Marcus du Sautoy

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Presenter0:08

The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand eight.

Presenter0:26

My castaway this week is Marcus de Sotoy. A professor of mathematics at Oxford and a Fellow of New College, he has a world class reputation for his work.

Presenter0:35

His obsession with this subject, then, is to be expected. Less predictable are some of his other passions playing the trumpet, theatre, arsenal football club, eye poppingly bright clothes, and surfing. Every seventh wave, he says, is good. He's also a first rate communicator, popularizing mathematics with books and T V programmes, believing, he says, that once you show people it's not a load of boring multiplication and long division, you can say it has beauty and aesthetics and excitement and drama and emotion.

Presenter1:06

You had me up until emotion.

Presenter1:09

Where does that come into mathematics?

Marcus du Sautoy1:11

Well, for me doing mathematics is a real emotional buzz, that moment when you've been working on something, you just can't see where it's going and then suddenly you get this rush of adrenaline when you see actually how something works out. I mean, it's really that aha moment. That is a really emotional moment.

Presenter1:29

You must though surely be aware that mathematics for many people at best provokes disinterest, at worst an open hostility.

Marcus du Sautoy1:36

It does, but I think that's partly because people don't realize what mathematics is really about. I mean, I think we we're about to hear a lot of music, and I think mathematics and music have a lot to do with each other. What I feel people think mathematics is, is just kind of scales and arpeggios, and what I was lucky to hear when I was at school was actually the real music of mathematics. And I think if you open that up to people, of a sudden you see the emotional side.

Presenter1:58

Mentioning school, it it was it was when you were, what, twelve years old and over a cigar that you had your moment of epiphany.

Marcus du Sautoy2:05

I wasn't making that.

Marcus du Sautoy2:08

Yeah, up to that point. I really wasn't interested in maths because I didn't really like learning my multiplication tables and wasn't particularly good at them. But I was really lucky to have a teacher at my comprehensive school who, about 12 or 13, picked me out in the middle of the class and said, Okay, I want to see you after the lesson. And during the break, he took me round the back of the maths block. And then he took out his break time cigar and said, Look, DeSoto, I think you should find out what maths is really about, because it isn't what we're doing in the classroom, it's something much more exciting. And he recommended a few books for me, which just really opened this world up for me.

Presenter2:08

Yeah, what happened to that point?

Marcus du Sautoy2:41

You know, I'm so thankful for him giving me the key to that world. It's amazing.

Presenter2:45

At what point was it then? Was it simply after this conversation that you thought, okay, this is this is a world I can engage with, this is a world that I can make my own?

Marcus du Sautoy2:52

Yeah, well I was actually up to that point I wanted to do languages'cause um uh my mother had been in the Foreign Office and I thought she'd been a spy. I thought that w I thought she was 007 and uh so I fantasized about going into the foreign office as well and was ch choosing all the languages at school and and I got very frustrated with the very illogical side of languages, all these irregular verbs and strange spellings. And for me this mathematical language I realized was the perfect language, captured the world, nature, didn't have exceptions and I think that's when I got sucked into the mathematical world.

Presenter3:22

Um eight choices today. No Bach, I notice. A lot of our scientists choose Bach, you haven't.

Marcus du Sautoy3:24

Move bar.

Marcus du Sautoy3:27

Yes, I do love Bach, but uh has a lot of mathematics in it. I mean his student Mitzler used to say that uh his music was the process of sounding mathematics. And maybe that's why I react against it. I find it m sometimes a little bit too predictable and and too controlled and as you'll see I've got some fairly wild and uncontrolled pieces uh on our journey.

Presenter3:48

Uh the first one in the journey they're not too uncontrolled. Tell me why you've chosen this.

Marcus du Sautoy3:52

The first one is Strauss's Four Last Songs. The particular song is Frühling, and I've chosen a particular artist to sing it because she does it for me every time, Lucia Pop. And I think music does something which mathematics, although it's a very emotional thing, rarely does. This piece of music just does something to my body. Every time I hear it, the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, and this is why I love music.

