[ Author: Various; Title: Numberphile; Tags: podcast, transcripts, chat ]
(gentle piano music)
Brady Haran: With much of the world currently locked down by the Coronavirus pandemic, mathematical modeling has become a household talking point. (music continues) To discuss this I'm speaking with Kit Yates, he's a mathematical biologist at the University of Bath. In this ever changing climate it's probably also worth noting we recorded this interview on the 30th of March, 2020.
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Kit Yates: By mathematical biologist I think people find that a bit of a strange one to deal with because I think people think math is quite pure and abstract and biology is pretty messy and real world and never the twain shall meet but really what I do day to day is take biological systems that I think are interesting so maybe anything from a swarm of locusts to the way that eggs get their patterning or the way that embryos develop and try to write down a system of equations or computer code which describe that to try to make predictions about those systems.
Brady Haran: Kit you say that people don't often see the link between biological systems and mathematics I feel like that's changed pretty rapidly in the last few weeks. (laughter)
Kit Yates: Right everyone is talking about exponential growth, about epidemiological models, about modeling and basic reproduction numbers, Boris Johnson was talking about the fast upward tick of the curve and yeah, even Conor McGregor, I saw the other days was talking about implementing half measures to halt exponential growth of the disease in Ireland so yeah everyone is talking about mathematical biology at the moment so it's a good time to be a mathematical biologist.
Brady Haran: Is there a degree of that… I know I'm sure if you had a magic wand you'd make this all go away and what a terrible thing this is for the world but are mathematicians thinking, At Last! People get it.
Kit Yates: Right, I think that's true I think people there's a good meme going round where it's just a guy standing at chalkboard drawing an exponential curve and students saying well, when are we ever gonna need this, right? and it's sort of the case it sort of feels like a little bit of vindication… although yeah of course ideally you would wish it away if you could do but I think mathematicians are trying to make the most of this opportunity and try and show people why maths really can be important. It can be a matter of life and death sometimes.
Brady Haran: Do you feel like this has showed up sort of a problem with mathematical literacy or do you think people have kind of risen to the occasion and they're getting it, like how have you felt about how well the public are understanding some of these things before we do start talking about them ourselves.
Kit Yates: Yeah I think people are doing an okay job actually I think the fact that people are actually talking about it and caring about you know how good these models are and asking these questions is a really good sign. I think its a little bit difficult to explain all the really complex models that are out there at the moment. But I think actually the basic mathematical models that underly epidemiological spread are actually not too difficult to understand in fairly straightforward terms and I think its our job as maths communicators to try and make those things as understandable as possible and I think there's a lot of good people out there working really hard to do that.
Brady Haran: Where do we start? What is exponential growth?
Kit Yates: Right so technically the mathematical definition is when something grows in proportion to its current size then that's exponential growth or equally it could be something decaying in proportion to its current size, that's also exponential growth so for exponential decay you can imagine taking a bag of M&Ms if you want, throw the M&Ms on your kitchen table on day one and eat all the ones that land on the M side upwards right so roughly half the M&Ms will disappear. Put them back in the bag save them for tomorrow, give them another shake up the next day, eat all the ones that have an M on them, and everyday you'll be eating roughly half of the M&Ms so the number of M&Ms is going to be decreasing in proportion the number of M&Ms you have left and therefore you'll be getting an exponential decay of M&Ms over time. So something is decreasing in proportion which means that the time it takes for halve or decrease by certain proportion will be the same no matter how much of that quantity you have. So that's exponential decay at least.
Brady Haran: So Coronavirus, let's deal with that for a second. That's exponential growth.
Kit Yates: At the moment, yeah, like so the way the simplest mathematical epidemiological models work is you break the population down into three different compartments. They'r called susceptible, so people who haven't had the disease. Infecteds are people who have the disease and can infect it to other people and then we have this removed category it's sort of a euphemistic term for people who have recovered but also people that have died.
Brady Haran: Right this is the Sir model we hear talked about.
Kit Yates: Right
Brady Haran: S I R
Kit Yates: We call it S I R but Sir, whatever you want to call it really.
Brady Haran: Yeah
Kit Yates: We at the very early stages you have a whole bunch of people who are susceptible to the disease and very few people who are infected and so each individual can go and infect a certain number of people who are susceptible, we call this the basic reproduction number of the disease. and if that number of people that they infect over the course of their infection period is greater than one then they will on average infect that many people who will then go infect that many people again so for COVID at the moment estimates of the basic reproduction number are between one and a half and four so it's quite a big window. The two and a half is generally sort of acceptable number, so the first people goes and infects two and half of the people, they're gonna infect two and half more and two and a half more and the exponential growth then occurs. You start to see the numbers growing exponentially.
Brady Haran: The way people seem to be getting this across is… or the nature of it seems to be it starts off as a slow trickle and then suddenly becomes like this huge waterfall.
Kit Yates: This is the thing about exponential growth, right, everyone… I think people confuse it with being big or fast all the time but actually if you think about the amount of money in your bank account or certainly my bank account, like it's growing exponentially you're getting interest proportional to how much money you've got. But the rate of interest is really low so you don't really see that exponential growth properly, it's just really really slow. If you left it long enough then great you'd get loads of money but who can leave their money in the bank account long enough. And that's sort of what you see the very start of the epidemic. You hardly notice these cases trickling in and then all of a sudden it seems to just absolutely take off when the number starts to really grow and that's the sort of danger of exponential growth is that if you don't recognize it early on then you can think, Oh this isn't a big problem, and actually you really need to be acting on it and taking steps which is what we're doing at the moment.
Brady Haran: It's these grains of rice on a chess board is the famous story, isn't it?
Kit Yates: Right, exactly, so uh… yeah the Emperor of China rewards this guy for saving his life and he comes along and says, you can have anything you want, and the guy this farmer says I'll just have you know one grain of rice for the first square on the chess board and two for the next and four for the next and if you could just complete that pattern that would be great and the King… the Emperor is like why yeah whatever that doesn't sound like very much you could have anything you wanted (laughter) and he chose this stupid amount of rice and then of course it's doubling every time you put rice on the next square it's more than rice than you've already put on the whole of the rest of the chess board so it turns out something like you'll have rice down to the knees or something across the whole surface of the Earth in the end. So yeah it's surprising, like counter intuitive if you like.
Brady Haran: Do you think the public has gotten that now or do you think we got it too late or like just as an observer. I know you're not like a politician or like an expert but it seems like you know, are people understanding this?
Kit Yates: Yeah I think the message is getting across to people I people are starting to realize as they are still seeing the numbers rise and rise, day on day we're still in this exponential growth phase so deaths are doubling every two to three days, cases are doubling every three to four days, so a little bit slower. But I think people are starting to get alarmed by the fact yeah we're having two hundred deaths a day and maybe more. And that's worrying them and they're seeing the numbers go up but not just go up in a linear fashion but actually sort of doubling every two or three days and I think people are starting to get the point that actually because exponential growth can be so fast anything that we can do early on can make a tremendous difference later on like we can really change the numbers later on if we can just make small changes even now. And there was this nice infographic that went around that showed that if one person infected two and a half people in five days then after thirty days they would have infected four hundred and six people, and actually if you can reduce that by fifty percent it changes from four hundred and six to fifteen people. And if you can reduce it even further by seventy-five percent which is there some of evidence that that's sort of what we're doing with our social distancing, you can reduce that number of total infected people to about two and a half including the first person who was infected. So you can really wipe out this epidemic if you can reduce this spread enough.
Brady Haran: So, it's about getting that two point five number to something closer to your bank interest.
Kit Yates: (laughter) right exactly if you can reduce I mean even your bank interest would be naught point you know half a percent per year right, even if we can reduce COVID spread to less than a hundred percent during the course of their infectious period then then you'll start to get this exponential decay, if you can get just go below replicating itself so just below zero percent then you'll start to see this exponential decline. But yeah, if we can bring it down to the rate of bank interest then we'll start to see very very slower exponential growth.
Brady Haran: What kind of jobs are mathematicians doing at the moment? Like I can see the job of doctors and I can see the job of researchers trying to come up with vaccines. These graphs and models you're talking about have been known long before COVID came along and obviously they're being applied now. But are there day to day things mathematicians can be doing, like new work they can be doing to help in this battle?
Kit Yates: Yeah absolutely. 'Cause every disease is different, right? And these simple models that I've sort of described, this S I R model, they can be made infinitely more complex. Right, so S I R is fine for some very simple diseases but actually there's extensions we can make to those S I R models to include things like a carrier class, so people who have the disease but aren't necessarily symptoms. So they're not necessarily you wouldn't class them as infected because you don't know their infected yet, but they've had this asymptomatic period, which is what is happening with COVID. And so they can be spreading it without you even knowing that they're infected and then can be a real problem and it has been a real problem with COVID, because we can't just isolate people as soon as they show symptoms we have to be isolating everyone in case they've got symptoms. So that's just one really simple extension you can make but adding in things like noise, so stochasticity or randomness in the way that people bump into each other. Taking account of the networks with which interact with each other can make a huge difference as well. You get these people are social hubs and therefore will spread the disease to lots of people compare to people who are stuck at home and don't go out so much. So you can make these arbitrarily complex and there's actually been a call by the Royal Society for Rapid Assistance in Modeling Pandemics where all mathematicians, especially applied mathematicians who have a familiarity with modeling can sign up and help out in this cause, so yeah there's to loads to be done at them moment and we're keeping really busy.
Brady Haran: Kit, how does someone build in something like these you know hubs super spreader type as opposed to people who are locked away. Like I see that they exist but how would you put them into a model? These sort of unmeasurables or like I see could guess at what they are but then how do you?
Kit Yates: So they're not necessarily unmeasurables, we actually know a lot about our social structure in part from using social networking data but also there's been a number of studies done and you could actually classify the way that people interact using a network. So people are nodes in that network and they're connections to other people are edges. So you can classify what's called the degree distribution of that network which tells you how many people are there who have a hundred contacts, how many people with ninety-nine, ninety-eight and so and down to how many people there with no contacts. And that distribution can tell you a great deal about the way that people interact so you can incorporate that network modeling into these S I R models you start the disease off in a particular node with a particularly connectivity. How many people do they actually interact with and you see how it spreads around the network. So, they may seem almost intangible but actually if we have good enough data and this is what it all comes down to really. If we have good enough data then we can actually capture these behaviors. But data at the moment on this emerging pandemic is really difficult to come by.
Brady Haran: You talked about randomness and I know that's a real expertise of yours, can you give me an idea how randomness would feed into for example the coronavirus COVID situation. What are some of the random factors and how can mathematicians use them?
Kit Yates: Well so it's sort of interesting that actually in the what we call the deterministic models. So the models that don't have noise in them. If your basic reproduction number is above one then your epidemic definitely takes off. Even if its only a tiny amount above one. And if its below one then it definitely dies off. But actually in models which build in noise or stochasticity you can tolerate being slightly above that threshold of R zero because in reality not everyone has the same number of contacts with everyone. There's noise and not every contact with someone else passes the disease on. So actually in reality you can actually have a non-zero probability of the disease dying out without having a big epidemic, even if you have this basic reproduction number being above zero in the deterministic model. Whereas yeah in the deterministic model it says it definitely takes off and then it dies out, but when you build in noise you can actually realize we can tolerate a little bit of spread above this basic reproduction number of one.
Brady Haran: One of the things I've found interesting has been the use of graphs where the Y axis has been logarithmic I think, so they take away that dramatic curve and everything becomes straight lines. And that's been used a lot comparing the spread in different countries. But there's something about those graphs that I somehow find deceptive. Like I know you're a mathematician and you can straight away process but what do you think of the use of those graphs?
Kit Yates: I don't think they're super helpful, actually. I was actually reading the comments below the line which you should obviously never do on the BBC article the other day which showed these log or what are called semi-log plots, so you have log axis so that you can really see how things are changing, the problem with having with a linear axis you don't really see what was happening early, it just looks like zero cases then all of a sudden it blows. Whereas the log you get this nice sort of straight line and it tells you what the exponent is. How quickly things are growing. Which is useful if you're studying the disease. But actually the comments below the line people like saying well there's clearly some mistake in this graph because the space between ten and a hundred is the same as the space between a hundred and a thousand, and that's the point of a log plot, but it's not actually that helpful unless you know something logarithms. So I, for me, I would steer away from those a little bit. Yeah.
Brady Haran: I mean I'm no expert but I think I agree with you on that. There's something almost like it makes the growth so steady and calm when it's a straight line, you think, Oh well you know if we do something now it will be all right, but like it doesn't show how it's running away from you.
Kit Yates: No and you compare the different number of countries cases and when you see that in a log plot you're like, oh, America's not very far ahead of us, I thought they were doing really badly, and actually like they are doing pretty, they've got a lot of more cases than us on an exponential, you know on sort of a linear scale it does look pretty bad. But on the log plot it doesn't really look like they're that far ahead of us but yeah it can be deceptive so I would steer away from using the log plots a bit I think.
Brady Haran: As a mathematician but also as a human who you know who doesn't want Coronavirus to be terrible, what are some of the numbers and graphs and things that you're looking at most closely and that you're really interesting in and that you're really hoping change or get dealt with?
Kit Yates: Right, so since we've had lockdown for about a week in the UK at the moment, and actually it's sort of too soon to tell what impact that's having, but even today we've been seeing the number of hospitalizations has gone down slightly, the daily hospitalizations that is. And similarly the number of cases that have been reported is going down. You can't read too much into that because actually not everyone is being tested. People are being urged to stay at home if they have mild symptoms, which is really sensible. And so… but we're testing everyone, so you can't read too much into it. But it's hinting that some of the early measure that we took like, telling people to work from home and banning gatherings are having an impact. It's a bit too early the impact of the lockdown yet and certainly like deaths is the figure that you really want to look at because deaths you know report all the deaths you don't miss any of those cases, right? But actually we won't really see the impact of the lockdown on deaths for probably a couple of weeks because there is this long period that you're ill for before you get seriously ill and then potentially go on and die. So but those are the really important figures is looking at case numbers and looking at numbers of deaths and once we start to control and bring those down then we know that the impact of the effects of the lockdown and the measures that we've been taking to control the disease.
Brady Haran: I mean what numbers can we give mathematicians other than positive tests and deaths?
Kit Yates: Yeah that's the tricky thing at the moment. There's a group led by a guy called John Edwards who are looking at other measures, so encouraging people to log how they are interacting with each other. So trying to figure out what the basic reproduction number would be if they were just talking to each other.
Brady Haran: Of course another piece of data is people going into intensive care I guess and things of that and ventilation and stuff but…
Kit Yates: yeah, so hospitalization data is something that's useful cause you don't go to hospital unless you're really serious and we can measure those numbers but it's not part of the data that's officially released by Public Health England everyday but it can give us an indication as it already is doing because the numbers are coming down a little bit per day that the effect the measures that we've been taking are generally having some effect at least.
Brady Haran: So as mathematicians produce different models and things like that that they can then give to policy makers, what are the levers the policy makers have? Like is this just level of how draconian we're stopped from bumping into each other? Like what other levers can policy makers pull?
Kit Yates: Yeah, I think unfortunately that's it basically. It can only be how much more lockdown we have at the moment. One thing that seems to be really important is getting this antibody test out to find out who's had the disease. So there was this talk early on from Boris Johnson about herd immunity. And so this is a mathematical idea really where if you have enough people in the population who are… who have had the disease and then are immune to it, then you can effectively wipe out the spread of that disease to the people who are more vulnerable and more at danger if they get the disease. And so actually there's a relationship directly between the basic reproduction number of the disease so how many infections one single infected person will spread to in the course of their infectious period and this ratio of how many people you have to have in order to get herd immunity and it's just one minus one divided by the basic reproduction number. So if the basic reproduction number is four then you have to have one minus a quarter or three quarters of the population immune to the disease before you effectively wipe it out. Ideally we would develop a vaccine so we could just get lots of people immune from the disease by vaccinating them but actually the alternative way to get herd immunity is by having disease. Obviously if every gets it then that's going to be awful but if we could get healthier demographics, younger demographics to have the disease, enough people to have it very mildly, that we could have that fraction of the population immune then potentially that's a strategy for taking the disease out. But in terms of what the government can actually do without putting huge numbers of life at risk, it's locking down further. Stopping people going out for exercise, putting road blocks in cities, stopping people from going on long journeys. So, yeah there's not much further we can go I guess but we could still go further. And unfortunately those are the only measures that are open to us without a vaccine at the moment.
