Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A mathematician and author of sixty books, best known for popularising maths and delivering the Royal Institution Christmas lectures.
On the island
Eight records
This is the one that I play to myself in the car at the moment and sing along very badly to. I'm not a good singer, but I enjoy it anyway. As long as nobody else is in the car, this is great fun. It has very interesting lyrics. It's the only record I know that has Marconi in there as part of the lyrics, and it seems to me this is quite an intelligent sort of thing to do.
When I was at school in the sixth form I played in a guitar group and of course in those days if you play guitar the shadows were the people you copied. Everyone cut their teeth on shadows records. The Savage wasn't one of their earliest but it's the one I particularly remember because it's from a movie soundtrack and I remember sitting in the movies with a girlfriend at the age of about 15 and watching this thing and there are the shadows up on the stage playing this. I thought this was fantastic.
When I was an undergraduate, I for two years made quite a lot of money, quite actually almost as much as my grant, by playing in a rock group with three friends. And then unlike most people who played in rock groups, I then went and spent all the money that I'd earned on mathematics books.
Scarborough Fair / CanticleFavourite
This is a record that my wife who was then not my wife, was wife to be, bought me as a birthday present. And we played this record so many times because it was the only one we had. We we nearly wore the grooves out.
My son was learning to play a recorder when he was quite young, and this is one of the tunes that he played on it. And we went along he went along to recorder classes and we went along to one of these classes in rugby one morning for the the kind of end of the term concert. And we suddenly discovered that he was playing solo in this. He hadn't told us. He hadn't told us anything about it. We turned up and discovered our son was the soloist.
I'm a science fiction fan and of course H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds is a great science fiction classic. And I was introduced to this piece of music by a friend of mine who was in advertising. We went up to stay with them and he played it. I thought this was great and I got a tape of it. And then I bored the pants off everybody by playing it for months on end in the car whenever I got the chance.
What I like about this is just that there is a a very clear mathematical pattern to the structure of this piece of music, and it's another one of these ones where there are several different patterns going on simultaneously.
I was driving along and I heard this record and I I thought, Oh, this is rather nice, I like that. So I bought it, and about three weeks later my younger son was cleaning out my car for me, and he came in and said, Is that your Nirvana C D in the car? and it turned out it was his favourite band. And I I had no idea who they were at this point. I didn't know about Grunge, I didn't know about Kirk Cobain. All I knew was most people probably don't like this kind of thing, but it appealed to me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:57Why does mathematics have such a dull image?
Nearly always. The one occasion this didn't happen to me was a lady at immigration in Houston, Texas, who said, Oh, I love math when I was at school. And that's the only time I've ever got that kind of response to announcing to somebody that I'm a mathematician.
Presenter asks
4:07What is the difference between being good at mental arithmetic and thinking mathematically?
They often are. There's definitely a difference between being able to do arithmetic fast in your head and thinking in this more intuitive mathematical way. … most mathematicians are pretty hopeless at arithmetic. In fact, I mean if I have to do arithmetic, I Reach for my calculator.
Presenter asks
8:15What do we deduce from the counterintuitive probability of the three doors problem?
Our brains have evolved certain abilities for the obvious reason of survival. Really, what we've got is things that helped us survive out on the savannas hundreds of thousands of years ago. And we have, in a sense, subverted all of those to the activities of modern living. … probabilities don't really help you survive on the savannah very much. … And most of our intuition about it, unless you refine it by mathematical calculations, is on this quick and dirty level.
The keepsakes
The book
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Douglas Hofstadter
it's a cult book in a sense … and the book is about all of the analogies between these things, and in a sense using Bach and Escher as ways of understanding Gödel.
Presenter asks
10:51How did a broken collarbone save you for mathematics?
Yes, it was my mum that saved me for for mathematics … when I was at primary school. I was doing quite badly at maths. It wasn't because I couldn't understand it. It was a combination of silly circumstances. … At this point, a friend pushed me over in the playground. I broke my collarbone. And I was out for five weeks. And so my mother decided, Right, we're going to sort this child's maths out. … She went marching into the school waving this exercise book and said, Why is this child in group three for his maths? And it turned out when I got back, I was about ten weeks ahead of the class.
Presenter asks
23:57Is there a link between a mathematician and a musician in the general sense?
I think there is. It's it's often said that mathematicians are very musical, and I think that's true … there's something in the mathematician's intuitive sense of pattern which is very similar to the way that people appreciate music.
Presenter asks
27:11Is it a hindrance to have a trained scientific brain if you're trying to write science fiction?
Well in a sense that's true. And it's what uh writing science fiction did for me was to to open up that way of thinking about things. … Having to getting practice at writing science fiction stories completely changed the way I thought about writing the books. And … Focus me on the point that you're telling a story. And it's it was such a different style of writing from what I'd done before.
“a large part of the mathematician's existence consists of in effect banging your head against a brick wall. And it's nice when you leave off and the brick wall's not there and you you get this amazing feel hey, wow, now we've cracked it. That's what you're after.”
“the way you succeed at these things is by not finding one of the many routes to failure that are sitting there waiting for you. If you're lucky enough to steer clear of this, or there are people around who will grab you and push you back onto the correct road, Then you do find.”
“Nature is working under constraints. Nature is working under the constraints of what the laws of physics are. The laws of physics are actually mathematically rather beautiful, the ones that we currently understand.”
“There's a lot of talk about the public understanding of science, but in a way that's the wrong way round. A lot of the problem is not with the public. It's with the scientists.”