Presenter5:10

Lucia Popp singing Fruling spring from Strauss's Four Last Songs with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Klaus Tenstedt, and uh were the hearers duly standing to attention.

Marcus du Sautoy5:20

Absolutely. I mean, it's just extraordinary. Every time I listen to it, there's a moment when she swoops up. It's just amazing.

Presenter5:26

You grew up in Oxfordshire. It was a very, very secure and happy upbringing you had. Tell me more about it.

Marcus du Sautoy5:32

Yes, it was. Yeah, I had a a really wonderful childhood. I had a a mother who was very creative. She

Marcus du Sautoy5:39

created stories with us, we played did lots of little theater games with um our toys and stuff like that, and had a father who was just wonderful as well, who uh he was in the computer industry and kind of I think gave me the logical side of my brain. So I I really see my parents as the the two sides, the very creative but very logical side.

Presenter5:57

And you said a moment ago that your mother had worked in the Foreign Office. She wa was she a spy? She wasn't a spy. No, she wasn't a spy. She told me she was a spy.

Marcus du Sautoy6:02

No, she wasn't. But yeah, there you go, that's her playing, you know. She said that um uh that they let her keep the black gun that every member of the Foreign Office is given and that it's hidden somewhere in the house. And so we used to spend all our time, uh me and my sister, trying to find where this black gun was, but we'd never find it.

Presenter6:17

She sounds very energetic. Is that where you got your energy and and sense of excitement about the work?

Marcus du Sautoy6:21

I think uh it probably is. I mean, she's still amazingly energetic. I take my son down there. She plays computer games. Uh she's flying birds now. It's uh totally extraordinary. She's one of these people who just loves new things. So yeah, I think my energy probably does come.

Presenter6:21

I think

Presenter6:35

And your grandfather, Peter de Sertoy, he he was a towering figure in your life.

Marcus du Sautoy6:38

He was a really important role model for me. He was chairman of Faber and he'd been to Oxford Waddam. He loved intellectual things, but he was a very humble man as well. And I just used to really look up to him as somebody who I aspired to be, you know, to to be somebody who ha had this wonderful intellectual range and was somebody who seemed to be important.

Presenter6:59

Did he introduce you to people from his working life, then?

Marcus du Sautoy7:02

Yes, my godmother is T. S. Elliott's wife, Valerie Elliott, so she would take me to cats and things like that, which was really amazing. And also there's a musical side to Faber and Faber. I don't think I ever met Britton, but certainly Peter Piers. I remember being at some party at their house and my hand was covered in some goo from some thing I picked up and I had to shake hands with Peter Piers and it was sort of rather embarrassing because I left him with a hand of goo.

Presenter7:27

So you give the impression of a very vibrant childhood. Had your parents recognised?

Presenter7:33

The spark of genius did they know they had a a very, very clever little boy?

Marcus du Sautoy7:37

I don't think I have a spark of genius, actually. I'm not sure I was a terribly clever boy. I think what I really love about my parents is that they just said they wanted me to do my best. It didn't matter whether I didn't succeed, just as long as I felt like I'd done my best. I just went through school kind of i in a normal way, but just enjoyed doing maths and it sort of grew more and more.

Presenter7:57

Tell me about your second choice today then.

Marcus du Sautoy7:59

Uh the second choice is actually related m to my grandfather because it's um a please by Benjamin Britton. This is the fanfare for St Edmondsbury. It's a it's a trumpet please and I'm a actually a trumpeter. I when I started getting into maths I actually started learning the trumpet at the same time.

Presenter8:14

The two were related?

Marcus du Sautoy8:15

Well, I didn't think so at the time, but I see in retrospect I think probably is a similar brain area that does that.

Presenter8:21

Yeah.