Brady Haran: This herd immunity idea was quite controversial at the time though isn't it? 'Cause there is there sort of feeling of lambs to the slaughter, let's deliberately let our people get it for the greater good. And I sometimes have felt this way myself that sometimes when we talk about it all so mathematically we kinda forget that these are all human beings who are like suffering as a result. As a mathematician how do you feel about that because I see the pleasure you get from the model and the mathematics of it but at the same time there's this very human element to it?
Kit Yates: Yeah I think you're right, I think it was hugely controversial and it still hugely controversial and I'm not advocating this strategy of herd immunity that is one of a good way to go in this situation. Yeah I think that's partly why I decided to be a mathematical biologist in the first place because I thought I got to uni doing maths and I thought when's this going to be useful to people, right? And then I realized that actually you could use maths to describe biology and for me that was amazing because from a very early age I decided wanted to be a scientist. My mum died from cervical cancer and remember kids laughing at me at school when I was ten years old because I was like, I want to be a scientist, and they were like, I want to be footballer, I was like okay right. But yeah so like when I got to uni and did maths and found I could use maths to describe the real world and describe biology that was massive for me because I thought well I can actually have an impact on real people life and make a difference. And I think that's at the heart of all the modeling that we're trying to do is not to forget that actually these models describe real people. It's super important for us not to forget that.
Brady Haran: I mean it's seems pretty obvious that this pandemic's gonna leave a scar on the world and have some kind long lasting effect. What about mathematically? Do you think it's going to have a mathematical legacy? Is it gonna like, cause I've never seen mathematics talked about so much with a global news event.
Kit Yates: I think I hope it will draw people into mathematics and make people realize that you know if you become a mathematician you can have a real impact on the world, you're not just sat behind a desk writing a textbook for a subject which is dead and gone. You're actually living in the real world and you're doing things which can have a real important impact on people's lives so I hope that people, future generations of kids who are studying maths at school will say wow this is actually this living breathing exciting subject and I want to be part of that. And so I hope we'll get more people into mathematics and I also hope that people will take maths a little bit more seriously themselves. So maths generally only gets in the news when its the Fields Medalist times and you know people struggle to understand the very complicated maths that the Fields Medalists who have won the maths bowl but actually the moment we can tell people about relatively straight forward mathematical models which are having a huge impact on their everyday lives and suggesting how we have come to this unprecedented lockdown that we've never seen before. So yeah hopefully it will have a really big impact on people's lives.
Brady Haran: Kit is there a cutting edge here though? Is there new mathematics to be discovered and found here? Or is this basically pretty relatively simple mathematics and statistics just being applied in clever and new ways with more data and more tweaks? Is there like a discovery or new types of mathematics that a genius could come along and change things?
Kit Yates: I mean I have to say I'm a very sort of luddite mathematician. I like using tools that are already there. So I'm not working at the cutting edge of developing new mathematical tools. I like to know that someone knows that there's existence and uniqueness for certain problems but it doesn't have to me. So I'm probably the wrong person to ask that question to but…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Kit Yates: But as far as I'm aware it's people applying tools in a new way. So it's tools that already exist, mathematical models that we've been developing for a number of years but actually applying them to new situations. Trying to get new insights from that.
Brady Haran: Can you just lastly just tell me a little bit more about this Royal Society project? What is this? Is this like all hands to the pump type thing?
Kit Yates: Right exactly, it's sort of like yeah… in Lord of the Rings when Aragorn runs in and says, you know, Gondor calls for aid, and everyone stands up says this is amazing. It's this call from the Royal Society, it came out over the weekend and they are asking people, mainly at Universities. Researching types of Universities to put proposals forward with their group and to volunteer amount of time can and what expertise they have including PhD students, postdocs and tenured faculty members to try and put forward their expertise and to offer it. And to hopefully try organize it. There's a lot of sort of individual modeling efforts people going off and doing their own thing. But actually we can work much better as a group as long as someone organizes us effectively and that's what the Royal Society are trying to do. So our research group, The Center for Mathematical Biology in Bath are putting together our proposal which we are going to send off tomorrow and we're going to contribute as much of our time as we can to help fight this.
Brady Haran: And I know it's just a proposal but can you just so I understand how you can even help, give me some vague ideas of to what that proposal looks like? What you propose?
Kit Yates: Yeah, so, yeah they're asking for ideas of what are your background expertise is and how you think that might be useful. So for me I have expertise in doing stochastic models, random models of multi-particle systems, multi-agent systems, so they're often called individual based models. And these can be really useful for understanding epidemic spread potentially at a very fine grained level. So looking literal interactions between people rather than thinking of everyone as this huge population in this S I R model. So that's the sort of thing that I'll be putting down. But we have other people in Bath who are traditional epidemiologists who have expertise in things like Household Models where you breakdown populations into households and you look at the effect of the different sizes of households and how people move between their local neighborhoods. There's all sorts of things that we're trying to do but that's the idea of the response in Bath at the moment.
Brady Haran: If someone was listening to this who wasn't a mathematician and is sort of following what's going on with the degree of fear and bewilderment but also interest, what do you want them to understand? What would you say to them if you could say anything to them?
Kit Yates: Right I think that if exponential growth teaches us anything about particularly about this disease spread, it's that the earlier you make your interventions and the tighter you do them, the more that you adhere to these rules that have been put in place, the bigger that you'll see this impact having within a few weeks, within even a few days it'll make a huge difference so now is the time to be so to speak doubling down on our efforts to lockdown so that we don't double up our number of cases if you'd like. So yeah really taking that exponential growth message to heart.
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Brady Haran: Thank you for your time and hopefully you get involved in more work to help us all out.
Kit Yates: Great, thanks Brady it's been a pleasure.
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[ Delicious Problems ]
Summary: Math celebrity Hannah Fry tells us about her life as public intellectual and thought leader - plus her as-yet unreleased novel 'Free as a Bird', written as a schoolgirl.
Hannah Fry: In America they call it a public intellectual, but I'm not using that because it's ridiculous.
Brady Haran: (chuckles)
Hannah Fry: The other one they do in America is they invite you to conferences and they're like, we just really wanted you as thought leader. (laughs)
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Brady Haran: A thought leader! We're reaching out to you as a thought leader. (laughs)
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Hannah Fry: What does that mean! (laughs)
(music continues)
Brady Haran: Hi I'm Brady Haran, today's guest on the Numberphile podcast is the public intellectual and thought leader Hannah Fry. (music continues) Hannah's a mathematician at University College London, or UCL, and we'll be talking about her work shortly but in recent years Hannah's also become something of a celebrity. She's written books, fronted BBC TV shows, she makes radio programs and podcasts and occasionally when time permits even pops up in the odd Numberphile video. (music continues) So as you can guess there's a lot I wanted to ask her about.
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Brady Haran: Let's start close to the beginning. What were you like as a little girl? Like would I have known, ah she's gonna end up being, a mathematician?
Hannah Fry: Hmm. Not early on, no, I don't think so. Not like as a kid. When I was about eleven I think that's when it sort of started to change really and I pinpoint it to one particular event which is (laughs) my Irish mother has a slightly skewed idea of what constitutes a fun summer holiday. So one summer she bought me a maths text book and insisted that I go through a single page in this text book every day before I was allowed to have any fun. (laughs) Which you can imagine my delight as an eleven year old.
Brady Haran: Like to give you education, like to be wholesome or thinking that little Hannah would find this fun?
Hannah Fry: Uh… I'm not sure really. She's just like really really into education. She's always has been. So, you know, her and her family really didn't get very much education. My dad left school when he was really young and I think that she was really just… had this totally inbuilt idea that education is the way that you kind of get yourself anywhere. So she was just very very strict about education the whole way through. So it's just kind of continuing that idea. But I think what happened though with that sort of summer is that then when I went back to school afterwards, actually I must've been ten 'cause I was still in primary school, so I must've been ten. Then when we were doing stuff in maths class I just had seen it all before really. I knew what was coming and I just totally got it. And at that point then it just becomes much more of a playground, right? When you're ahead of the class it's just way more fun and I think that, yeah, that's when I started playing with it a lot more.
Brady Haran: So it's not like when you were doing those textbook exercises on holiday, you were enjoying that, but it gave you this skill later on that put you ahead of the curve which then allowed you to look at mathematics in a more fun way later, it's like set you up?
Hannah Fry: Actually maybe I'm being a bit naive but I think everyone quite likes doing problems when they get them right, don't they? Everyone quite likes it when you get a puzzle correct. So it was only that first bit that's horrible and then when you're sort of in the exercises in the back of the textbook, the first couple are horrible 'cause you don't know what's happening but once you get it you're like, yeah, sailing. It's not like I was kind of getting up in the morning and self motivating myself to sit down and do some of this textbook. That I had someone standing over me… (laughs) so, yeah.
Brady Haran: 'Cause a lot of the mathematicians I speak to when they talk about their childhood like confess to being a nerd, they're like, yeah I was bit of nerd.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: Were you a nerd?
Hannah Fry: Yes! (laughs)
Brady Haran: You were?
Hannah Fry: Yeah. Totally wholeheartedly a complete nerd. I mean though what else can you say? (laughs) I was…
Brady Haran: What…
Hannah Fry: You picture a nerd.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: And that was me.
Brady Haran: Like give me an example of something nerdy you would do besides being good at mathematics?
Hannah Fry: (laughs) I took extra A level maths modules just because I wanted to.
Brady Haran: Right?
Hannah Fry: That's quite nerdy.
Brady Haran: And was that because you were like wanting to be an alpha overachiever or because you just loved mathematics?
Hannah Fry: Probably both. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: Like I just once wrote a book in the summer.
Brady Haran: What was it about?
Hannah Fry: It (laughs) was so (laughs) so sh-t. (censor beep)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: Am I allowed to swear on this podcast?
Brady Haran: I don't know.
Hannah Fry: I just did.
Brady Haran: You just did, alright.
Hannah Fry: (laughs) It was an awful…
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: (laughs) I can't believe I'm telling you this.
Brady Haran: What was it about? Like what was…?
Hannah Fry: (laughs) It's was called… it was about a guy who has a car crash…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: …and loses the ability to walk. And then learns to walk again after it makes friends with a bird in the garden.
Brady Haran: How old were you at this point?
Hannah Fry: Like maybe eleven or twelve?
Brady Haran: Okay. Was it the bird that made him able to walk?
Hannah Fry: Yeah!
Brady Haran: Did it have magic powers or…?
Hannah Fry: No! (laughs)
Brady Haran: It wasn't super…
Hannah Fry: I think it was like encouraging him to walk, so it would like sit on his shoulder and then like kind of (laughs)…
Brady Haran: Alright. It could talk?
Hannah Fry: No, no, but he was like it would be friendly to him. Try to get it to sort of sit on his hand and then the bird would just be slightly too far away so he's have to kind of reach for it.
Brady Haran: What was hero's name? Do you remember?
Hannah Fry: No. I can't remember. (laughs)
Brady Haran: You really don't remember?
Hannah Fry: No, I can't but my mum found this book when she was going through the attic a little while ago and she wrapped it up and gave it to me for me thirtieth birthday. So I've got it at home.
Brady Haran: It still exists?!
Hannah Fry: Yeah, yeah. And I even got a friend of mine (laughs) he was also like eleven, to illustrate it for me. So it's got like an illustrated cover and everything.
Brady Haran: I so want have to see this book.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: What was it's name?
Hannah Fry: It was called Free as a Bird.
Brady Haran: Oh!
Hannah Fry: It's so sh-t. (censor beep)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs) You know when you think you're like this real literary genius when you're like ten?
Brady Haran: No, I'm impressed by that. I'm impressed by that. So you were hundred percent like science and math then? You were showing bit of a humanities bent at this point?
Hannah Fry: No, I think I was just a nerd, mate. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Alright.
Hannah Fry: I think I was just a nerd.
Brady Haran: At what point did it become evident that you were actually gonna be like a professional mathematician, like, this was actually gonna end up being my job?
Hannah Fry: Oh I don't think that happened until it actually happened, really.
Brady Haran: Right?
Hannah Fry: I mean what I really wanted to do was work in Formula One, that was like my single minded ambition.
Brady Haran: This is motor racing.
Hannah Fry: Motor racing, exactly, that was I really wanted to work at. 'Cause my dad used to race motorbikes professionally.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: So like our family's just very into kind of racing and I just massively massively loved Formula One, I just wanted a way to work in it. And engineering just wasn't really on the table. I don't know… it just never occurred to me that that was a kind of career option. I went to all girls school and just no one ever spoke about it really. So, because I was good at maths I went and did maths at university. Although actually what I wanted to do when I was sixteen, although I was a massive nerd, what I really wanted to do was be a hairdresser.
Brady Haran: Right?
Hannah Fry: And my mum was like, okay (clears throat) what we'll do, you just do your A levels and then we'll talk about this again. So I did maths, physics and chemistry A levels. And then after I did my A levels I was like, you know I still would quite like to do a hairdressing course. And my mum was like, tell you what, just go off to university and do an undergraduate in maths or theoretical physics and then after that (laughs)…
Brady Haran: Then we'll talk about hairdressing. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs) We'll talk about it. And then, yeah, by the time I'd finished my PhD I was like, probably not gonna be a hairdresser.
Brady Haran: Why do you think you wanted to be a hairdresser?
Hannah Fry: It's just cool! Like, have you ever been and looked like watched what a hairdresser does? It's cool.
Brady Haran: They're just like… cut and do things to people's hair.
Hannah Fry: Yeah, I know, but they do like magic stuff, they'll like make it all… (laughs)
Brady Haran: So it was the process, like you liked the idea of doing the processes that they do? The craft?
Hannah Fry: Yeah, the craft of it and also but it was (laughs) I think, there's something quite nice about, you know, having a process that's quite short where you get to see the end result very quickly. It's kind of the reason why I liked doing Youtube videos because you have an idea, you execute the idea and then it's sort of out there, it's not like this really long thing that lasts for ages and ages before you know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.
Brady Haran: Short turnaround time?
Hannah Fry: Yeah!
Brady Haran: So when you started studying mathematics properly at university like did it take quickly? Was it like, yeah this is still holding my… well obviously it was 'cause it became your job but like you started to realize this was gonna be your job now? Like, you're all in?
Hannah Fry: Yeah, so, I just… just always loved it. It's just so delicious and so… I mean I've always just played with it and massively massively enjoyed it. But I did actually make my dream, I did manage to get to Formula One. So after I finished my PhD, which was in aerodynamics, I was kind of incrementally getting closer and closer to working in Formula One.
Brady Haran: So this was still… this was a plan? Like you were aiming for Formula One?
Hannah Fry: Yeah.
Brady Haran: You were like making choices that would get you closer?
Hannah Fry: Yeah, I totally was. I was picking things I was enjoying doing at the same time.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: But was kind of edging towards it. And then I eventually got… I just hated it 'cause there wasn't enough maths in it. (laughs)
Brady Haran: What did you do?
Hannah Fry: So (laughs) I was doing… I worked for an aerodynamics consultancy firm.
Brady Haran: Right?
Hannah Fry: So we were designing the wings on cars like Ferrari or like Lotus or like…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: HRT as it was at the time.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I had imagined that what this would be would be a group of people sitting around a chalkboard coming up with loads of really clever ideas, writing equations, you know just thinking about the physics of it and thinking about the mathematics of it.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: And it just wasn't like that at all, basically (chuckles).
Brady Haran: What was it like?
Hannah Fry: All of these… the really nice stuff has already been wrapped up in computer simulations. So you were just setting up runs on your computer overnight and then coming in the morning and like picking the picture that just had the least amount of blue in it. It's like chucking darts basically. And if you chuck enough darts something's gonna hit. It was just… boring really.
Brady Haran: So you thought you'd becoming into work and say I've had a whole new idea for the way we should design the wing and we're gonna completely revolutionize it and we'd all go and… but it wasn't, it was just like, you were just like grunt work.
Hannah Fry: Yeah exactly, exactly that, grunt work. So that I think was the point where I was like no, I'd rather be a professional mathematician thanks very much.
Brady Haran: Do you still like Formula One?
Hannah Fry: Yeah I do, although I haven't really watched it that much this season just because…
Brady Haran: I've liked it this season.
Hannah Fry: Have you?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I know, I just haven't been around really.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: Just too much going on on Sundays.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: Worked too much basically.
