Ian Stewart
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 15 March 1998
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week believes he has the answer to "life, the universe and everything". According to mathematician Ian Stewart, it's 137-and-a-half degrees.
He calls it "the golden angle", and says it can be found everywhere in nature - whether in the pattern of seeds on a sunflower head or in the spiral of a snail's shell. Mathematics, he says, has nothing to do with arithmetic and everything to do with being able to pack the luggage into the boot of the car. But for a broken collarbone which meant he stayed at home working out puzzles with his mum, he would have remained bottom of the class and never discovered how much fun maths could be.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel Book: Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter Luxury: Mrs Thatcher pickled in a Damien Hurst sculpture
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:09.1 | The program was originally broadcast in 1998, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a mathematician. For nearly 30 years he's taught at the University of Warwick |
| 0:36.2 | which has one of the best mathematics departments in the country. But his reputation stretches far beyond his academic home thanks to his unique ability to popularize his subject. |
| 0:46.0 | Maths, he believes, only becomes interesting once you leave school when there's no longer a right answer. |
| 0:52.0 | He's written 60 books, the most popular one is called |
| 0:54.4 | Does God Play Dice, and writes a column for a monthly American magazine. |
| 0:58.4 | Last year he became only the second mathematician for more than 150 years to deliver the Royal |
| 1:04.3 | Institution's Christmas lectures. The pattern of stripes on a tiger, the |
| 1:08.7 | formation of a snowflake, the spirals on the shell of a snail. All these, he says, are part of the magical maze of the mathematician's search. |
| 1:17.0 | According to him, mathematics is the closest humans get to true magic. |
| 1:22.0 | He is Ian Stewart. You make the search for explanations to these |
| 1:27.0 | things, Ian, sound exciting, a kind of dangerous journey with talk of magic and mazes, but the truth is surely that a mathematician |
| 1:35.1 | takes a logical progression through these things is fairly sort of solid |
| 1:39.2 | stuff isn't it? It's a mixture of lots of solid stuff most of the time, but this inspiration, this feeling that you're in touch with the universe in certain respects. |
| 1:47.8 | Every so often you get that, and that I think is certainly for me is what keeps me at it. |
| 1:52.1 | Can you allow inspiration in? |
| 1:54.0 | Oh, absolutely. |
| 1:55.0 | But the mathematician's job in a sense is to start from the inspiration |
| 1:58.0 | and then you have to turn it into this logical progression. |
| 2:02.0 | The logical progression is a framework that you impose |
| 2:05.4 | upon your ideas, partly while you're creating them, but very much rationalizing them afterwards. |
... |
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