Speaker 48:21

Um

Marcus du Sautoy8:22

This piece actually, we went to visit my grandparents and they when they retired to Warborough and they took me up to the Red House, which is where Britain was, and the librarian brought out this piece of music, the score for it, and I hadn't heard it before. It's an absolutely magical piece. You get these just solo trumpet lines individually, and then they're all played together in this amazing cacophony, which you realize how amazing Britain is at weaving these themes together.

Presenter9:47

The Philip Jones Brasse Ensemble playing Britain's fanfare for St Edmondsbury. So you've already mentioned so many of your interests. I spoke of some of them in the introduction. Playing the trumpet, this vivid interest in theatre which had been generated and initiated by your mother, classical music that was brought out for you to listen to. I mean, all of those things on paper do sound like the classic ver we won't use the word genius because you don't seem to be comfortable with it, but very, very bright little boy.

Presenter10:17

Who was not being hothouse, but was being vigorously encouraged to engage with quite a complex world.

Marcus du Sautoy10:24

I guess so. I think they gave me a wonderful environment, like a fertile soil which that seed grew out of. My parents took me along to Wagner operas, six-hour operas at the age of 13, but I'd love them. I wasn't dragged there. I quite liked being slightly different as well. I liked the fact that everyone else seemed to be into pop music at this time, but what did it for me was classical music.

Presenter10:52

Held yourself to Oxford. What decided you that uh that's where you must uh end up?

Marcus du Sautoy10:58

Well partly again it was music because when I was playing in the youth orchestra in Oxfordshire we would do our concerts there. We did some wonderful concerts in colleges in Maudlin Chapel. I remember doing some singing there. I could see just what an amazing world it was for the students there. And also my grandfather had been to Wadham and so that sort of gave me that aspiration as well.

Presenter11:17

It seems interesting to me that there are two things that seem to run in parallel with you, and one is that you are a very unconventional character. I mean, I've mentioned the clothing, we might talk about that in a moment. You're very, very bright, vibrant clothes. You like to confound expectation by doing what is not expected of a 13-year-old, you know, going to the six-hour Wagnerian extravaganzas, and yet.

Marcus du Sautoy11:21

You and I

Presenter11:39

You want to go to the same college as your grandfather?

Presenter11:41

You felt very proud when you got into who's who. That's interesting, isn't it? Those two things running in parallel, because they seem apparently contradictory.

Marcus du Sautoy11:50

Yes, yeah, which which you know, and I I was a goody two shoes in school. It was the punk generation. Some of my friends were coming with just weird hairdos, but I I think there is a certainly uh a quite conventional side to me. Going to Oxford, becoming a professor in Oxford, that that is something I dreamt about.

Presenter12:05

And you won a scholarship to Wadham. Do you remember that uh that day?

Marcus du Sautoy12:08

That was extraordinary. I mean, you know, when I got this phone call from Wadham saying, Yeah, we'd like to take you and we're going to give you a major scholarship, you know, I I was just totally emotional. But what really surprised me was I phoned my dad up, who is quite a controlled uh guy. You know, I could hear on the phone he sort of collapsed and he raced home and he just came through the door and he burst into tears. And I I hadn't quite realized how much this meant also to the rest of my family.

Presenter12:35

But did that realization of seeing something uh uh as vivid and profound as your father's, you say not an emotional man, bursting into tears in front of you? Did it make you feel any sense of obligation about what you must achieve once you were there?

Marcus du Sautoy12:49

No, uh not really. In some sense, I kinda ma mucked up my first year actually because I was doing far too much music and um theatre and I actually got a a second in my um exam. So it's the first time I never actually got the top mark. But in my third year I then realized um that that's when I kind of went on my desert island and realized, okay, my dream is to become a mathematician. Um and if I'm gonna do that I have to get a first at the end of this. So I think I'm quite good at just going from one thing to another and just totally dedicating myself 100%. I think it's almost that autistic or blinkered thing. I can really blinker out everything else and just spend time doing one thing.