Brady Haran: When you watch Formula One now do you look at it differently because of that time you spent working in the behind the scenes with the…?
Hannah Fry: No, I think I still massively enjoy it.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: In the same way, I think you realize just how superficial the information that you get from the broadcast version is. Just how much more… unbelievably delicious technical detail there is going on behind the scenes that you just don't have access to.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I mean ultimately the reason why I like Formula One is 'cause it's just gigantic maths competition, isn't it?
Brady Haran: Yeah. Yeah, it is.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: But also a big like politics… competition.
Hannah Fry: Yeah, completely.
Brady Haran: It's like a big political thing as well and a big like business financial thing, it's like…
Hannah Fry: Yeah, totally with a bit of danger thrown in. Bit of jeopardy.
Brady Haran: Yeah! Yeah. Can I ask you a gender thing about university?
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brady Haran: Were there lots of women, girls on your course, or was it very male dominated?
Hannah Fry: I would say when I went it was about… hmm… maybe a third were girls.
Brady Haran: Oh okay.
Hannah Fry: Maybe a bit less actually, between a quarter and a third for undergrad.
Brady Haran: So it wasn't crazy? It wasn't like you were the lone woman in the course?
It was like…?
Hannah Fry: No, no, not as an undergrad.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: There were other girls around.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But then as you go up through the sort of stages, so Masters and then PhD and then postdoc, basically all the women sort of fall away.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: So then when I was doing my PhD there were… I would say maybe forty PhD students and there was me and two other girls.
Brady Haran: Okay. When it becomes that much a minority does it affect… your enjoyment of it or your ability to do it or are you completely blind to it? Like what's it like when there's so few?
Hannah Fry: So I personally never really minded that much. But I know that there was one girl who was doing a PhD… she was a couple years ahead of me and she dropped out and I had this conversation with her and she said that actually she just felt incredibly uncomfortable that she would walk into this PhD room, often when you're doing PhD you're not… you don't… you work at home a lot. You just sort of have days where you're working at home but really you're just sleeping.
Brady Haran: (laughs) or watching Countdown. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs) It happens quite a lot too.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: So you know, if there was no other girls in the office she'd be the only girl in the office and she said that she just felt massively intimidated in that environment. She just felt completely uncomfortable in that environment and it just really put her off. And I think there are some people who do get really put off by it.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: 'Cause ultimately, you know, people often ask the question of like why are there so few women in mathematics and like, you know, STEM subjects. And in a way, I mean I've got somethings to say about it, but in a way the people who you should really ask are the people who left.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And ask them why they left. The one thing that I will say about it though is that… and actually I think sometimes you can use this to your advantage, but especially when I was younger and especially when I hadn't done much outreach work, people would often assume that you have no idea what you're talking about. So you'd kind of go into a room, especially if you didn't know anyone, and people'd be having a bit of a maths chat, you're at a conference or something, and people would just assume that you're a complete idiot.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And that I just always really loved that when you could… (laughs) just say something and watch people's faces fall. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Yeah. I always wished I could speak other languages…
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: …so that moment when you're in the lift with two people speaking another language who think you don't know what's going and then you suddenly answer in their language. They're like, oh how embarrassing!
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: That's like the mathematical equivalent of that.
Hannah Fry: It totally is.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I was teaching very young, at sort of twenty-two and I was teaching my first group of undergraduates and there was one year when… the first year where I wrote an exam for these undergraduate students and I went off to go to the exam to monitor the students during it and (laughs) they wouldn't let me in the hall because the invigilators were like, we're not allowing any students in. So I kind of argued my way in and they were like, do you have authority to read this exam?! And I was like, well I wrote it so… (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: I'm gonna go with probably yes.
Brady Haran: (laughs) So, going back to leaving the wing factory, Formula One.
Hannah Fry: Hmm?
Brady Haran: How did you get from that back into mathematics? What was the path?
Hannah Fry: It was really straightforward (laughs) because my PhD supervisor, Fellow of the Royal Society actually guy called Professor Frank Smith who is just… there are few people on earth who I admire more than him. I mean I was only there really for a couple of months, right, before I was like I'm done with this. So he had not only sort of set me up with the Formula One stuff 'cause he knew that I want to just do it, but when he knew that I wasn't enjoying it he also set me up with a postdoc. So he's a fluid dynamicist, but he'd been dipping his toe in the water of looking at human behavior and sort of that overlap between social sciences and mathematics, which was a very new area and he had this postdoc that came up and was like, wanted to know if I wanted to do it, and I did and… yeah that's it really.
Brady Haran: So tell me about most of the work you've done. It does sound quite accessible for mathematics?
Hannah Fry: Yeah! Completely.
Brady Haran: Your work. How would you explain it?
Hannah Fry: I mean it's super super super applied, right? It's like the most applied maths that you can get. So the idea is that you can look at humans as though they're a mathematical system and there are some things that sort of make sense, right? If you think about a crowd of people, there are analogies there with the way that fluids move, right? Or if you think about, you know, sort of systems of revolutions and you know politics, the way it ebbs and flows, there are sort chaotic moments in there, you know you can also think about the systems that work through history that kind of connect up with each other, the networks of people, the way that ideas spread, you know? Influence spreads through a population in a similar way to sort of epidemics do. There's lots of little things about people that if you take enough of a step back you can see them as mathematical objects really. So that's really the starting point. And it sounds like the different things that I've worked on, it sounds like they're really disconnected, so you know, I've worked with the police looking at burglaries, at riots, at terrorism, you know, I've worked with retailers looking at where people spend money in the sort of retail environment, looking at badger culls, right? (laughs) What other stuff? Lots of epidemic stuff, it sounds like those things are really different from one another but actually underneath them all they have this common theme which is that they're about patterns created by humans that move around in space and time and yeah, the sort of theoretical basis of that is actually just a really simple idea.
Brady Haran: What mathematical tools or processes do you use to effect this? Like what kind of mathematics do you use?
Hannah Fry: So there's tons of statistics, obviously, because if you're starting with a dataset and you're analyzing it, the first thing that you want to do is to really get a grip with what kind of patterns are in there. But then from there I mean you have all kinds of tools, you know, in your toolkit that you wanna use so lots of network stuff. That happens quite a lot. But you can build models that are essentially differential equations and then use them to sort of isolate certain situations. Lots of information theory as well, lots of entropy maximization where you're trying to fill in the gaps in your knowledge. All kinds of different things. All kinds of different things.
Brady Haran: How do you find non-mathematical people respond to this idea of mathematically modeling human behavior? 'Cause even I feel this like inbuilt resistance to it where it's like, you can't do that we're all individuals and you know we can't predicted by mathematics. We're unpredictable and we're…
Hannah Fry: I have free will!
Brady Haran: Yeah, exactly, like and suddenly you're there saying, oh I can predict where the next burglary's gonna happen or where the next bomb's gonna go off or where people are gonna walk in a shopping center.
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brady Haran: Do you find a resistance to that? Are people very accepting to the fact that you're just treating them like data points or…?
Hannah Fry: I think the difference is, it depends on what scale you're talking about. So, tomorrow morning if you're working in an office and you were doing your morning commute, it's certainly true that you can change your mind and you can decide to get a coffee or you can sleep in or you know there's all kinds of different things that you might do that are different, so predicting exactly what you're going to do, I'm not always gonna get it right, you know? There's limits to how accurate I can be in that regard but when you scale up to the size of a city, actually that randomness kind of ends up evening itself out and you can predict with quite a high degree of accuracy how many people are gonna pass through a particular station on a given morning. So it's really a think that shift is where people can still hold onto their free will but are still broadly predictable.
Brady Haran: Have you read the Foundation series then?
Hannah Fry: What? The Asimov stuff? (laughs)
Brady Haran: Yeah, psychohistory.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: Hari Seldon is the king of your mathematical field.
Hannah Fry: I know it's so true. It's so true.
Brady Haran: Hmm. Okay.
Hannah Fry: I like to think that the outcome of our stuff… is slightly well… I dunno… (laughs) less terrifying.
Brady Haran: Is there a holy grail in your field? Like what's your Riemann Hypothesis or the like the ultimate thing that could be done in your field that would make that person the King or Queen of this thing? Like what's the ultimate?
Hannah Fry: Well so, you know, a lot of the statistical methods are stepping aside for a lot of machine learning techniques now. Which are just incredibly power at following these really really subtle patterns. So, you know, for example, I mean this is not exactly my area, but just for example, there are these really beautiful mathematical models that can predict earthquakes and aftershocks, right? In earthquakes. And they've been around for a long time and we, you know, really know the equations very well. Those equations instantly you find a similar pattern in burglaries which is why I know about them. But now, in the last year or so it's been shown that machine learning techniques are actually better at making these predictions than the beautifully elegant mathematical models are. And it's a similar thing with predicting burglaries or predicting whether someone's gonna go onto commit a crime in future, you can come up with these really well crafted theoretically sound mathematical models. But sometimes all you want is that prediction and so there are occasions when the machine learning techniques are the better route to go down. But some people sort of say that, you know, as artificial intelligence gets better if you have artificial general intelligence then you won't need the mathematical models at all. You know if you have something that can look at a situation, work out exactly what's going on, predict the future perfectly, and not lose any context or nuance in the process then… who needs maths? (chuckles)
Brady Haran: How do you respond to that?
Hannah Fry: Umm.
Brady Haran: As a mathematician? (chuckles)
Hannah Fry: I think A, it's a long way away…
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: So I think I still got a job.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And B, I think that actually you lose something when you throw away the mathematical model, which is that you lose an understanding of the mechanisms behind those patterns. So it's all very well saying the statistic shows that this area is the one where burglaries are gonna happen this evening, but if you don't know why and if you don't know what it is in your model that's driving that… that result, then it's very difficult to go in and unpick it and make a positive change for the causes behind it.
Brady Haran: Like I don't really understand how a car engine works at a proper level but I just know that if it breaks down, I go and get it fixed, like so do you always need to know how something works as long as it works?
Hannah Fry: I think yeah, I think you do actually. I think if you don't understand how it works then you can't be sure that it's completely robust. You can't be sure that what you've created isn't just making it's decision based on something that isn't part of the situation at all. So to give you an example, right? There was this driverless car that was built in like the Nineties, I think it was called ALVINN. And it was amazing, it was an amazing driverless car, it drove thousands of miles, had a camera on top of it, a neural network running behind the scenes that was working out where to drive, it was brilliant, right? Until they asked ALVINN to drive over a bridge. At which point it went completely made and almost killed the driver… or it would be the person inside the car.
Brady Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: And they worked out what had actually been happening was all of those thousands of miles that it had been driving, it had learned to just drive with the grass on the lefthand side… righthand side I guess 'cause it was probably in America. But there had always been a verge, it was always nice and simple, and then as soon as there was a bridge and there was no grass it was kind of essentially hunting for grass, right?
Brady Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: And you can end up with a similar situation if you're hunting for criminals or you're working out where burglaries are happening in the city. You want to be sure that it's really picking up on the signals that you want it to be picking up.
(gentle chimes)
Brady Haran: I wanna ask you something about doing mathematics or being a mathematician. So take away all the other things you do on the side.
Hannah Fry: (chuckles)
Brady Haran: You know, extracurricular activities and the administration of being an academic and even take away teaching. Just like when you're doing your research.
Hannah Fry: Mhm?
Brady Haran: What does that look like? Like do you come into work with a notepad and a pencil and think, okay, today I'm gonna have an idea or do you go for a walk around a park? For you what does the process of doing new mathematics look like?
Hannah Fry: So to be honest, it's a lot a lot of stuff on the computer where you're crunching through data looking for stuff, doing statistics on a machine essentially. Or when you're building models inside a machine but if you are sort of back to like the pen and paper mathematics where you're designing something. Designing a model from scratch or you're doing some analysis on your model to try and work out where it's limits are or where the weaknesses are or, you know, how it works in particular situations. Then you are literally just in a room with the doors closed and a pen and paper and scribbling and then, you know, when you get stuck you go for a walk to think it through.
Brady Haran: Do you have like a happy place or an inspiration place or a way that you give your brain a little kick start to start thinking about…
Hannah Fry: Oh yeah, always on a walk.
Brady Haran: A walk?
Hannah Fry: Always on a walk. Yeah, isn't it the same for you? I always have my best ideas when I'm walking.
Brady Haran: I have my best ideas in the shower.
Hannah Fry: Do you?
Brady Haran: Or water or a swimming.
Hannah Fry: When you're working on a particularly creative project you just find yourself fully immersed in water most of the time?
Brady Haran: (laughs) Yeah it's very hard to edit underwater.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: But like I'll go for a swim and have all these amazing ideas and by the time I've like dried off and gotten home and it's time to work again like all the inspiration and motivation's gone. But I find water very inspiring. But yours is a walk? But you walk around like an urban environment or does it have to be like a natural environment?
Hannah Fry: No it can be an urban environment too, but if I'm working on something and like really kind of embedding myself in it then I try to take my doggie for a nice long walk everyday. But the reason for it though is exactly what you said about swimming. That you can write stuff down when you're swimming. Where is if you go for a walk, you can like have a phone with you and kind of take notes and stuff.
Brady Haran: Professionally, academically, what's been your proudest moment? Like what's been the paper so far…
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brady Haran: …that's the one that you're like that was really good. That was the one that you would like, you know, show another mathematician…
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: …look, you know…
Hannah Fry: Hey.
Brady Haran: I was pretty good that.
Hannah Fry: (laughs) Okay so, (laughs) the truth is that the one that I like the most in that regard is also the one that no one will ever read. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Right?
Hannah Fry: I mean it's almost certainly got zero citations, but it took me the longest to write and its a paper that I wrote with my PhD supervisor, Frank Smith, and it's where we have taken a very old model of retail behavior and we have bent it out of all of recognition into the most delicious mathematical problem imaginable and just played with it to our hearts content. That's my favorite.
Brady Haran: So this isn't one that like Westfield are gonna use 'cause…
Hannah Fry: No. (laughs)
Brady Haran: …it's applicable to their shopping centers?
Hannah Fry: God no.
Brady Haran: This is one where you guys just have gone like freestyle and played with math?
Hannah Fry: I think we turned shopping centers into a one dimensional continuous line.(laughs)
Brady Haran: Right? (laughs) Do you remember what it's called or…?
Hannah Fry: I think it's called Rate Effects on the Growth of Centers.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: As I said no one has ever read it. (laughs)
Brady Haran: We'll link to it.
Hannah Fry: But I like it.
Brady Haran: We're gonna link to it in the notes from this show.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: So people can go and have a look.
(gentle chimes)
Brady Haran: Obviously in the last few years a lot of people will know that you're like on TV a lot now and on the internet and on Youtube and radio and podcasts and books and all sorts of things and we'll talk about a few of them probably shortly, how did that all start? How did you become like… outreach person as well?
Hannah Fry: Wasn't just an accident, really? It was never an intention. It was never sort of my ambition but I did this (chuckles) very stupid talk in a pub which was about sexual contact networks, right? It's called the Friendship Paradox, do you know about this? It's the idea that when you have a network that structured like a sexual contact network or like a friendship network, so actually the way that Twitter's structured is very similar, there's a strange paradox which is this, your friends are more popular than you, essentially, so on Twitter both the people you follow and the people that follow you will on average have more followers than you do.
Brady Haran: (laughs) So you're always bottom of the heap?
Hannah Fry: Yeah, I think it's for ninety-five percent of users this is true. Right, which is a really strange idea. It's a really kind of weird idea. Actually…
Brady Haran: That doesn't seem possible!
Hannah Fry: It doesn't seem possible does it? The thing is that actually the reason why it happens is because a slightly odd quirk of when you use the mean, it illustrates the downside of using the mean, because you have people on Twitter like Katy Perry right, who've got ten million scrillion billion followers. So if you follow her that number so massively dwarfs everyone in your network who's like you, that the people who you follow are then way more popular than you are. But it also happens in the reverse, all it takes is a couple of people who are really popular who follow you and then it skews your numbers too. But it actually has a really interested implication when it comes to targeting intervention programs for halting the spread of sexually transmission diseases, this is a really nice idea.
Anyway, I did this very stupid talk about it, it has this thing about Mick Hucknall being the center of the hub 'cause apparently he slept with three thousand people.
Brady Haran: Okay. This is Mick Hucknall the singer.
Hannah Fry: Yeah, he's also I would say not the most attractive man that's ever walked the earth.
