Marcus du Sautoy

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2008

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. A professor of mathematics at Oxford University and a fellow of New College, he has recently been named as the next Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He has always been driven to try to demystify and popularise his field. It's clearly a task he takes seriously - his father has recently enrolled on an Open University course in maths and, he admits, when he took his young son to visit the Alhambra in Spain, he challenged him to find the 17 forms of plane symmetry in the palace. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: The Prelude to Parsifal by Richard Wagner Book: The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse Alternative to Bible: Mahabharata Luxury: My own trumpet.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kesti Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive
0:04.9	for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.2	The program was originally broadcast in 2008.
0:26.8	My cast away this week is Marcus de Sotoi,
0:29.5	a professor of mathematics at Oxford and a fellow of New College.
0:32.6	He has a world-class reputation for his work.
0:35.9	His obsession with his subject then is to be expected.
0:38.8	Less predictable are some of his other passions.
0:41.2	Playing the trumpet, theatre, Arsenal Football Club,
0:44.4	I poppantly bright clothes and surfing.
0:47.2	Every seven's wave, he says, is good.
0:50.2	He's also a first-rate communicator,
0:52.6	popularising mathematics with books and TV programmes,
0:55.6	believing he says that once you show people
0:58.0	it's not a load of boring multiplication and long division.
1:01.1	You can see it has beauty and aesthetics,
1:03.2	and excitement and drama and emotion.
1:06.9	You had me up until emotion.
1:09.3	Where does that come into mathematics?
1:12.0	Well, for me doing mathematics is a real emotional buzz.
1:15.6	At the moment when you've been working on something,
1:18.1	you just can't see where it's going,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.