Presenter13:18

I think it's only

Presenter13:24

No, Marcus, I think they call that being a man.

Marcus du Sautoy13:26

Ha ha ha ha. Uh

Presenter13:28

Tell me about your next piece of music, then.

Marcus du Sautoy13:30

Oh, well this is actually goes back to the Wagner that I got immersed in. I've chosen uh Wagner's passive. I love the tha the way he sort of is constructing some huge mathematical proof, I think, with these all these um themes, leit motifs, which he interweaves in as complex a way and sort of gets this resolution at the end of the six hours.

Presenter14:48

The Prelude to Wagner's Parsifal, played by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Carrian. So we've talked a little, Marcus de Sertai, about how uh mathematics has been, can be, a source of joy, an expression, an almost poetic

Presenter15:04

in its way for you. It has, I understand.

Presenter15:08

offered solace to in the year two thousand you were struck by a profound family tragedy when your second child Yonatan died and your wife became very gravely ill. Can you explain a little of what happened there?

Marcus du Sautoy15:21

Yeah, it's um

Marcus du Sautoy15:23

It was like a bomb going off. We had a son already, Tom Air, and we were expecting a second son and.

Marcus du Sautoy15:31

My wife said I hadn't felt the baby move for a day and it was a right at term and I said, Oh, we'll just go along and check it. I'm sure it'll be all right Um but it it it wasn't all right and the baby had died um and we had to go through this awful

Marcus du Sautoy15:45

thing of delivering a a a dead baby, and I thought, What an awful thing to happen and then it just uh everything got uh radically worse and worse. When my uh wife then delivered the baby, then she went into this kind of free fall, she was bleeding out the the the

Marcus du Sautoy16:00

Hospital whisked her off, and the last thing she said to me was I'm dying.

Marcus du Sautoy16:03

And frankly, she uh she was. Um and beyond the next hour I didn't know what was happening to her, and it was just

Marcus du Sautoy16:13

terribly frightening and and and that's one of those m ki totally logical moments which nothing made sense at all in this in my life. And um uh for about two weeks she was in intensive care in a coma and then she came out of this and uh you know, I felt like I've got my wife back. It's just uh

Marcus du Sautoy16:31

Um the solace of mathematics, I'm afraid I did that classic male thing of just

Marcus du Sautoy16:35

burying myself in a world of security, and something where things don't blow up like that.

Presenter16:41

Where were you at her bedside? Were you at home with Tomir?

Marcus du Sautoy16:44

Oh, uh well, we went back and forwards, um, to the hospital. I mean, I have this awful that that corridor to the intensive care unit is just I mean, that is that is the road to hell for me. I can't think about that. Um and it was really tough'cause I didn't know whether she was going to survive. So, what do I tell Tommy? So, you know, I had to tell him that, you know, you build a child up, the child thinks he's going to get a brother. And so I had to tell him that

Marcus du Sautoy17:08

you know, something went wrong, we don't know what went wrong, but the that his brother died and um and then I wasn't quite sure what to tell him about uh his mother at that point because I didn't know either. And I think he you know, he's an he's an amazing boy and he's been through a lot. Uh so I have as well, but

Presenter17:24

And so your wife was in this coma for two weeks and came round from the coma, and I'm wondering.

Presenter17:31

How you began to make sense of any of it, as somebody who spends his life making sense of itself.

Marcus du Sautoy17:34

Once look

Marcus du Sautoy17:36

Exactly. I mean it's you know, this should be science. I realize kind of how primitive the other sciences are'cause they they didn't manage to produce any explanation for this. It was um totally frustrating. Um but that is what science is about, trying to find answers to to things like that.

Presenter17:53

Uh was there a moment when Shani came round from the coma, or was it more a sort of gradual in-and-out?