Brady Haran: No. (sighs) Well there are three thousand people that disagree, but alright.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: So I did this stupid talk about that.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: In a pub.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Kind of like a comedy night thing.
Brady Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Hannah Fry: And someone was there who then invited me to go and give another talk that was filmed.
Brady Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: Which did really well on the internet.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: And then someone saw that and then asked me to do another talk, which was a TEDx talk which I did the Maths of Love for.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: Never expecting anything to happen from it but it ended up being promoted as a proper TED talk.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: And then really it… that sort of got millions of views and everything really came from there.
Brady Haran: Okay. And then more and more people started asking you to do more and more stuff.
Hannah Fry: Yeah, exactly.
Brady Haran: You said yes to it. So clearly there's something you like about it. So what's been you feelings about now going into this outreach side of things in such a big way?
Hannah Fry: Well I think that initially… I was a real scaredy cat when I was younger, right? I never like pushed myself or anything, just like your classic nerd. You know, never went anywhere, never travelled anywhere, never took any risks at all, and so when this stuff started happening and it was people coming to me asking me to do something, right? I just sort of thought, well, I'm just gonna say yes, because I'd rather live in a world where I said yes and it went badly than I said no and never and didn't know how it would go. So I just had a year where my motto was to say yes, basically. And then actually all of the stuff went quite well and now I'm in this situation where you know, I get to like… have someone pay for me to go to Dubai and fly in a helicopter over the desert at like sunrise and watch people who've built jetpacks strap them to their back and like chuck themselves out of a helicopter and fly around the desert. I mean like who the hell wouldn't want that?
Brady Haran: So is it just the experience of doing it that's motivating you, do you like have this underlying I must do outreach for the people. I must bring math to the masses or is that not really like motivating you?
Hannah Fry: I think it's a combination of the two really, I mean on the one hand it's like, you know, you only get one life and like, why on earth would I ever turn this stuff down? It's amazing to have these opportunities, but I think on the other hand I mean I really do like whole-heartedly believe that maths has got this reputation that it doesn't deserve and I think it's a massive shame that there is this just glorious living breathing playground that is just so incredibly wonderful and people just think it deserves to sit in a dusty textbook and be ignored and you know, I don't think that you can force people to like the subject. I don't think you can make people into mathematicians who were never going to be mathematicians but I do also think that actually the whole of society has something to gain by just looking at it with a little bit more understanding about what they're actually talking about.
Brady Haran: 'Cause this side of things really become a big part of your life now. I imagine it must take a lot of your time because of the some of things you've been involved with, the books and the excellent TV programs. How has that affected your ability to still be a working mathematician?
Hannah Fry: So actually the biggest thing that affected me being a working mathematician was having a baby. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Right. (chuckles) Okay. Yes.
Hannah Fry: So, I'm half and half, right, so I'm half proper academic and I'm half a outreach person, I guess.
Brady Haran: (chuckles) Outreach person, is that what you would call it?
Hannah Fry: Outreach person. Well I dunno, what'd'you call it?
Brady Haran: I dunno.
Hannah Fry: In America they call it a public intellectual (with an American accent).
Brady Haran: A public intellectual?
Hannah Fry: But I'm not using that 'cause it's ridiculous.
Brady Haran: You're too late, you said it.
Hannah Fry: No! (laughs)
Brady Haran: And you said it in an American accent. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: Okay so half half. So how do you feel about that? How do you feel about being a half academic? 'Cause it seems like something that, you know, when I hear you talk about your academic life, I see the pleasure that it gave you.
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brady Haran: And the happiness and the pride, and having to start squashing that more and more 'cause of the other stuff, you know, you think you got the balance right? How do you feel about it?
Hannah Fry: Yeah, I mean I think so, I'm about to go off on maternity leave again and I think that, it's inevitable actually that, this is sort of the main thing, right? I think like lots of females find this the… when they have children there's a period of time where it's very very hard, right? You can't just pick up and put down research. It's really really hard, you kinda it takes momentum and it takes, you know, being embedded in the community and being at the conferences and hearing all of the current ideas and you know, being totally immersed in it. So a lot of female academics have this where they have their first child and they're away for a year and then they come back for a year and then they're away for a year and it's three years really out, so I think really that's the thing that's stilted stuff, right? That aside, the being half and half, in some ways it quite helps with the research because you meet people you would never meet otherwise. You have the opportunity for collaboration you would never have otherwise. And also you have the opportunity for engaging people in your projects, right? In a way you wouldn't have otherwise, so just to give you an example, earlier this year, this project that we did with the BBC, that was also with the University of Cambridge and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It was a program called the Pandemic, right? Now in epidemiology there's one big problem which is that you can come up with these glorious mathematical models but if you want them to really work, if you want them to be able to predict how an epidemic might spread, you have to have a real idea of where people are traveling, how far they're moving and how many people they're coming into contact with. And the only information that we had up until this point is a paper survey that was conducted ten years ago where it was like how many people do you reckon you met this week? Right, which is… there's limitations to how well, you know, that can actually be employed. So, because I had this sort of platform, this opportunity came up where we got the BBC to pay for an app to be built, people could download to their smartphones, that would collect their data for them and we've created this unbelievably glorious dataset that now is, you know, gonna be released to the academic community and make a massive difference, you know, for years to come really and that's something that you couldn't do unless you had this double edge to your bow, what's the phrase?
Brady Haran: Oh.
Hannah Fry: Double sword to your…
Brady Haran: Second string to your bow, is it?
Hannah Fry: There we go, we'll go with it.
Brady Haran: One of those.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: How has being like a more public figure changed your life away from the academic side of things? Has it been… like, 'cause you know I imagine you would get recognized more than you used to 'cause your in television shows and things like that like… has it been like a real positive experience for you being a public intellectual? Or…
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: Has it been… has it been… (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs) D'you know…
Brady Haran: A Public Intellectual is probably the title of the podcast now.
Hannah Fry: (laughs) Shut up, no you can't do that. (laughs)
Brady Haran: You're totally screwed. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: You can't do it. The other one they do in America is they invite you to conferences and they're like, we just really wanted you as a thought leader. (laughs)
Brady Haran: A thought leader? We're reaching out to you as a though leader. (chuckles)
Hannah Fry: (laughs) What does that mean!
Brady Haran: I dunno.
Hannah Fry: What does that mean.
Brady Haran: I don't know.
Hannah Fry: Nothing, I think. Don't call me that. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Alright. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: So has it been like quite positive? Do you like the sort of glitzy celebrity side of it?
Hannah Fry: I think the glitzy celebrity side is where you going down red carpets, right? You're getting papped, you're appearing in Hello magazine, I mean those are celebrities, right?
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: Whereas if you're just on BBC 4… (laughs)
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Or like… (laughs)
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: Radio 4 in the morning.
Brady Haran: or Numberphile. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: Oh, yeah. (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: Exactly.
Brady Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: And getting the Tube still. I mean…
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: It's not like you know…
Brady Haran: You don't still get the Tube do you?
Hannah Fry: Sometimes.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs) Actually I quite hate the Tube. Uber's ruined my life. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Alright.
Hannah Fry: But… no, I really get the Tube, I do get the Tube.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: But it's been almost universally positive. It's been almost universally positive.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Like you get letters of support from people who just make a massive difference. You know, things that you… aren't even really aware that your having an impact on people and then they contact you, it just makes an enormous difference.
Brady Haran: Yeah. That's nice.
Hannah Fry: There's downsides too. I mean obviously.
Brady Haran: I'll ask you a question, but it'll be hard because it will make you sound unhumble so I'll ask you to be humble and self-deprecating. Answer both sides of it. When it comes to outreach what do you think you're good at, and what part of it do you think you're still not good out? Like you when you look back at stuff… yeah?
Hannah Fry: Ooh, good question.
Brady Haran: Like what's your strength and your weakness?
Hannah Fry: Okay, so… I think that it's quite new to have someone who's not a middle aged man. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: (laughs) I think that's quite a big part of it.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I think also if I'm honest…
Brady Haran: But you can't say I'm good at being… a young woman.
Hannah Fry: I'm good at not being (laugh) I'm good at not being a man.
Brady Haran: That's just what you are.
Hannah Fry: Okay.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: Alright I think also the fact that I'm not a genius helps, a lot, actually. I think the fact that…
Brady Haran: You're like a professional mathematician though it's not like you're like…
Hannah Fry: Yeah but I'm not like a good one. (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: You know I'm not like Marcus du Sautoy who's like professor at Oxford.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: And professor twice 'cause he's a proper professor and he's also a professor… an outreach professor.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: I'm not like David Spiegelhalter who's like… have you read someone of the papers that man was writing when he was twenty-three?
Brady Haran: What so you think you're seen as having like a common touch?
Hannah Fry: Yeah I think so. I think so. I mean basically I'm just a normal person who just really likes maths, basically.
Brady Haran: Alright.
Hannah Fry: So I think that helps.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And then I also think that I don't take myself too seriously, I'm quite happy with people take out the piss out of me.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: Which I think helps to be a bit more approachable.
Brady Haran: Especially as a public intellectual.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs) Yeah?
Hannah Fry: As speaking as a thought leader and an intellectual, yeah. (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs) Okay, yeah. Right.
Hannah Fry: I think that stuff helps.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But in terms of what I'm still not good at, oh my god. Like everything.
Every time I do a project… I have a little notebook where I give myself a star rating.
Brady Haran: Really?
Hannah Fry: Yeah. On everything.
Brady Haran: Oh wow.
Hannah Fry: Actually it's not really a star rating, it's a score out of ten.
Brady Haran: Right, on anything you'll do like a…?
Hannah Fry: Every talk. Every radio program.
Brady Haran: Youtube videos?
Hannah Fry: Uh… yeah.
Brady Haran: Does that mean that you've got star ratings for your Numberphile appearances?
Hannah Fry: Oh yeah.
Brady Haran: (gasps)
Hannah Fry: Yeah, although, it's slightly different when you're edited. Your performance isn't totally… do you know what I mean?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: It's not like totally… but yeah totally with the idea… yeah completely.
Brady Haran: How have you been going on Numberphile so far?
Hannah Fry: (laughs) So some of them I'm really happy with.
Brady Haran: What's your highest star rated one so far?
Hannah Fry: Umm… I think it was the Rock Paper Scissors actually.
Brady Haran: Okay, yeah?
Hannah Fry: Which was my first one.
Brady Haran: Yeah, that was good. That was the first time I ever met you.
Hannah Fry: Yeah, I think it was.
Brady Haran: Yeah. We've just gone downhill since, have we?
Hannah Fry: I know. (laughs) No! (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: You know, I 'm not giving myself tens or whatever.
Brady Haran: No, no, no.
Hannah Fry: But the thing is I think it's incredibly important to look back at what you've done and… acknowledge where you can improve.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: So I still do… I mean I've given hundreds of public lectures now, right, hundreds of public talks, and I still do this where it's like, I have a note… you know, little notes… in every folder where I save the talk and I just say what worked and what didn't work.
Brady Haran: Alright.
Hannah Fry: So that next time… yeah.
Brady Haran: What's been your… your biggest crash so far, and what's your like highest rating? What's the high and the low so far?
Hannah Fry: Ooh that's a good question.
Brady Haran: Have you ever got a ten or is ten not allowed?
Hannah Fry: I've got like close to a ten a couple of times.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: So one actually, I did an interview on Shaun Keaveny's show.
Brady Haran: He's great.
Hannah Fry: He's brilliant, I like him a lot.
Brady Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Hannah Fry: And that got a really high mark, but it got a really high mark because I managed to like keep my nerves under control.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: And I was really nervous about it, it's like Shaun Keaveny, do you know?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And I hadn't done this program before and I hadn't done loads of radio… chatty radio shows before. But I… yeah, managed to not sound like an idiot.
(Radio clip fades in)
Shaun Keaveny: Our next guest is an expert in fluid dynamics, understands the trigonometry of love and can tell us a thing or two about ear-worms. Here to talk about… I've gone a little bit William Hague.
Hannah Fry (in clip): (laughs)
Shaun Keaveny (in clip): Here to talk about… Theon! Here to talk about the next series of the Curious Case of Rutherford and Fry, it's Hannah Fry, good morning!
Hannah Fry (in clip): Hello, good morning.
Shaun Keaveny (in clip): Thanks for coming in.
Hannah Fry (in clip): What an intro.
Shaun Keaveny (in clip): It was quite good.
Hannah Fry (in clip): I enjoyed that.
Shaun Keaveny (in clip): I know it's hugely… we start well and then it goes downhill. (laughs)
Hannah Fry (in clip): Well I think if anything it peaked up as the voice… you know…
Shaun Keaveny (in clip): As it went a bit William Hague, yeah…
(radio clip fades out)
Hannah Fry: 'Cause the thing is on those kind of shows, right, you have to be really careful that you are jumping in exactly the right amount. You can't just sit there and wait for them to talk to you. (pause) Because it has to be a conversation, so you kind of have to jump in a little bit.
Brady Haran: Were you doing it via phone or were you in the studio with him?
Hannah Fry: I was in the studio, yeah.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: Which makes it easier.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But you also you can't jump in when they're talking when it's not appropriate.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: So it's really hard to like get that balance right.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: But then also I just explained my thing that was going on… quite well… whatever.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But I mean I've definitely bombed a lot of talks. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Like do you ever get a zero or a one, what's like, what's the lowest mark you can get?
Hannah Fry: Oh… no because I try… I always really prepare.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: So I never get a zeroes and ones. That would be like…
Brady Haran: A zero would just be falling over on the stage and then not giving a talk at all?
Hannah Fry: (laughs) Or I… just going in and shouting at everyone.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Going like, hey y'all! (growls) (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: And stalling up. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Okay. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: But I think that you know, I've definitely got low marks where I just haven't thought enough about what the audience were wanting.
Brady Haran: So a low mark is at times where you feel like you've just missed the audience? You've missed your…
Hannah Fry: Yeah, or maybe I've been a bit sloppy and I haven't prepared as well as I could have done. So one thing that I'm still not very good at, right? That Matt Parker is amazing at actually, instantly. Is that, if the audience is in a really good mood and they're going with me I can accelerate that when I'm stage this is. I know how to accelerate that and, you know, get it to feedback on itself. But sometimes the audience just isn't in the right mood and what Matt can do is he can turn the audience to being into him.
Brady Haran: Win them. Win them back.
Hannah Fry: He can win them, right? And I just haven't quite worked out how to do that yet. I haven't worked out that when you've got a bad audience, not to just be like okay I'm just going to say what I was gonna say and that's it and then I haven't got anything else… but rather be like, what is it about you that you need, you know, do you need me to be more goofy, do you need me to be more energetic, what is it that you need? And give them that and then turn them to your side, I haven't worked that out.
(gentle chimes)
Brady Haran: Let's talk about your books for a second. You've done a few now, you had a few like light hearted fun ones. One about love and stuff and one about Christmas and now you've written a more hardcore one.
Hannah Fry: Yeah.
Brady Haran: Tell me about the… how they were different. How writing them was different?
Hannah Fry: So the love one (laughs) well, in a way, I sort of don't want anyone to ever read that book (laughs) because… I'll tell you why (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs) Okay. Link in the show notes, people. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs) I know you're not supposed to say this about your own work.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: But what happened with that book, right, was that I'd just done this talk, this TEDx talk, got an email from TED saying, we're putting it on the main channel, we're making it a proper TED talk. It's completely unexpected, right? And then a couple of weeks later, they said, actually what we're gonna do, we're not gonna put it online yet, because we want you to write a book to go with it.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: And then we'll launch them both together.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: And I was like… my god this is amazing! I mean I never would have written a book if someone hadn't come to me and said you need to write a book, right?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Never in a million years. And then I kinda thought about it and was like okay I'm gonna do it. And they were like, great! We need the whole book delivered in six weeks time.
Brady Haran: (gasps) (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs) And I'm like full-time academic. Got a full-time job, you know, it's like right, that's not really gonna be possible. So I tried to negotiate with them and they were like (tsks) yeah… thing is… we're TED… so…
Brady Haran: Yeah. Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Do you wanna do it or not?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: So I did it. I mean it was the most horrific experience of my life.
Brady Haran: Bit of it… you felt like it was a bit rushed?
Hannah Fry: Yeah I do think it was a bit rushed, yeah.
Brady Haran: How many stars does it get in your notepad?
