0:00.0	Today's guest is Alex Bellos.
0:07.0	Alex is an author, journalist and something of a puzzle guru.
0:13.0	He's also been a regular on Numberphile videos over the years, featuring in some of our most popular posts.
0:20.0	You may well have seen him cutting cakes, counting cows and playing pool on an elliptical pool table.
0:28.2	We'll get to the books and the puzzles later.
0:31.2	But first.
0:32.4	So, Alex, where were you born?
0:34.6	Oxford.
0:35.5	Oxford?
0:36.2	Yeah.
0:36.8	Oh, so you're a posh person, are you? That made me posh? I don't know. So I was born? Oxford. Oxford? Yeah. Oh, so you're a posh person, are you?
0:38.6	That made me posh?
0:39.2	I don't know.
0:40.4	So I was born in Oxford from a Hungarian, naturalised French mother and a father who was still a student there, who's grandparents were poor immigrants from Ukraine.
0:54.1	So they did it all right and I guess now I'm
0:57.2	posh in the sense that I then studied at Oxford and I write books. But I don't think then you'd
1:03.6	have called them posh. You'd have to call them kind of hardworking immigrants. What occupations do they
1:07.6	do, your parents? So my dad has been an academic all his life. About 20 years ago,
1:12.4	got a job at Princeton, where he's head of the Department of Comparative Literature,
1:17.0	which is basically modern languages. His speciality is French and now has become translation.
1:21.4	So he runs, I think, the Centre for Translation Studies, something like that, at Princeton.
1:24.8	He is a translator himself, but also the kind of the
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