Today's guest is Vicki Neal, a mathematician at the University of Oxford.

She's just written a book about why people should study mathematics at university.

So of course, I wanted to find out why Vicky studied mathematics at university.

So, the beginning is always a good place to start. Where are you from? Where were you born?

I was born in a place that we moved away from when I was six months old. So I was born in Worcester,

but I know nothing about Worcester. I grew up just outside Winchester in the South of England. so a little village near a small city. So when you go to Worcester or Worcester comes up in conversation, do you

for any warmth or attachment to it because you were born there or is it just like complete coldness?

It's mostly coldness. I have been to Worcester a couple of times to go and do maths with young

people and I was curious to go and do maths with young people.

And I was curious to go and see having been born there, but I know nothing about the place.

I'm sure it's a lovely place. I've just not spent very much time there.

Did you like go and trek down the hospital you were born in or anything like that?

I spent sometimes trying to work out whether the university building that I was working in were somehow, or they bulldozed the hospital and replaced it. I never really got to the bottom of that.

I wasn't so excited, to be honest, to exactly what I was born. I was more interested in finding

somewhere nice to have lunch. It seemed like more of a priority. Tell me then what you were like as a youngster. Would I have seen

like little girl Vicky and said, well, she's going to be a mathematician? I don't think you would

have been surprised that I now do maths. I think my friends from secondary school are not surprised

that I'm now doing maths because I really liked maths when I was at school. But I certainly had no idea

that I might go on to do the kind of things that I've done professionally that wasn't remotely

on my radar. I don't think I understood when I was at secondary school that people had jobs as

university lecturers. I think if I'd stopped and thought about it, I'd have worked out that somebody must do the teaching in universities, but I didn't really stop and think about it. So I definitely didn't imagine that I would find myself doing this kind of thing. I had no kind of concrete ideas of what I wanted to do beyond maths was fun. What did you want to do when you grew up then? What would the answer be when the adults said,, what do you want to be when you grow up, Vicki? I'm still waiting to grow up. I think growing up might be overrated. I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. My answer is a secondary school student was, I don't know, maybe something to do with maths? And then people would say, or do you mean like a maths teacher in school? As though that was the only thing that you might do if you studied maths further.

I don't know. And being a maths teacher in school is a terrific thing to do, but it didn't seem like the thing that I wanted to do. It didn't feel like the right fit for me. So I was rather vague about the whole thing. I think I just sort of hoped that something would turn up, that maths was a sufficiently useful thing to

...