Hannah Fry: Oh god… I mean… a lot less than it gets on Amazon. Put it that way. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Right. (laughs) Is that a humble brag? I can't quite decide. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: Blimey (laughs). It might be.
Brady Haran: It gets very high ratings on Amazon! (laughs)
Hannah Fry: What I'm saying… no… (laughs)
Brady Haran: But I think it's rubbish!
Hannah Fry: No it doesn't, no it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't but what I'm saying is that people are still being generous.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: That's what I mean.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Hannah Fry: I mean like, don't get me wrong, I mean I think the idea is there, like taking maths and something love and smashing them together. I still would like stand by that idea and I think there was like the kind of beginning of something much better there. But it was just such a hard process. I'm not a natural writer and… getting the ideas… it wasn't my research area either, right? You know, getting that up to the point where it's like, yeah I'm really proud of this and I'm ready to release it to the world, it just wasn't… I just needed more time and just didn't have it.
Brady Haran: Hmm. Hmm.
Hannah Fry: The Christmas one on the other hand, I think I did have more time with that and I did that with… as a collaboration with my colleague Thomas Oléron Evans, who is basically a wonderful human being. And we just had loads of funs writing it and just being really silly and… playful and whatever and coming up with stupid ideas and seeing them through. So that one's kind of more like what I wanted Love to be, if you know what I mean.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But I really like that book, it's really… it's just a stupid little fun book.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But then the latest one, the Hello World one…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I sort of see that to be honest as my first book.
Brady Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: Because six weeks to write a book is just like a pamphlet, not a book. And then the other one was just me mucking around with someone.
Brady Haran: They're sort of more like stocking filler type fun books?
Hannah Fry: Yeah, totally, I mean they're very thing, right? They're like twenty-five thousand words or whatever.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Whereas Hello World is like… I mean it's still quite, well I hope anyway, that it still got that chatty style and there's still like some silly bits in there, it's not completely serious, not like it's really serious heavy read. But it's not just much more the things that I'm actually interested in, in terms of research that I do. And also I just think it's got some really good stories in it.
Brady Haran: Where did you write it? Where do you sit and write?
Hannah Fry: On a walk, mate.
Brady Haran: You write it on a walk?
Hannah Fry: Yeah. (laughs)
Brady Haran: But you can't type on a walk.
Hannah Fry: You can dictaphone though can't you?
Brady Haran: Oh, you dictaphone it!
Hannah Fry: Yeah, so I'd go for a walk with my doggie. For a really long walk and I'd dictaphone loads.
Brady Haran: Oh.
Hannah Fry: And then I come back and I type it up and make it into sentences and then pad it out and do the same next day.
Brady Haran: Have you still got the dictaphone recordings?
Hannah Fry: Probably, yeah?
Brady Haran: Will you give us like… fifteen seconds so we can hear what that sounds like?
Hannah Fry: (laughs) Yeah but my sentences are really slow.
Brady Haran: That's okay!
Hannah Fry: So I'll be like…
Brady Haran: I'd love to hear what it sounds like, you know, for a peak behind the curtain.
Hannah Fry: (laughs) There'd be heavy breathing as I'm walking up hill. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Yeah!
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: I'm gonna lobby you for that. I'm gonna lobby you for a little…
Hannah Fry: Okay, I'll see if I can find one.
Brady Haran: If you can find some, just give us a little snippet and we'll just play it now so people can get a feel for that.
(gentle chimes)
(low quality dictaphone recording of Hannah Fry plays): On the one hand it means that we don't… we kind of feel surprised when things get stuff wrong… and on the hand it means that we are dismissive… when things go wrong. That's what we're just really bad at that stuff. Because we're not really good at calculating, but I sort of think actually the more interesting and more accurate way to frame it (bird chirps) is to have that as a secondary idea. (audio distortion) And instead have how much power should we give the… the machine. (breathing and audio distortion) (bird chirping) Part one is the algorithm gets final say, part two is that the human gets final say. (bird chirping)
Maybe the algorithm should have final say. (audio distortion) but the problem
(whispers) squish too much of this sh-t (censor beeps) (birds chirping) (audio distortion) So how bout we just go? Include all the AI stuff in with the algorithm bit, then go, should you blindly follow it? (yells) Molly! (audio distortion) Oh sorry, I didn't see you there. (voices in the background) (bird chirps) I know! (laughter in the background) (Hannah talks to someone in the background) Yeah she's a cockapoo. (dog growls) (background chatter) (child talks to dog)
Child on Recording: Bye bye doggie! (laughs) (audio distortion) (recording ends)
(gentle chimes)
Brady Haran: The parts of the book that I've read, what I like about it, is it does sound like you're talking to me, like it's like, oh yeah this is… obviously…
Hannah Fry: Because I was. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Yeah! That… it all makes more sense now. That's why I was gonna say you're so good at writing in your voice, your chatty voice, it's because you are, it is your chatty voice. How has it been going, like, how was it received? I know it's been nominated for some awards and stuff…
Hannah Fry: Yeah it has.
Brady Haran: …so it's obviously, you know…
Hannah Fry: I has. No, it's been really good actually. It's been really amazing. 'Cause I think… (laughs) one thing that I do find about it is that, I think because I have done quite silly stuff in the past, like the love stuff and, you know, telly stuff, whatever, I think one thing that I've noticed is that people think I don't know what I'm talking about.
Brady Haran: Right?
Hannah Fry: It's sort of back to what we were saying earlier.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: About walking into a room and people thinking you're an idiot. I don't think people think I'm an idiot but I think they don't…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I think people are a bit like why is this TV presenter writing a book about AI?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: You know, she's jumping on the bandwagon or whatever.
Brady Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Hannah Fry: But it's not really, I mean it's stuff that I've been working on for a really long time. It's been nominated for two awards, right, shortlisted for two awards. And one of them was the Royal Society, which is… like a really big deal because when it comes to science writing, you just don't really get a bigger institution than the Royal Society.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: And you know the books that they pick are like, these weighty, you know…
Brady Haran: Tomes.
Hannah Fry: Exactly.
Brady Haran: (chuckles)
Hannah Fry: I mean they really are it's like, you know, a history of engineering, right?
Brady Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: Like that was one of the other books. Or like, what I find quite intimidating books.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And why it was a real surprise it was because exactly as you said the book that I've written is really chatty. It's not written in the style of a scientist, really.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: So it's really that was really amazing to get that recognition. And then the other one, the other big prize that it's been nominated for is this non-fiction, like, the biggest non-fiction award which is anything in the English language so I think there's only a couple of English authors on there, which is frankly absurd. I mean science books almost never even get on this list so it's…
Brady Haran: Brilliant.
Hannah Fry: It's completely absurd.
Brady Haran: Brilliant.
Hannah Fry: But you know, it's actually I did try really hard. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Well, there you go, you did something right. So you get to dip your oar into a lot of the different types of outreach now. You've got like, you know, radio and podcasts which are really successful, you've done these television shows, a book, occasionally you even get to be in Numberphile videos…
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: …which is amazing.
Hannah Fry: You know, actually though…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: …in terms of people like coming and talking to me in the street, it's almost always Numberphile people.
Brady Haran: Ah, there you go.
Hannah Fry: They're the best people.
Brady Haran: Well, keep doing them then. So of all of those, and now there is no offense to be taken here, what gives you the most pleasure? Like, what are the ones like if I said, alright you can't do any of it anymore except one, what's the one that like, you know, feels most in your wheelhouse? That you enjoy doing?
Hannah Fry: So I… and you know, well I actually have this conversation quite often with my husband who's like, you need to give up something. (chuckles)
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: He's like, stop those Numberphile videos, mate!
Hannah Fry: (laughs) But the problem is that actually, each of them have their own merits.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: And I think that they all sort of add to this bigger picture, so you know, the radio stuff, I just absolutely love the team that I have. So, you know, it's a podcast called the Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, with Adam Rutherford the geneticist. And it's just me, him and this producer, and we just have the best time making these programs. It's just I wouldn't give it up for anything and just absolutely love it. The telly stuff is like, those are times where you get these incredible experiences. I mean it's hard work don't get me wrong, right?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And you do not make your fortune in television. (chuckles)
Brady Haran: No.
Hannah Fry: Believe me.
Brady Haran: That's about the access to…
Hannah Fry: Yeah but it's about the experiences and the access and then…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: You know, being part of something that eventually gets seen by so many people and that just looks really beautiful and glossy on the surface and…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: Yeah, having that role, I think, is really… I wouldn't want to give that up.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And then the Youtube stuff is where you can actually be yourself, right?
It's where you can actually talk about the ideas that you think are interesting to the audience who want to hear them. And get immediate feedback on them and actually kind of communicate with people who are like you. I wouldn't ever want to give that stuff up.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And then the books that's where you get to… really author something.
Where you get to think about an idea wholly and completely and just, you know, spend tens of thousands of words getting your own thoughts on a page. So I wouldn't wanna give that up either.
Brady Haran: Then your husband says, well you gotta give one of 'em up! (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs) Yeah.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: You can sleep when you're dead.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: So, like to finish up then, like, in… five years time what's the next thing?
Or do you not know, you're waiting for someone to offer it to you?
Hannah Fry: Oh I don't know. I don't know. I think everything's worked out quite well so far by being micro-ambitious.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: So just looking at what's immediately in front of you, and doing the very best that you can at that and trying your hardest.
Brady Haran: Is mathematics still a big part of it? Like do you think in ten, fifteen years you're still gonna be someone who's like churning out papers and researching, or like…?
Hannah Fry: I hope so, I hope so. So I mean as I said, you know, I'm just about to go on maternity leave again, so like in the last couple of years I haven't done as much maths as I'd want to. And I won't again for another year or so.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: Because, you know, the new baby. But when I come back from that maternity leave, yeah I really want to get back into it, because there's just nothing in the world gives me more pleasure that getting totally stuck into a totally delicious maths problems.
Brady Haran: Well… Hannah Fry, public intellectual. (gentle music fades in)
Hannah Fry: No! (laughs)
Brady Haran: Thought leader.
Hannah Fry: (laughs) Brady!
Brady Haran: Thank you for your time today. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brady Haran: Thank you very much.
(triumphant piano music)
⁂
Brady Haran: So Matt I know you're like stand-up comedy. You're the funny man of mathematics. But you are allowed to be serious today. I wanna get, you know… I wanna see what's inside your heart.
Matt Parker: I'm looking forward to the opportunity.
Brady Haran: I want the tears of clown.
Matt Parker: Behind the happy face is always… actually it's just… I'm fine actually.
(gentle piano music fades in slowly)
Brady Haran: If we end up with tears I feel like in someways I will have done my job really well but in other ways it will have gone catastrophically. (laughs)
(music continues to fade up)
Matt Parker: I will feel slightly bullied. (chuckles)
(music continues)
Brady Haran: (laughs) I know. Alright we'll see where we end up on that front.
(music continues)
Brady Haran: Matt Parker will be familiar to most people who watch Numberphile videos.
(music continues)
(Numberphile video clips of Matt Parker overlapping and echoing): Today we're gonna look at the fact that all prime numbers are… the rules are… when you square them… you're allowed to add numbers together. (cacophony of voices mix) You're allowed to sort… of runway… for some reason Brady has printed out the first one million digits of pi. (reverbs and echoes)
(music continues)
Brady Haran: He's already been in about fifty of them and there are more on the way. And to borrow a cliche, it'd be fair to describe Matt as one of the busiest people in mathematical show business. (music continues) He regularly performs to sell out shows. He broadcasts across the full range of media and more recently he's started writing books. All of his endeavors combine a unique blend of genuinely funny comedy with an equally genuine for proper real deal mathematics.
(music fades up and out)
Brady Haran: How do you explain your job to a stranger or a taxi driver or someone?
Like… when you meet someone who has no idea what you do and they say, hey mate what do you do for living?
Matt Parker: That's a really good question. (sighs) 'Cause there is no concise way of doing it and when I'm at my happiest is when someone asks my wife what I do for a living.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: Often if I'm nearby I'm like alright let's hear this, this could be interesting. Actually it happened when we got married we had to do an interview to prove that it was a legitimate marriage because I wasn't British, and one of the questions in the interview process to check that you're a real couple…
Brady Haran: (chuckles)
Matt Parker: (chuckles) …they turn to Lucy and said, so describe Matt's job. And I was like… can't wait to hear this! (chuckles) Go for it!
Brady Haran: So you're in the room? They don't put you in separate rooms for this interrogation?
Matt Parker: Well, they're meant to… they can at their discretion they can put you in separate rooms… on our case they're like look there's just one of us here would you mind being in the room.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: I think we… we were not a high risk case.
Brady Haran: (chuckles) So it was like Mr. and Mrs. for your life?
Matt Parker: It was like Mr. and Mrs. but the prize is being allowed to get married. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Right.
Matt Parker: And so she's a solar physicist. Boom. There's my answer for her. She just said, uhh… maths teacher. Which is correct and I think that's what was written on my form… and to be honest that's the answer I give. If a taxi driver or someone says, what do you do for a living? I just say… I'm a maths teacher, because they're then very few follow on questions and if you say…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: I'm a stand-up comedian… never say that. 'Cause they always want you to tell a joke.
Brady Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Matt Parker: And I'm not doing that. And if you say Youtuber, they're like, oh! And they've got some opinion or thing they wanna go on about that. What'd'you say?
Do you say… you make Youtube videos or…?
Brady Haran: Yeah I say I make Youtube videos and usually they'll say, about what? And I'll say kinda geeky stuff like science and maths and then they shut up.
Matt Parker: Oh okay so it's one further step to get to…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Yeah that makes sense.
Brady Haran: Were you disappointed when your wife said, he's a maths teacher?
Matt Parker: No!
Brady Haran: Did you want her to go into this proud spiel about all your success and fans and…?
Matt Parker: No! No, very happy to (chuckles) just go with maths teacher and that's what I always say. And... it would tend to be… if it's like a party scenario and I say maths teacher, it'll be people I know or my wife who then says… he's underselling what he does. He also blah blah blah blah. Actually the most common place I get asked is going into the United States in immigration. They're like so what do you do, sir? And so I tend to say maths teacher or math teacher but the problem is then they're like oh isn't school in at the moment? I'm like oh well yeah but I work part-time for a university and I do this and I do that and the other. Now I think I'm just gonna start saying author. And they're not gonna ask me, oh quick write a chapter, right? But they're also not gonna have too many follow on questions or then… oh, what sort of author? And then I'll say maths books and then you know… (chuckles)
Brady Haran: (laughs) That's it!
Matt Parker: There's no follow on questions! (laughs) So, done! But all roads lead to, oh… maths huh? And then that's it.
Brady Haran: That's like the ultimate conversational dead-end.
Matt Parker: Yeah. It really is. (chuckles)
Brady Haran: Let's go to your beginnings because at last I'm interviewing someone who is from the great nation that I am from of Australia.
Matt Parker: Glorious sunburnt land.
Brady Haran: You were born in Australia.
Matt Parker: I was born in Perth, Western Australian.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Matt Parker: So, you're from Adelaide.
Brady Haran: Yes.
Matt Parker: Which is lovely.
Brady Haran: Thank you.
Matt Parker: It's got a great mall.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brady Haran: Do you know the mall's balls got vandalized the other day?
Matt Parker: What! Really?
Brady Haran: There's this sculpture of these two giant silver balls in Rundle Mall in Adelaide called…
Matt Parker: You could tell my brain was then thinking…
Brady Haran: I know.
Matt Parker: Should I reference the mall's balls or not?
Brady Haran: No. Yeah.
Matt Parker: Really someone's vandalized them?
Brady Haran: Someone went and graffitied them. He's like a pariah in Adelaide now.
Matt Parker: (sighs)
Brady Haran: Anyway sorry we… we digressed.
Matt Parker: That's outrageous. Okay.
Brady Haran: So you're from Perth…
Matt Parker: I'm from Perth.
Brady Haran: …which is a long way from Adelaide.
Matt Parker: A long way from Adelaide. I once drove from Perth to Adelaide.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: In fact we drove from Perth to… Melbourne I think… to the Melbourne comedy festival.
Brady Haran: Wow.