Marcus du Sautoy17:59

Well it's a terrifying thing because they kept her quite drugged to to um keep her stable and then they took the drugs off and I was expecting it almost to be like a switch and and for several days she didn't come round and I was thinking oh gosh, you know, so many things have gone wrong. Well, what's the next thing that is gonna go wrong? But, you know, then she did come round. But of course uh we were in very different places then because I was em on emotional high that I had my wife back but then she was on this kind of

Presenter18:14

Again, gone.

Marcus du Sautoy18:24

terrible low because she she then was aware of everything that had happened. You know, the way I make sense of it is, you know, life deals you these these sets of cards and you have to deal with it and and it is an emotional roller coaster ride and

Marcus du Sautoy18:36

Maybe I wouldn't want to have just a flat boring life, and this was part of just life's experience, and it was an incredibly intense experience.

Presenter18:44

And you said that you did take comfort in mathematics. I mean, how did that did you find yourself for an hour or two simply going and devoting yourself to yourself?

Marcus du Sautoy18:49

Yeah.

Marcus du Sautoy18:53

Yeah, it's uh for me it is a meditative world that just wanting to let everything else go and just be in a place that you're happy. So so it it is an escapism for me quite often. And a spirituality as well. I mean for me I get my spiritual buzz out of the amazing eternity of this world as well. There's something very special for me about this world.

Presenter19:16

Let's take a break for some music then. Tell me why you've chosen uh Lynch.

Marcus du Sautoy19:19

No, another Britain actually, yes. Uh i this is A Midsummer Night's Dream. Uh one of my favourite plays that I did at university was Midsummer Night's Dream in Maudlin Deer Park, which is magical. And I played uh Flute the Bellows Mender, which is a really fun part. I I love this operatic version of the play. I I really enjoy doing it at university.

Speaker 419:56

Red oaks sing and stand to the

Speaker 420:16

For the canopy with the song.

Presenter20:28

James Bowman singing I Know a Bank from Britain's A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Trinity Boys Choir and the City of London Symphonia, conducted by Richard Hickox. Travel is a big part of your life, and and was from a relatively young age. When you were studying you went to Israel. Why did you go to Israel?

Marcus du Sautoy20:46

Um yeah, after I did my Ph D there was one guy in Jerusalem that I really wanted to go and work with'cause I could just read his papers and feel like this is somebody who speaks my my language. You know, I I wanted to travel because I wanted to be in the foreign office like my mum to be a spy, but uh now I've you know, instead of this uh spies language I'm speaking this mathematical language to all these people.

Presenter21:05

And it was when you were in Israel that you met uh Shani.

Marcus du Sautoy21:05

Uh

Marcus du Sautoy21:08

Yes, that's right. She she's not a mathematician at all. She was working at Petzalel, the art college. We were flatmates together in Jerusalem. She's a v incredibly vibrant woman, somebody who just loves life very strong. I think that's why she survived the terrible experience. She's somebody who just gets on with life and and does things. And I and I just fell in love with her.

Presenter21:29

And and as well as your son, you have twin girls now. Yes. And the twin girls are from Guatemala.

Marcus du Sautoy21:34

Yeah, why

Presenter21:35

Why Guatemala? What what was the connection?

Marcus du Sautoy21:36

Well, that was also travelling because actually, just before I went to Israel, I travelled in Guatemala with my sister, and I fell in love with the country then. And so, when we were looking to adopt children to expand our family, we met a lot of people who'd adopted children from Guatemala, and all the children seemed to be so happy. So, we went out and we lived in Guatemala for seven months. Why did you do that?

Marcus du Sautoy22:00

Well, partly we've been told about these girls who were in an orphanage there and it that it was taking too much time. My wife just said, Look, come on, let's go out and look after these girls there. I'm tired of seeing them grow up in JPEGs that were being sent. So again, it's my sort of my wife's just this go-get mentality. My son went to school out there, and school's so much more fun out there. He just ran a farm and did woodwork and things. You know, he'd just come out of this horrible year where they do their exams at the age of seven or something ridiculous like that. And so he just really blossomed there as well. But Guatemala is a wonderful place. I feel like we've adopted two girls from Guatemala around a country as well. We went back there this summer actually to take them back for the first time.

