Today's guest is Alex Bellos.

Alex is an author, journalist and something of a puzzle guru.

He's also been a regular on Numberphile videos over the years, featuring in some of our most popular posts.

You may well have seen him cutting cakes, counting cows and playing pool on an elliptical pool table.

We'll get to the books and the puzzles later.

But first.

So, Alex, where were you born?

Oxford.

Oxford?

Yeah.

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?

That made me posh?

I don't know.

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.

So they did it all right and I guess now I'm

posh in the sense that I then studied at Oxford and I write books. But I don't think then you'd

have called them posh. You'd have to call them kind of hardworking immigrants. What occupations do they

do, your parents? So my dad has been an academic all his life. About 20 years ago,

got a job at Princeton, where he's head of the Department of Comparative Literature,

which is basically modern languages. His speciality is French and now has become translation.

So he runs, I think, the Centre for Translation Studies, something like that, at Princeton.

He is a translator himself, but also the kind of the

...