Matt Parker: And I'd already done the Adelaide Fringe and then went to Perth to see the family. 'Cause my mum gets very upset 'cause my mum and dad still live in Perth.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: And I go to Australia quite a bit for work but it tends to be Sydney, Melbourne, occasionally Adelaide. And my mum gets a bit emotional if I literally fly over her without visiting, right?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: So every trip I go to Perth, which is great. I see family and hang out. And then Lucy and I hired a camper van and drove from Perth to Melbourne which took eight and half days. And it's a good… I think it was like must have been four or five days before we even got to Adelaide, which is the nearest…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: …city, right?
Brady Haran: It's the first stop. (laughs)
Matt Parker: I have to say it is the first stop, we're like well that's like day five.
Brady Haran: So you drove across the Nullarbor Plains.
Matt Parker: We did the Nullarbor Plains. And actually we stopped every megameter, so every one thousand kilometers. The whole trip was three point six megameters. We got out of the car and took a photo because Lucy's research, she's a solar physicist, her research everything's done in megameters, like ten to six meters. That's just what she uses. But on the sun like that's tiny and we actually paced out just over three megameters and I want to show this to you 'cause she's British, just the size of Australia and growing up in Perth, it's very isolated, which has pros and cons. And the scale until you drive it, it's such an abstract concept. The distances involved and so we're like right we're are gonna drive across the Nullarbor. We're gonna see the fact there's one bit that's dead straight for ninety miles and then it's the same scenery day after day. And we got to one service station which had a motel made out of shipping crates attached to it and Lucy's like oh this isn't… it's not very nice. And I was like, d'you wanna drive to the next one? She's like yep!
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: So we got back in the car, two hours later another service station with a few shipping crates turned into a motel and we're like well… this is just what you get, right? This is the Nullarbor.
Brady Haran: Nullarbor of course means no trees.
Matt Parker: No trees, yeah exactly and there are no trees. That is not false advertising.
There's a null number of trees across the Nullarbor, which I love so like yourself I've lived in the UK now for… goodness I've done like… (pause) decade and a half…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: …now. So, you know, I've obviously got a love for Britain and the British people.
Brady Haran: Do you consider yourself an Australian or a Brit?
Matt Parker: You know, I consider myself Australian.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: And that's difficult having a British accent. So (chuckles)…
Brady Haran: You think you have a British accent?
Matt Parker: I definitely have a British accent.
Brady Haran: Dude! (laughs)
Matt Parker: Well it's strange so…
Brady Haran: If you have a British, what have I got!
Matt Parker: Well you're definitely more Australian than… I think… you've got a better Aussie accent than me.
Brady Haran: You think I sound more Australian than you?
Matt Parker: I think you sound more Australian than me.
Brady Haran: I think the exact opposite.
Matt Parker: Really!
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Oh, they're you go.
Brady Haran: Well anyway, 'cause we'll…
Matt Parker: We were in Kalgoorlie, which is this mining town where the… paternal side of my family comes from Kalgoorlie.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: And so Lucy and I have actually been there a couple times we really like Kalgoorlie. It's like this wild west mining town. It's terrible.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: But we love it. And it's where the Halfords who my… paternal grandmother's line came from.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: And we got there and we'd missed when the hotel we'd book had closed, like 'cause it's a long time to get there and we just took a bit too long and when it's closed it's closed, right? We're now… and we bumped into someone else staying in that hotel and we were like oh we just missed them closing and now we can't get into til tomorrow. And then they're like oh well you know… they were talking about Kalgoorlie and I was like oh, actually Lucy said, oh Matt's actually Perth. And they were, like what! And I said, yeah my accent's changed a lot. And they just looked at me and went, ah that's a shocker. Now whenever I talk occasionally Lucy will go, ah that's a shocker.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: 'Cause just my accent to Australians is super British.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: But to British people I still sound very Australian and to Australians who live abroad I fall into a spectrum. So some of my… I still do weird things to some vowels.
Brady Haran: That's between you and the vowels, Matt.
Matt Parker: That's it exactly! (laughs) Some inflections here and there and certain words and phrases and even weird things like… is it gotten… there's a few words that I would use all the time and then people are like, oh that's a weird way to say that.
Brady Haran: So as a boy in Perth when you did still have an Australian accent. Were you a math kid straight away? Was the writing on the wall?
Matt Parker: I was nerdy right out of the gates. So… obviously I played a bit of sport because in Australian everyone's forced to play every sport just to make sure you're not good at any of them.
Brady Haran: That was eliminated was it? (laughs)
Matt Parker: It really was. That's why Australian punches above it's weight in the… my argument… international sport… is we just check every citizen…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: …against every sport when they're in primary school just to see if they're good at them or not, right?
Brady Haran: Were there any that you had any aptitude for?
Matt Parker: I could play basketball.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: And so I was on the high school basketball team and I loved playing basketball and that was great and height is a bit of advantage and I could jump, right? And I thoroughly enjoyed basketball. Terrible at cricket. I was adequate at lacrosse.
Brady Haran: (chuckles)
Matt Parker: I know. Didn't see that coming.
Brady Haran: No?
Matt Parker: So… eh, gave that a go. Passable at football and soccer and the rest, right? But I loved nerdy things and so my dad is an accountant and my mum trained as a dental assistant but then basically has either worked in bookshops or libraries ever since. And so it's quite a nerdy family in that regard.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: And when I was very young my dad gave me exercise books to do which were arithmetic and I quite enjoyed that, right? It's one of my earlier memories is enjoying doing adding up which, you know, that worked out. And I often say when I'm asked about my background that it was an advantage going to school already liking maths. Or already being convinced that it's a fun thing to do. And I think that's very true, you know, if you don't like maths it's easy to get behind and once you're behind you're in big trouble. So the fact that it was at home and you know, my rolling start, I always enjoyed it, I loved it, but I still enjoyed physics and chemistry and when I was younger a lot of biology bits and even like I was doing programming. There's a thing in Perth called P-EC, which I think still runs, which is Primary Extension and Challenge. And that's where they get a bunch of kids, they're like hey you look a bit bored in lessons and you do a different thing at a different school once a term and one time it was programming and one time it was stop animation and one time it was sampling bugs from a swamp over the course of a season or something, right? And that was such a wide range of nerdy things and that's my first memories of programming and maths and chemistry and a bunch of other things and I've been a poly-nerd, I think, ever since.
Brady Haran: What would the answer have been when, you know, people were, and what do you want to be when you grow up? Like once you sort of were old enough to have the concept of a career in mind, what were you aiming at back then?
Matt Parker: Oh my absolute first memory of what I want to be when I grew up was a bricklayer.
Brady Haran: Right? (chuckles)
Matt Parker: Because I liked building, people building buildings! Like, that's amazing. And then that gradually transformed into engineering when I realized just putting the bricks in place is probably not the most fun part, although I still enjoy, you know, construction and hands on things. And so I actually studied engineering at university, initially.
Brady Haran: Right?
Matt Parker: And this is just between us and all the… Numberphile podcasts listeners… I initially enrolled in a mechatronic engineering degree.
Brady Haran: What does that mean like…?
Matt Parker: Which means you're doing mechanical engineering with electronics.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Matt Parker: Turns out… I'm terrible at electrical engineering. Like I used to love soldering and I've been soldering, you know, since primary school and I love electrical circuits… but that kind of electrical engineering that hardcore analysis of circuits I just didn't… I was like oh this isn't exciting. And I really enjoyed civil engineering because we were forced to do some civil units so… love concrete. Big fan of concrete as I discovered in material engineering and so I really enjoyed all this but I did it as a double major. So, I was doing a double major in mechatronic which then became… mechanical engineering and… physics. First year I did computer science as well, 'cause you're allowed to do an extra first year. And so I did first year compsci, again loved that but never pursued it beyond that. And I did two years of engineering and I was like… this is not for me.
Brady Haran: Right?
Matt Parker: And I'd done all the requirements for the first two years of a maths degree while doing physics and then I did an extra year on the end which was the third year of maths, and so then I did my maths, Bachelors. So I officially got a Bachelor of Science double majoring in physics and mathematics.
Brady Haran: So for that first year or two when you were like going more engineeringy and physics, had you kind of put mathematics to one side for a bit? Had you like… 'cause the Matt I know obviously is, you know, all about the mathematics.
Matt Parker: You know it!
Brady Haran: Was there a year or two when that sort of subsided or where you still…?
Matt Parker: Not really! It was always there. And my educational career was just a gradual… shedding of bits. So if you spoke to me when I was in high school I probably wouldn't have been… I woulda split maths, physics and chemistry. And by the end of high school, chemistry I was like, ugh I'm sick of memorizing the colors of things that precipitate out and salts and all these things and then I loved physics so I did a physics degree, absolutely loved it but I was kind of just happiest when the equations were working out well. But I enjoyed it enough that I finished the degree and looked at doing postgraduate physics but then I was like actually I really like loved the maths aspects so I was like well let's do the maths degree, I was like well I'm not in a rush. I thoroughly enjoyed the equations doing physics. I enjoyed all the maths units, let's do third year maths, I don't wanna miss out on that. And what actually bumped me… into hard maths… (pause) and I've still got a soft spot for physics obviously… was after that I did a teaching qualification. (pause) And I was like, whatta I wanna teach?
What did I enjoy talking about the most? And it was maths. And so… then I did a maths teaching qualification afterwards and that's what finally steered me into hardcore maths and to this day I kind of keep an eye on physics and my brother's a physicist and my wife's a physicist but… since then I've just got more and more into maths and the fact that I can do it at a recreational level in kind of a way you can't do physics I find… amazing.
Brady Haran: What made you wanna be a teacher? Why not be like… you know… a math researcher and prove the Riemann Hypothesis or become like a… university mathematician or… you know make a million dollars…
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brady Haran: …in Wall Street? Like why did you want to be a teacher?
Matt Parker: So the reason why I left studying was I was like, okay I could go into do, you know, a PhD would be the next step. I wasn't a brilliant theoretical physicist. I quite enjoyed experimental stuff and I was like okay but I was so sick of… I'd done four years at that point and I was like, oh I just need a break from constant studying. But I had been tutoring high school students to make endsmeat, I was like, oh I really enjoy doing that. I also fancied moving to the UK because I'd been to the UK for a gap year before I went to university and I was like I loved it in the UK and no one should spend their whole life in Perth. Like I loved Perth.
Everyone in Perth needs to live somewhere else for a year at least. And I'd done this gap year but I did that when I was like seventeen and I was like, you know what, as an adult I'd like to go live in England again and I was like, well I don't wanna just work in pubs. (pause) And so genuinely my logic was, I'll get a teaching qualification and then I can teach… in England while traveling. That was my plan. But it wasn't just that, 'cause that's a lot of effort to go on vacation. I was also thinking I wonder if I would enjoy this as a career, and this is a good way to find out. And the teaching qualification is one year. The… diploma of education is a one year postgraduate diploma and you get to do a placement pretty quick. And I was like well I'm gonna do my first placement within like four months. I'll find out very quickly if I enjoy teaching. And I absolutely loved it. I loved my placements, I loved the qualification. I then actually taught in Australian for a year first, 'cause I kinda thought, well I'm enjoying this, I should do it in my own culture first. (pause) And so I taught for one year in Perth, had a great time but then I was like, you know, originally I wanted to go to the UK and so I then went on the… I got the two year working holiday to the UK and off I went. And taught some of the time, traveled some of the time, absolutely enjoyed it and towards the end of that is when I started doing work for universities and that's when I started to drift out of teaching so I then moved on to a more permanent visa doing educational support stuff in the UK.
Brady Haran: Often when you… speak to people who become teachers they talk about… those first months when they go into the classroom and often they're quite horrific stories, like people are like, I wasn't prepared for the stress and the amount of work but you seem to be talking about it very fondly. Was it not jumping in the deep end?
Matt Parker: Oh, that's… don't get me wrong, it was incredibly difficult. So, actually I spoke to a new teacher last night. They came to a talk I did. A physics teacher and I often get asked for advice, 'cause people know I was a teacher. And I always say your first year of teaching is the hardest year of your life. Well, no, actually depending on how your training is done, for me my diploma of education was the hardest year of my life and my first year of teaching was the second hardest year of my life. It's, there's no way to learn teaching than doing it. You learn a bit of theory and then you gotta stand up in front of teenagers and convince them to listen to you, but it gets… dramatically easier with experience 'cause you see a student, your second or third year teaching, a student would do something stupid and you're like, oh I've dealt with this before. Right? And you're so much better the second time, and once you've… when you first start you're staying up until after midnight planning lessons, because you're doing everything from scratch. But then, second, third year in, you're like, oh okay, I've taught this before, I've already got the resources. And a… teacher I worked with, guy called Kim Lee, when I was at my first year of teaching said after five years teaching becomes more of a hobby. And it's true, it starts as the hardest thing you'll ever do and in five years it's a hobby that you do on the side with the rest of your work life balance. And I taught for four years so I fell just short of that. But I miss it, right? It's really… it's super hard work but it is very rewarding.
Brady Haran: Matt obviously a lot of your communication of math now, that we'll come on to shortly, involves comedy and humor.
Matt Parker: Mhm.
Brady Haran: Were you like that as a teacher from day one? Were you Mr. Parker the funny teacher?
Matt Parker: I was not! No.
Brady Haran: No?
Matt Parker: No. 'Cause comedy doesn't fly with teenagers and the moment teenagers think you're trying to impress them, this is my motto. The moment they think you're trying to impress them, it's all over. And so I wasn't the funny teacher.
Although I… you know… there's a certain amount of dry humor that gets you through dealing with teenagers.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: Which a few students that will resonate with and you can spot the ones who've got… well, I would say an advanced sense of humor but obviously I'm biased. Right, and so that's kind of fun, right? And I got endless entertainment from saying things which I knew the students would find hilarious but I do it with a straight face, right? And they can't tell… you know they're like… I can't believe you said that. And I'm like ha ha ha, can't believe they didn't know I said that deliberately. Which is good fun but… (pause) comedy is very different to teaching. When I was at uni I did bits of comedy writing, I wrote for the student paper, the Pelican at University of Western Australian.
Brady Haran: Oh, the Pelican!
Matt Parker: The Pelican.
Brady Haran: Oh alright. (laughs)
Matt Parker: That's right, it's no Adelaide Advertiser but it's…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: …it's a decent publication. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Hang on a second. Hang on a second, you're now commingling my important newspaper with like a student paper. (laughs)
Matt Parker: Oh! I think they're all peers! (laughs)
Brady Haran: This apples and oranges here. (laughs)
Matt Parker: Oh really! (laughs) Oh… sorry!
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Didn't know one of us is a real journalist. (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: So… (laughs)
Brady Haran: But in university you were into comedy like…?
Matt Parker: I was into comedy, I was into comedy, yes.
Brady Haran: Performing as well or just writing?
Matt Parker: Just writing. And I did short films.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: So… this is before Youtube so I made short films for short film festivals.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: And then I had… a spot on the community television station. So Channel 31.
Brady Haran: (gasps)
Matt Parker: I was making little comedy videos. They weren't maths or nerdy they were just… comedy skit kinda things.
Brady Haran: Like, what's an example of one? What would happen?
Matt Parker: Oh goodness… so… we used to do a bunch of really surrealish stuff. So my absolute favorite. The one that… was just ideal. It's just this shot of a road in Perth with traffic diving along and then I walk into frame from one side with a big roll under my arm and I roll out a zebra crossing across the road.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: And then the traffic all stops. And then I cross the zebra crossing and then I roll back up…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: …and then walk off!
Brady Haran: Did you do that for real or was it set up?
Matt Parker: I did it for real! Did it genuinely for real.
Brady Haran: You didn't set up the drivers or anything?
Matt Parker: Nope! I was… I did things properly, right?
Brady Haran: Cool!
Matt Parker: And I was just like, oh it's so funny. Right, and it was that kinda weird, not Trigger Happy TV or… Jackass but something like weird skits but filmed guerrilla style…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: …in locations.
Brady Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Matt Parker: But legal enough that we could put them on community television.
Brady Haran: Right. (laughs)
Matt Parker: And so I used to love doing that, right? And so we used to write all these stupid films and… me and friend of mine we remade a video about drugs from the Sixties entirely in finger puppets. So we did a complete reedit of the audio and then refilmed it… did a remake with finger puppets.
Brady Haran: (gasps)
Matt Parker: Right? And we thought we were hilarious.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Entered it into a film festival, right? That kind of stuff.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: But then all that went on hold when I went to teaching and it was a while into teaching when I was like… oh I miss… like teaching is a creative outlet, don't get me wrong, but I missed that kind of comedy, pure creative outlet.