Presenter22:41

And appropriately for men obsessed by symmetry, they are identical twins.

Marcus du Sautoy22:45

Yes, exactly. Identical twins, so that's nothing to do with the mathematics. That was sort of chance, I think. But it is I think it is rather cute. Let me

Presenter22:51

Let me ask you about your next piece of music. What have you chosen?

Marcus du Sautoy22:54

Oh Messian, this is the Tarangalila. Messian is somebody who loved doing mathematics actually. He threaded a lot of mathematical ideas in his work. I almost chose another piece, The Quartet for the End of Time, which uses prime numbers, some of my favourite numbers, to create a sense of timelessness. But actually I went for this one, which is a really emotional piece of music which I was listening to when I was phoned up and told I got a fellowship in All Souls College, which was a really major moment in life. And I remember trying to sing this theme as I was going down. I was living in Brixton at the time. So I was walking down to the tube trying to sing this theme. I think people thought I was just a total nutter.

Presenter24:26

Joie des Sang des Etoile, Joy of the Blood of the Stars, from Messayans Turangalilla Symphonie with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Simon Rattle. You are the new Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. That's a splendid title. Let's just explore a little more then the idea of trying to evangelize and and get people interested. It all begins at home. Um is it true that when you took your son to the Alhambra Palace you challenged him to find the seventeen forms of plain symmetry?

Marcus du Sautoy24:55

Yes, exactly.

Presenter24:55

Exactly.

Marcus du Sautoy24:58

Yeah, I do we do go on these kind of nerdy mathematical um sort of holidays sometimes where I drag them round and show them you know the way I see the world. Um yeah, my son kind of raises hi his eyebrows. He knows that I'm sort of starting to go mathematical on him and uh but he

Presenter25:14

He grins and bears it. So it's prime numbers and symmetry that are two particular areas of focus for your work. Why? Why did they particularly attract you?

Marcus du Sautoy25:24

Well, I think prime numbers because they really go to the heart of what mathematics is about. I mean, I t say a mathematician is a pattern searcher. That's what I'm trying to do. I try and look for patterns. And the primes come out somehow the ultimate challenge. If you look at a sequence of primes, these indivisible numbers, two, three, five, seven, eleven They don't seem to have any patterns in them at all, so they're kind of like the ultimate challenge for the mathematician.

Marcus du Sautoy25:47

And symmetry as well. Well symmetry is the language of nature in some ways. That's what I sort of discovered in my exploration. It's it's a language that nature uses in chemistry, biology, physics. So for me, if if I get access to the the possible symmetries that are out there, I'm getting access to really deep eternal truths.

Presenter26:07

I think one of the most interesting things that you've written for the uninitiated, for people like me, I'm going to quote it here.

Marcus du Sautoy26:12

I'm good to

Presenter26:13

Evolution has programmed us to be over sensitive to symmetry. Symmetry in the undergrowth is either someone about to eat you or something you could eat. And to me that is a wonderful description of the fact that we are programmed to be fascinated by it, and why you want to unlock the reasons for that fascination.

Marcus du Sautoy26:32

That's fascinating. So many people say that they don't have the brain to do mathematics. Oh, I hate mathematics, can't do mathematics. And I totally disagree with that. I think we're evolutionary programmed to do mathematics. It's how we survived. The fact that we can judge distances in the forest, jungle, or whatever, that you can pick out things with symmetry, that you can count things. Say there's more of us than there are of them, we can attack them. Those who could count survived.

Presenter26:55

I read a summary of some of your postdoctoral work, and it said you were

Presenter26:59

Investigating theoretical symmetry in infinite dimensions. Now, I can understand each one of those words individually.

