Ready to open your heart to me.

Well, we'll see.

Today's guest is the English mathematician Sir Timothy Gowers.

Among his numerous accolades is the Fields Medal he won in 1998.

Well, it's a medal he pretty much hasn't seen since by the sounds of it, but we'll come to that later.

I've visited Professor Gowers at his office

in Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. Where are you from, actually? Where were you

born? You sound very English. I am pretty English. I was born in a town called Mulborough in Wiltshire

and grew up in London. Did you grow up with mathy people? Like, were your

parents mathematical? They were musicians, but my father was always interested in maths and did maths

up to A level. And were you like, were you like one of these prodigy boy? Like, were you like,

it was it obvious you were going to be a mathematician? Um, I was

quite, uh, I think it's sort of, when I was quite young, I was sort of picked up music quickly.

So, that was, uh, quite a big thing. And at school, I was one of the good ones, but not sort of

far and away at the best person at school, including in maths, but in general, I was sort of reasonably good all rounder and maths was always going to be in the mix somewhere. Did you want it to be in the mix? Like if I'd spoken to you as a boy and said, what do you want to be when you grow up? What would the answer have been? When I was really young, I think I wanted to be a doctor because I had doctors in my family. But I think I wanted to be a doctor with a beard. I don't know exactly why that detail was actually neither. Professor Gowers is clean-shaven for those who don't know what he was. Very clean-shaven. I suppose I did have a PhD, so I was a sort of doctor for a while.

A doctor with a bit? Did your doctor have a beard? Like, where did that get into your head? I don't know. I think maybe some, I may have been an ancestor. My mother's father was part of a long line of doctors in Marlborough, actually. So that may have had something to do with it. I'm not quite sure.

Anyway, my father was a composer, and I think I had some aspirations in that direction at a certain age.

But maths was not by very long way, but certainly I think I would say it was usually my favourite subject at school,

and I think that was partly because of less learning to do.

You just, once you understood something,

of course I realized later that that was only up to a certain point,

and then after that point there's a lot of learning to do in mass,

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