Brady Haran: So this is now when you're in the UK, you're starting to get like the itch to… do funny things again?
Matt Parker: Yeah. So I did a little bit in that… at the end of the year I would do… a entertaining lesson for the students which wasn't on… something they had to know. So I did like… you know I'm gonna do just a whole talk about Pythagoras, right? And I'd put in some things that I thought were kind of funny teacher jokes.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Which math teacher jokes are a very specific genre.
Brady Haran: Yeah. (chuckles)
Matt Parker: But then I'd go, oh… the students from the lesson next door would come in and do that. And one time when I was teaching in the UK, the school that I was at forgot to book… they were trying to book Simon Singh's Enigma school visits, which James Grime now does, right?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: But this is before James did it. I knew James before he was doing that and this was 2006, I think Claire Ellis was doing it at the time? And they forgot to book Simon Singh's Enigma machine.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: But we had all of year 9, and I was like… I'll give it a go!
Brady Haran: This is your moment.
Matt Parker: This is it! This is my time to shine.
Brady Haran: A star is born!
Matt Parker: I'll do a talk! And that was it and so I did a… interesting maths talk for year 9.
Brady Haran: With how much preparation? How long out did they realize there was a problem?
Matt Parker: A week or two? Like long enough.
Brady Haran: Do you remember what it was about?
Matt Parker: Yeah! I did… a little bit about maths in the Simpsons. Which now obviously Simon Singh has written a book about and so you think well you know… I replaced it with what would future be a Simon Singh topic… and I talked about some probability stuff, I did the Birthday Paradox, which is a classic of the genre.
Brady Haran: Was this a funny talk or was this a…?
Matt Parker: It was an entertaining talk. Again they're teenagers and to this day I still do big talks for teenagers, something that's entertaining for teenagers is an usual form of entertainment. Because they're teenagers and they have no life experience and they don't like to think you're trying to impress them but they do find things funny and so you gotta entertain them despite themselves which I love doing. (pause) And so it was a nearly proto-version of that. I wasn't cracking jokes, but I was doing entertaining things with the maths.
Brady Haran: Were people coming up to you saying, oh Matt you should turn professional…
Matt Parker: No.
Brady Haran: Or was it just your pure enjoyment of the…?
Matt Parker: It's my pure… enjoyment of doing it myself. I was like I love this, I want to do more of this and then I did some work on a summer school at Imperial College. I helped in the branch which was teaching students programming and then occasionally there'd be some dead time. Like in the morning they would come in, there'd be like an hour before we got going and I was like… oh, I'll do a morning puzzle or a morning talk.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: And I started… filling in whenever there was a gap in the schedule, I'd do a bit of a talk. And I loved that and that is what then made me think, hey, there could be a career doing this bit that I enjoy. The… talking about maths which the students don't have to know but in an interesting way.
Brady Haran: So you sorta saw a market for it beyond students or were you thinking I could be going and talking to students or were you thinking, no I could do this in pubs and the venues?
Matt Parker: It was both. So also in 2006… with… another maths teacher, a guy called Julian Smith, we filmed but never finished a Youtube video about similar triangles. 'Cause we were like, hey this Youtube thing just happened, that's exciting, let's do some videos about maths. But we were filming it on like TV tapes and then we never got it finished. 'Cause we were originally thinking it'd be useful for teachers to use in their classes and at the same time I was thinking… wouldn't it be great to do the fun bit of teaching but for adults. And so all of this was kind of happening at about the same time and then I thought, you know what, if I want to be serious about doing these talks for students and doing them well and if I'm serious about thinking maybe this would work for adults and possibly doing it in video and other forms, I need to get better at public speaking.
Brady Haran: Mhm.
Matt Parker: And so I'd worked from Imperial for a while 'cause after the summer schools I stayed on and did some work with their outreach and then I went back to teaching for a while and when I went back to teaching that's when I went, right… I'm gonna go back to teacher 'cause that's a good stable job while I work out how I'm gonna do this dream job I wanna do. And I realized I need public speaking training but I looked up public speaking training and all the options are very corporate. How to give a business presentation, how to sell. And I was like, no no I just wanna be entertaining and then I saw you could do a course in stand-up comedy and I've got a very academic approach to life and I was like… that's perfect! I'll do that, as an evening course it was one evening a week for ten weeks and you finish by doing like a show where everyone in the course does their bits and it was like fundamentals of stand-up comedy and I was like brilliant. I'll go in there, get all those delicious transferable skills, right, and then apply them to maths. And I did… so I did the course but I loved it, absolutely loved doing stand-up and so instead…
Brady Haran: Were you already like incorporating math content into it or were you going along completely as a guy who, I could be a comedian or anything.
Matt Parker: I started quite pure but I still talked about being a mathematician.
Brady Haran: Right.
Matt Parker: And so the very first joke I told on stage was… it was a classic, hey! I just noticed if you go into… Sainsbury's, you can buy a cake from their in house bakery and they will print any photograph you want on the top of that cake, so I… whenever I have to buy a cake to save money, I buy the cheapest cake they've got and get a photo of a really nice cake printed on the top, right? And that's… that's not a maths joke… it's probably not even technically a joke…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (chuckles) …but that kind of… self referential humor… that playing with logic… that became my schtick. It was, I'm a mathematician. I think the world should be logical. Here's some funny ways my logical view on life plays out and here's when I get upset that reality's not as logical as I think it should be. And so I was a very nerdy character on stage which was just me. But I didn't communicate any maths, but I talked about being a mathematician.
Brady Haran: That first gig you mentioned, tell me the story of that. Because that must've been like your first… teaching lesson as well?
Matt Parker: Oh it was so. It was a special moment because it must've been two or three weeks into doing this stand-up course, and it was all very supportive and you get up and the first week is just talk about yourself and then we're gradually learning how to tell jokes and how to structure comedy and a few of us were like… how hard can this be?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Really, like we're all killing it here. Right? (laughs) How hard can it be in the real world? And so I think four of us… signed up for an open mic night.
We're like… let's get out there in the real world. Let's see what it's really like. So we all signed up for this open mic night and on the night only I showed up.
Brady Haran: (laughs) What the others just…
Matt Parker: The others just bailed! All of them. And I got there and no one else came along and I was like you jerks!
Brady Haran: Did you have family or friends to help you?
Matt Parker: No one!
Brady Haran: Okay.
Matt Parker: So I walk into this pub where the comedy night was and everyone else is like oh! I can't make it. Oh! I can't go anymore, right? Everyone else dropped out. And I was like, oh for crying out loud. (sighs) So, I looked around the room, I said those people over there look like they're also here for the comedy night, so I wandered over, hey are you guys here for the comedy night? And they're like oh yeah we're all new comedians (high pitched voice). I was like brilliant. You're my people. And so…
Brady Haran: And was there a big audience?
Matt Parker: And so I did it. Nah! It… so it was at a pub… one day there'll be a blue plaque there… it was a pub… (chuckles)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: It was a pub in London. It was the Queen's Head just behind Piccadilly Circus. They don't do comedy there anymore. I was… there the other day…
Brady Haran: (laughs) It was since that night. (laughs)
Matt Parker: They're like hey! It can't get any better than this, close the club down. (laughs) And so they had an open mic night. God it was terrible, it was so terrible.
Brady Haran: Did it go well? Like obviously you're, you know…
Matt Parker: I had a great time. I had a great time. The problem was… what's difficult about open mic nights is it's very hard to get an audience and there's various ways to get around this, and the way this comedy night got around it is to get on stage you had to bring audience members.
Brady Haran: Right. (chuckles)
Matt Parker: And the more audience members you brought, I kid you not, the longer you got on stage.
Brady Haran: Right. (laughs)
Matt Parker: (chuckles) And I brought roughly zero people.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Matt Parker: So they're like, nah mate, you get two minutes at the end.
Brady Haran: Right.
Matt Parker: And so… everyone else did their bits and then they're like… and here's the jerk who didn't bring anyone and I'm like, hey everyone (sheepish voice).
Right, and so I got up and did a two minute routine and at the end of it the audience enjoyed enough, or I think they voted or something? I got to do an extra minute. (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: So I got up to three minutes of stage time. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Nice.
Matt Parker: But I loved it and I got up and I did it. I mean obviously everyone's terrible when they start and it's terrifying but I gave it a go and I enjoyed and people seemed to enjoy it, right? And so… that encourage me, I was like, you know, I can do this, right? And you know, carried on from there.
Brady Haran: Did you have a level of confidence and persistence that this was gonna happen or do you think if that night and that had tanked and things had gone badly at the start it might have all gone a different way?
Matt Parker: I would have persisted. There's a problem with stand-up in that you need to have a certain amount of self-delusion to persist despite all evidence to contrary. That is sadly, there is a lower threshold. There's no upper bound, and so some people get into it 'cause if you haven't got enough self-delusion you won't persist. You'll give it. But if you got too much and you never get any good you just get stuck in this loop of doing terrible gigs. So thankfully I was delusional enough or… you know, adamant enough or you know… I'm a finisher completer, I was like I'm gonna do this and so I think I would have definitely persisted 'cause not everyone finished the course. People dropped out of doing even the stand-up course which was quite a nice environment. I was like I'm gonna finish this, I'm gonna do the final show, I'm gonna do some open mic nights to give it a go, but… I would've very quickly stopped doing it and just taken my transferable skills off to do something else if I hadn't got a good reaction reasonably quickly…
Brady Haran: Mhm.
Matt Parker: And thankfully within… a year… I was doing… proper gigs. I think six months in I got my first, still unpaid, but first actual booked spot to come and be a comedian on a show and I think if I hadn't gotten that reasonably quickly I probably would've packed it in.
Brady Haran: Jumping forward a bit, you've now got, you know, Festival of Spoken Nerd, and all the different things you do on Youtube and (chuckles) like you do a million different things and it's almost like this huge empire now. Was this the vision? Are you now living what you thought back then? Or were you thinking you'd just be like a comedian who goes to comedy clubs and maybe will one day get on TV? Or is what you're doing now what you were aiming for?
Matt Parker: None of this is the plan.
Brady Haran: Right.
Matt Parker: But it is what I was aiming for. So my original vision was just picturing… I was like oh wouldn't it be great if I could go to a pub and do a talk about maths and people would come along and watch it? Wouldn't that be incredible. And with Festival of Spoken Nerd, that's now what we do. Right? We've got our own night, An Evening of Unnecessary Detail in London and we tour around, I've done my own tours, and so I can still remember me as a teacher picturing this tiny pub with like me on the stage with like a flip chart or something doing some interesting bits of maths, thinking oh wouldn't that be incredible? And that I've achieved. I didn't… everything else has kinda grown up around it the… I do too many other things… have all just been me going, oh wouldn't that be fun! So, I kind've had a vague vision but I never had a plan.
Brady Haran: How much are you drive by just like being a show off and wanting to be funny and make people laugh and the buzz that that gives you. And how much is there this kind of altruistic mathematics, the world must know the importance of, you know… which is driving you?
Matt Parker: It's probably fifty fifty. When I talk to university students or academics about outreach… and I say why do you do outreach? Why do you want people to know about your subject? You tend to get the worthy answers of, oh it's important or I'm publicly funded, I should tell people, or you know a numerate and scientifically literate society is useful, which is all very true. But I'm also like, it can just be fun. And so I think it's pretty even, maybe it's sixty percent fun, forty percent useful. Where I love performing, I love doing the shows, but… I do make a rod for my own back by insisting that I… put actual maths content in the shows. But… It would be a bit hollow and pointless otherwise because comedy's great but… you make people laugh and then they walk away and that's it right? And at the end of your life what have you… I mean you've made some people laugh which is wonderful? But then, you know, that's it. And I was like, no the reason I got into teaching as well as enjoying it was I liked seeing people enjoy and I can do some good PR for mathematics and I can get more people into it and more people… can enjoy their maths lives and so… I think it's a pretty even balance. Particularly I still do a lot of shows for teenagers, which I could easily not do but I think that's super useful.
Brady Haran: Are you suggesting there are things… opportunities that you… would not take because of this stand your taking? Are there like things that have come to your head or have been offered to you that you've said no because… you want me to dumb it down too much or…?
Matt Parker: Sort of. I've… (pause) don't do… much… (pause) TV… but that's because (pause) the stuff that comes up I'm like (groans) right? And I'm never get offered the bits I wanna do and also TV's dead.
Brady Haran: But still contact Matt's agent if you… (laughs)
Matt Parker: (stutters) Jo Wander. Joe Wander Management.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: And but… but… it's more that… when I'm writing a comedy show I would be disappointed in myself if I didn't put actual content into it, but I think that's a good challenge. Like constraints make… the creative process more interesting and I like that constraint. Yeah I would be disappointed and not satisfied if I didn't do it. So I don't think it's so much me turning down opportunities. I'm probably inadvertently shutting off opportunities. Like the number of people who are in TV or whatever, who've come to see a show and… gone… yeah… but… (pause) it would never work on TV. Often a direct quote. And that's fine, right? Because they come and they look at that and they go, yeah it's obviously for a niche audience. And I'm much more happy doing that. I mean obviously a fraction of a fraction of comedians go on to actually be successful in terms of TV, so I'm not saying like, I turn down television, right, but I've picked my niche and I'm having a great time in it and it was definitely could be seen as an astute career move to pick on one little demographic and do it well but also I think it's much more rewarding.
Brady Haran: You do perform live in front of some pretty big audiences in the scheme of things but obviously those audiences aren't as big as say the people who watch the Youtube videos…
Matt Parker: No.
Brady Haran: …that you're in. How do you compare the satisfaction or the thrill you get from doing like a live show with real human beings laughing out loud and you can smell them and you can hear them and that… to a Youtube video you make that might have two or three million views but…
Matt Parker: It's surreal. Because I… last year did a small bit on a show at the Royal Albert Hall. It was this big space extravaganza and… Spoken Nerd, we went out and did like a ten minute bit in front of five thousand people with Chris Hadfield, like, absolutely phenomenal.
Brady Haran: I was there. I was there.
Matt Parker: Exactly. Peak of the career, right? And… you know were one of those… five thousand. You were a member of the five kilopeople that were there.
Brady Haran: (chuckles) yeah.
Matt Parker: But directly before that I was like oh I've gotta get… this Youtube video I wanted to do out. I know I'll zip over to Hyde Park which is like the park just near there and I'll quickly film it with the GoPro and I'll come back and I can do an edit because our sound check was so early. 'Cause we were like the least important people on the bill. That I had a big block of time. So during that time after the soundcheck, which was like honestly we were there eight in the morning. I then run over to Hyde Park, film this thing on a GoPro, came back, uploaded it and before I went on stage it had had more than five thousand views like way more, and a bit of me is like, oh I've just had you know… ten times the views on a thing I just banged out on a GoPro, which don't get me wrong I love doing, but yet… my focus is on this crazy going out in front of thousands of people and you're right it is… different with a live audience. But then, is that just because it's fun for me? Or is that because… is it important to have live… events?
It's an interesting one and… I have a real fractal approach to maths communication. You need to have it at all different scales. Like its maths all the way down on every possible scale, so you wanna have big live shows and small live shows and big videos and small videos and… 'cause the level of engagement and the type of engagement is different. I personally would miss any one aspect if I didn't do it. Like, you're right the buzz you get off the live show is incredible. You don't get the same buzz from looking at a number on a Youtube count and go, oh! And then you try and… you're like what would three million people look like? And you're like that's an insane.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: But they've watched some other video and they'll watch a Numberphile video, then they'll watch some other video…
Brady Haran: But also rightly or wrongly like the stakes are higher for some reason in our heads when there are other living human beings in the same room as us.
Matt Parker: Isn't that crazy?
Brady Haran: Because I'll talk to people saying can you help make a Numberphile video for me and they say I can't possibly help you make a Numberphile video, I've gotta give a talk next week to fifty people. And I have to spend a week preparing that talk and part of me wants to say to them. Are you insane?
Matt Parker: Are you insane!
Brady Haran: Like if you do a video with me a million people are gonna watch.
Matt Parker: Have you run the numbers!
Brady Haran: Yeah. But… yet I'm exactly the same. If I was giving a talk to fifty people next week it's all I'd being thinking about.
Matt Parker: You'd be really focused, yeah.
Brady Haran: So it is…
Matt Parker: It's just our humanness isn't it?
Brady Haran: So speaking of modes of communication… let's talk about books.
(pause)
Brady Haran: You're just about to release your second?