Presenter27:06

I'm entirely unsure of what the phrase means when it's all joined up together like that.

Marcus du Sautoy27:11

Well, you know, one of the problems with trying to communicate ideas of mathematics to the general public is that I think they want to understand it in one go. You can't teach somebody a musical instrument in three minutes, but you can give them a feel. So you can play somebody a piece of music and give them a feel for that world and this is what you'll get access to. And I think that's what I'm trying to do very often. I can't give complete understanding of the things that I do, but maybe I can give them a taste.

Presenter27:19

Yeah.

Presenter27:40

Tell me about your next piece of music, then.

Marcus du Sautoy27:42

This is Bartock's Bluebeard's castle and this is the moment when Bluebeard opens the fourth door and he opens it onto this secret garden and that is I think what my teacher did for me when he took me round the back of the maths block and he said you know find out what maths is really about and he opened this door and my god Bartock got exactly right what it feels like to suddenly see mathematics for what it really is.

Speaker 328:57

Oh sudden earth.

Presenter29:08

Ava Martin and Samuel Ramey performing Look, My Castle Gleams and Brightens from Bartock's Bluebeards Castle with the Hungarian State Orchestra, conducted by Adam Fisher.

Presenter29:19

So then, when Oxford University was looking for someone to take over from Richard Dawkins in this professorship of the public understanding of science, you must have been a shoe in. I mean the door must have been wide open for someone like you a communicator, a vibrant person, a modern man.

Marcus du Sautoy29:32

Oh. Well, I I think it was quite

Presenter29:33

What

Marcus du Sautoy29:34

It's a a a fierce battle to to you know end up with this job. But um I d I think they've gone for a great choice personally, but I mean, partly because of the my subject. I think we've gone from one end of the spectrum, which is evolutionary biology, sort of to the other end, which is mathematics. It's a very hard core subject.

Speaker 429:41

Yeah.

Marcus du Sautoy29:52

But I think mathematics is a great choice for this chair because mathematics does underpin all of the other sciences.

Presenter29:59

And what about this Amoni chair that you've taken over from Richard Dawkins? He was.

Presenter30:03

Well, notorious would be a good word, for evangelizing not only for science but against religion. He almost became more known for that in his time there. Um will you?

Presenter30:13

You're doing the same? You won't be.

Marcus du Sautoy30:13

Because you are an atheist. I am an atheist, but I work very closely with religious scientists. The person I went to visit in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he's an Orthodox Jew, lives on the West Bank. He practices his religion and does fantastic mathematics. So I don't the two are so separate for me that I really don't feel that I need to engage with that debate. And it's not one that really interests me. I want to bring the emphasis back more onto science rather than religion.

Presenter30:41

As an atheist, you send your son to a faith school. Are you comfortable with that? Are you sitting with him across the tea table and telling him why they've got it wrong at school?

Marcus du Sautoy30:49

A little bit, but actually I think that's the point that religion is actually very much a cultural thing. It's a tribal thing. And my wife's Israeli, she's Jewish, she's moved to London. It's very important for her to keep her community and culture alive. And I think for most people, that's the primary role of religion. You know, for me, my religion is arsenal or football. That binds me together in a community. And so I think for me, it isn't inconsistent to send my son to a Jewish school because I think he's getting a sort of cultural framework and he's sharp enough to ask the questions about the ideas of God and religion.

Presenter31:26

Tell me.

Marcus du Sautoy31:26

Uh

Presenter31:26

Say about your next piece of music.

Marcus du Sautoy31:28

But

Presenter31:28

Uh

Marcus du Sautoy31:29

This is Shostakovich who I've always loved uh since I was a kid, but I love him even more when I discovered in fact he's a great football fan, uh which I am as well, and he used to break off from doing his uh musical compositions to go and see matches on a Saturday, so I thought this is the man for me. He even wrote a piece which is a sort of mat football sonata, but I think it's a really useless piece of music, it was one of his um duds, so I haven't chosen that, but uh I've chosen uh s the string quartet number eight, which is a really delicate piece of music.

