pattern and if you think about it from that angle then you start to see okay literature

has for example poetry. I can see that there's structure and poetry. You can see that there are

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