Marcus de Sotoi, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me on.

Was Shakespeare something of a mathematician?

Well, I think most people would say, surely that's a contradiction in terms,

as he was a wordsmith.

What on earth has mathematicists got to do with Shakespeare?

And actually, I did think the same for many years, but then there was an anniversary

a few years ago, and somebody asked me to do a talk on Shakespeare and mathematics. And I thought,

well, I don't know anything about this. But so I was very lucky. One of the wonderful things about

Oxford is that you mingle with a lot of people

outside your discipline. And so I was sat next to a Will Poole, who's a Shakespeare expert at my

college in Oxford, New College, and I said, I've got this, you know, for this task to do this

talk about Shakespeare and maths. And he said, I don no, actually, Shakespeare was obsessed with numbers and

used numbers a lot in the way he wrote. So I was very intrigued, and he went on to explain

some really curious uses of number to create certain effects in his work. So everyone probably

all knows that Shakespeare comes in iambic

pentameter, which is, you know, 10, 10 kind of sounds which go da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

So that's a, you know, nice number, 10 being the number of fingers on our hand, will we count in. But when he wants to say something important, he changes that. So what's the most famous line in Shakespeare? To be or not to be, that is the question. So suddenly you get this 11, a prime number, a number which doesn't kind of fit into any other

kind of, you know, certainly wakes you up out of 10. And so suddenly you're listening because

things have changed. And so this kind of use of an indivisible number, a prime number, 11,

Shakespeare uses to kind of just rattle you out of this kind of soporific,

iambic pentameter that you got used to in Hamlet.

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