Presenter32:54

The Brodsky Quartet playing the second movement of Shostakevich's string quartet, number eight. Now, Marcus DeSito, I have heard that sometimes.

Presenter33:02

Your work is so difficult it makes your head hurt. Which makes me feel a bit better. Is it true?

Marcus du Sautoy33:07

Yeah, I think i it's really hard work doing mathematics, so you can only do about two hours of it a day. I mean, it you do require intense concentration to actually sustain yourself in this world.

Marcus du Sautoy33:18

And actually your subconscious is an incredibly important part of doing mathematics. So you'll sow the seeds in those two intense hours of work, and then the ideas will come when you're kicking a football around or making a train journey or something like that. So subconscious work is really important for a mathematician, so you need lots of relaxation.

Presenter33:35

He says, Um I I wonder if you ever fantasize about stopping the hard work, the brain throbbing work.

Marcus du Sautoy33:36

I

Marcus du Sautoy33:41

Well, if I had to cho have have chosen another profession, it would have been the theatre. And every now and again when maths is going really badly, I download this application form to um the Le Cop Mime Theatre in Paris, which is where Complicit did all their stuff. And I have filled it out a few times, but but you have to know French quite well, I think, to do the the course, and that was sort of like

Presenter33:51

And completely.

Marcus du Sautoy33:58

Wow, I should have learned French after all. Yeah, that that's been my dream.

Presenter34:02

And what about being marooned on the island? I'm imagining for a couple of hours every day almost the perfect place to do your.

Marcus du Sautoy34:08

Totally. Actually I've got no worries about being on this desert island'cause I do I really enjoy just being on my own thinking about mathematics, all these other things crowding in. So I think I'd be okay out there.

Presenter34:19

Tell me about your final choice, your eighth choice today.

Marcus du Sautoy34:22

This is uh Alexander's Feast by Handel, and this is a piece I played the trumpet in actually when I was um a student. It's a magical piece of music, uh and I've actually chosen an early music version of this because I love the kind of grittiness of this recording.

Marcus du Sautoy34:48

Uh

Speaker 434:49

The music of the clothes

Presenter35:32

The many rend the skies with loud applause from Handel's Alexander's Feast with the Bach Choir of Stockholm and Consentus Musicus of Vienna, conducted by Niklaus Arnancourt. So this is the point when I give you um the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. Do you want the Bible?

Marcus du Sautoy35:47

Uh I heard somebody else bring Mahabharata, that you're allowed a religious text. And I love that because I think I would be performing that because the way Peter Brooke did it, I I'd love to perform that one. So if I can take that one, I'll do that. You can, and of course your own book. What'll that be?

Presenter35:51

See what

Marcus du Sautoy36:01

Um it's The Glass Speed Game by Herman Hess. Um this is a book I read when I was a student. It's all about this sort of futuristic game which sort of tries to combine mathematics, music, philosophy into one sort of activity. I think I that's what I've been trying to do in my life, play The Glass Speed Game. So uh it's a book which really I love.

Presenter36:22

And what will your luxury be?

Marcus du Sautoy36:24

My luxury might have spotted a pattern. Hopefully I've made you into a mathematician in this uh program, and uh there's a pattern running through all my music which is the trumpet. I think the trumpet is very strong. And so I'm going to take my trumpet with me because I don't get enough time to play it at the moment. I'd love to just be able to sit on my desert island and play along to this music.

Presenter36:40

It's yours, you can have it. And if you had to take just one of these eight discs, which one?

Marcus du Sautoy36:46

Um, it's gonna be Wagner's Parseval. I'm a total Wagner nut and he does such good trumpet parts.

Presenter36:51

Professor Marcus DeSotoi, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Yeah, it was fun, thanks.

Presenter37:03

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.