Matt Parker: This is my second book.
Brady Haran: So the first one…
Matt Parker: Yep, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension.
Brady Haran: In which you misspelled my name.
Matt Parker: I do… only in one edition! And I genuine… you know I'm gonna print you out the email where I sent in the acknowledgements 'cause it was original spelt correctly and they messed it up, which was very disappointing.
Brady Haran: Well for that reason… we're gonna talk very little about that book.
(chuckles)
Matt Parker: We're gonna move right on. Right.
Brady Haran: To the new one.
Matt Parker: To a book about mistakes, 'cause I figured you know what if I'm gonna make mistakes I'll do a whole book about it. And so actually just literally today as you know…
Brady Haran: Yes.
Matt Parker: …I picked up the first copies ever printed.
Brady Haran: Hand it over.
Matt Parker: And so I'm going to ceremoniously hand across, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker. You are the first person other than me to be given an actual final copy of this book.
Brady Haran: So a bit a foley work then. Here's what the book…
Matt Parker: Here it is! This is what it sounds like. (book pages shuffle)
Brady Haran: That's me opening it.
Matt Parker: The audiobook's just that for the hours.
Brady Haran: I'm not just saying this Matt. I honestly really like the look of this book.
Matt Parker: It's nice isn't it?
Brady Haran: I like the cover, that is because I'm a bit of a plane aficionado. And the front of the book is a plane.
Matt Parker: It's a picture of a plane with the wings are on the wrong way.
Brady Haran: Yeah, so.
Matt Parker: I did ask when they pitched this cover idea to me. 'Cause with the design they come up to… it wasn't me… and I was like that's great, I said, ah, but can it be a Boeing 787 or can it be like… 'cause there are actual planes in the book. Can it be a, you know, a BAC One-Eleven and they're like nope! It's gonna be this made-up plane or I don't know if it is an actual plane because that's the image they had the rights to. But they did a really nice job with it. I absolutely love the design.
Brady Haran: It's a beautiful… tell us what the books about.
Matt Parker: It's just a lot of stories about maths mistakes. 'Cause I wanted to write a book about how maths is important for our modern society. Everything, finance, economics, medicine, engineering, you know it, it's based on maths. But the publishers are like, well you gotta make it interesting, why are people gonna read a book about why maths is useful? And I said oh, what if I told it through stories of when it goes wrong. 'Cause it's a great excuse to talk about the maths in the context of it went wrong this one time and normally it doesn't. And they're like, ah people love reading stories about disasters! Go for it, right? And so that's how… 'cause obviously there's a lot of people into maths who read stuff I write and watch the videos and I was like how can I hit a bigger audience and so a book of maths mistakes and this was announced about when the Parker Square video came out and everyone was like, that's clever marketing and I'm like… that's totally coincidental and… I have put a lot of plane stories in there and no one dies. (pause) So…
Brady Haran: (laughs) Okay.
Matt Parker: The trouble is with disaster problems, particularly engineering and medical ones, people die. And… you can't for a so-called comedy book about maths I can't… every second story can't be and then everybody dies. So
(chuckles) I've rationed the stories where everybody dies and none of the aviation stories involve any death. Everyone survives in all the aviation… so if you're scared of flying, it's still a bit terrifying what happens but it's always okay.
Brady Haran: You know the first thing I wanna do in this book?
Matt Parker: What? Read it thoroughly from the beginning? I mean that would be how I…
Brady Haran: No.
Matt Parker: Are you checking the acknowledgements!
Brady Haran: Yes.
Matt Parker: Okay. Well fair enough, fair enough.
Brady Haran: I do not expect to be acknowledged but if I am… I'll be looking for spelling.
Matt Parker: I go through and I give everyone who contributed something or helped me fact check something or… have enabled my career in some way get a reference in there.
Brady Haran: Oh! You've done it!
Matt Parker: You're the last line.
Brady Haran: The Parker Square is thanks to Bradley Haran.
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brady Haran: Consider this a sign of my appreciation, mate. Mate indeed. (laughs)
Matt Parker: It's just my little way of saying thanks, Brady, for the Parker Square and all you've done for me.
Brady Haran: You've Bradleyed me.
Matt Parker: I well… it… (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: It felt deeply appropriate… as a sign of…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: …a sign of my thanks.
Brady Haran: I'll tip my hat to that.
Matt Parker: I'll get it fixed in the… again as tradition dictates (laughs)
Brady Haran: Ah!
Matt Parker: I'll get it fixed in future editions.
Brady Haran: So this… so…
Matt Parker: So only the hardback when it goes to paperback I'll get it flipped over.
Brady Haran: So people, I'm gonna say this now 'cause Matt has helped Numberphile so much over the years, I owe him so many favors 'cause he's been in so many videos for me. If you buy a hardback edition, a Bradley edition, while they're available, and you ever cross paths me. I will sign it as Bradley.
Matt Parker: That's very generous.
Brady Haran: Which is something…
Matt Parker: 'Cause you!
Brady Haran: …normally refuse to do that.
Matt Parker: You refused to do that on the previous book.
Brady Haran: Yeah. Yeah. So if you ever come to me with a Humble Pi hardback edition by Matt Parker, I'll sign Bradley Haran on the page.
Matt Parker: You'll sign Bradley… wow! And if you buy the hardback through Maths Gear, I sign them all before they go out.
Brady Haran: Mhm.
Matt Parker: So you can get a double signed…
Brady Haran: Double signed.
Matt Parker: You gotta hunt down… Bradley afterwards (laughs).
Brady Haran: Right. I also wanna know if, for your author picture in the paperback edition you're gonna… lose…
Matt Parker: They didn't update it! So it's still me with hair.
Brady Haran: You have a lot of hair in that picture.
Matt Parker: It's not my new streamlined look.
Brady Haran: I don't even recognize you in that picture.
Matt Parker: I know. I looked at that and went (tsks) aww look at that young optimistic fella. That photo was taken in 2011.
Brady Haran: Wow.
Matt Parker: How terrifying is that?
Brady Haran: Look at that, fresh faced.
Matt Parker: But I was also quite pleased because in there I talk about the Civilization mistake where Gandhi… as soon as you get nuclear weapons in the first Civilization game he started nuking everyone and that was a mistake in the code and I love those sort of things that roll over and calculation errors in code. But in all future editions of Civilization, they kept that mistake in as a reference to the original error and so I thought (laughs) I would keep the mistake in out of respect for the first genuine error.
Brady Haran: There are many things I wanted to talk to you about and we haven't got time, like so you will come back and do another?
Matt Parker: Absolutely.
Brady Haran: Another podcast, soon?
Matt Parker: As you know I will show up and do a podcast or a video anytime you ask.
Brady Haran: Thank you very much, 'cause there is genuinely is so much more I want to talk to you about but there's one thing we have to talk about in this episode and we've already mentioned it but I know people are gonna wanna hear you talk about it and that is the Parker Square. So for people who don't watch Numberphile videos, how would you give an executive summary of the Parker Square story and how it rose to fame?
Matt Parker: So the Parker Square…
Brady Haran: You don't have to go into all math. I'll link the video so you don't…
Matt Parker: You can watch the video…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: And I did this video and my message from the video was, give it a go.
Just have a go in maths. And actually that's something that comes out in the book. I'm like everyone thinks maths is all about getting the right answer. It's not. Most doing of maths involves getting it wrong, getting it wrong, getting it wrong. So I had a go at finding this magic square. It wasn't that good. You called it the Parker Square, it was all very funny.
(gentle piano music)
(Numberphile clip plays)
Matt Parker (in clip): My find.
Brady Haran (in clip): Has it got a name?
Matt Parker (in clip): No it hasn't got a name. I don't wanna call it the Parker Square!
Because it doesn't work properly, it would be like, oh that's a classic Parker Square. Or if someone were to do something that's almost right but not quite and they go… (tsks) that's a real Parker Square kinda move. So I'm not calling it the Parker Square!
Brady Haran (in clip): Matt… you know what this video's called?
Matt Parker (in clip): I've called it… oh for crying out loud. (laughs)
Brady Haran (in clip): (laughs)
Matt Parker (in clip): The first time you name something after me and it's something that not quite right. You know what! Maybe it'll become the mascot (hits table) for giving things a go!
(gentle piano music plays)
Matt Parker: And there was a wonderful moment, do you remember after we stopped filming and we were both just like… I was just like I can't believe this has happened and you looked at me and said, I can not put the video out if you want. And I was like… it's fine.
Brady Haran: Ah yeah.
Matt Parker: Number one, it's funny.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: And number two, I think it's an important message to give it a go and you were like, you'll never hear the end of it. And I'm like no it's fine.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: And you said…
Brady Haran: No, you will never hear the end of it.
Matt Parker: Exactly.
Brady Haran: I'll make sure of it! (laughs)
Matt Parker: Yeah. But no and then you said I won't make a big deal of it.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: I'm like oh good good good! Right? And then there was a range of t-shirts!
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: So I didn't fully know what I was agreeing to at the time so… I say it's a mascot for giving it a go. Other people say it's… a mascot of when your best just isn't good enough.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: So I think it falls somewhere on that spectrum.
Brady Haran: It's kind of starting to morph into a mascot for failure and getting things wrong, rather than noble effort but…
Matt Parker: Exactly! Right.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: So I keep trying to bring the noble effort back to the table and other actors… I mean I don't wanna point fingers (laughs) seem to use it as a shorthand… (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: …for hilarious failure.
Brady Haran: How much does it like… 'cause obviously my exposure to your life is limited to Numberphile and my…
Matt Parker: Yeah, yeah.
Brady Haran: So to me the Parker Square and Matt Parker have become very very closely entwined and I can't upload a video with you without Parker Square jokes and… how much does it follow you around, like, you know?
Matt Parker: Yeah, a non-trivial amount, Brady!
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Um.
Brady Haran: Like you get t-shirts at gigs?
Matt Parker: So… so I get the t-shirts. People will show up wearing t-shirts to gigs.
Which I love, right? And everyone who does I then take a selfie with them one where I'm like, hey Parker Square (happy voice) and one where I'm like, oh Parker Square (grumpy voice), right? And so they get… you know, I love doing that, right? That's really good fun. The fact that people wear the shirt is great, 'cause I sign a lot of calculators that's a common thing I do.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: And quite a few people'll ask me to sign their book or their calculator and draw a Parker Square into it, right?
Brady Haran: So you've memorized it properly? (chuckles)
Matt Parker: (sighs) Yeah. I keep thinking I should get it wrong each time and
(mutters)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Right, and so I sign a lot of Parker Squares. It's a good go to joke when I chat to someone. 'Cause a lot of people will recognize me in the street and instinctively go, oh! Hi. And then they'll realize that they've done that without a plan, right? 'Cause I appeared out of nowhere. They're just going about their shopping or whatever, they're on the train, suddenly someone from Youtube jumps in front of them, and they're like oh hey you're that guy, how you doin'? And then they're like… I've got no follow on plan, now I'm socializing with a human that I wasn't expecting to. Right, and so some people are just like, bye! And they run away again, which is also adorable. There are some people who are like, oh hey, Parker Square, right? That's there kind of go to, so…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: For better or for worse… it follows me around. But in a very nice way.
Brady Haran: If you could go back in time, you can't (laughs)… but if you could go back in time…
Matt Parker: No.
Brady Haran: Would you not do that video? Would you think, oh it's just a bit of a…
Matt Parker: I would happily put it out, you know, I get the correct amount of annoyed but I like the fact that people have embraced it as a memey kind of concept. And I like the fact that… it to some extent… reinforces the notion of giving it a go. The square is mentioned at the very end of the book, 'cause I knew some people would expect it to be in there.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: And I hold off, hold off, hold off, it's only like in the final pages and actually I've got a… there's a square of photos of people wearing Parker Square shirts at my shows, right? Which I thought would be kind of fun to put there in the end.
Brady Haran: Here we go.
Matt Parker: So there's a Parker Square of Parker Squares.
Brady Haran: So, minor spoiler but if you do have the hard copy, which I hope you've all gone out and bought by now, you just have to flick to the back to the book to… (pages shuffle) page… nine.
Matt Parker: Page nine (laughs) yeah.
Brady Haran: Page nine?
Matt Parker: Page nine. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Which is also a bit of a spoiler to the numbering system in this book.
Matt Parker: Oh! That took so many emails to Penguin but they finally (gentle music fades in) agreed to let me have a book with reverse number page numbers.
(music fades up)
Brady Haran: There we go.
Matt Parker: So they go backwards.
Brady Haran: And there is indeed, there is a big montage of pictures of Matt with people wearing Parker Square t-shirts which… (music fades up)… which yeah I must have a little chat to Penguin about royalties on that (laughs).
Matt Parker: (laughs)
(music continues)
Brady Haran: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, again…
Matt Parker: My pleasure, I will be back for another podcast. We will finish off my life story.
(music fades up)
⁂
Brady Haran: Do you recognize this tune?
(Clip from Tuplets for Toddlers, a Penguin Cafe Orchestra style version of Frère Jacques)
Brady Haran: Alright, how about this one?
(Another clip from Tuplets for Toddlers, a Penguin Cafe Orchestra style version of Three Blind Mice)
Brady Haran: (clip continues) They may be familiar but perhaps don't sound quite right. (clip fades) That's because they're part of an experimental album called Tuplets for Toddlers, which has taken familiar nursery rhymes but played 'round with the underlying numbers, the counts, the rhythms, the tempos.
(Clip from Tuplets for Toddlers, a West African style version of the Itsy Bitsy Spider)
Brady Haran: It's a fascinating collaboration between a number of talented composers, but we'll get more into that soon. But first let's go back a few steps and to today's very special guest, Alan Stewart. Now Alan's an important man in my life because he composes and performs much of the music you'll hear across all my videos and podcasts, not just Numberphile. To me he's some kind of genius, I actually call him the Maestro. (chuckles) A nickname I'm not entirely sure he likes, but he's way to polite to stop me. Like me, Alan lives in the UK but he's not a full-time musician, in fact, he's a school teacher and that's where our discussion begins.
(gentle toy piano music plays)
Brady Haran: Did you always wanna be a physics teacher, was that like… was that what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Alan Stewart: No, I don't think I knew what I wanted to be at all when I was at school. I kind of drifted into physics because I found it quite easy, I suppose? And I don't wanna sound big headed like that but I just found it came naturally to me. Maths on the other hand… did not come easily to me and I really struggled with A level maths when I was at college myself, but no, physics, I always found like, it just made a lot of sense to me, and so when it came time to choose what I wanted to study at university, physics just seemed like a very natural choice.
Brady Haran: Did you want to be a physics teacher or did you wanna like be making discoveries and working at the Large Hadron Collider and figuring out how black holes work?
Alan Stewart: So during my degree, I think there was a lot of pressure for us to decide upon our career. I was still very very uncertain about what I wanted to do, until I got to third year and I took part in something called the Undergraduate Ambassador Scheme, where undergraduates were sent into local secondary schools to teach science and that unit of my degree I absolutely loved that. I love sharing science ideas with the students at the secondary school. I loved how it was very active thing to be doing. Yeah I decided I really want to be a teacher when I graduate.
Brady Haran: So if I was to ask your students now what kind of physics teacher you are, what would they say? Would they say, oh he's jokey or he's fun or he's strict or he's like… what kind of teacher is Mr. Stewart?
Alan Stewart: I don't think I'm jokey, and I'm not even sure if I'm that fun, what I try to do is I quite… myself I quite like thinking things through a lot and perhaps including a little bit of philosophy as well. So when I teach, I'm very eager to draw ideas out of the students and have a lot of discussion work and I like that sort of theatrical way that you can perhaps build a bit of suspense, so rather than students, you know, here's what Rutherford discovered about the atom, I like to try and turn it into a bit of a story. That's what I hope my students would say. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Alan, you said that math wasn't your strong point, but we always hear that mathematics like underpins physics so much so how do you reconcile those two things? Is mathematics not this like essential tool to be a good physicist?
Alan Stewart: Your absolutely right, maths is crucial for physics. I… you know… it's always said that maths is the language of physics so… although I didn't find that maths came easily to me at all and so I had to do a lot of work and that… I think came as a bit of a shock to me when I was sixteen years old, because up to that point in school, I think I'd found quite a lot of things not too difficult, except for foreign languages which I was really really really bad at. So I just had to do a lot of work. I remember sitting for hours and hours doing maths homework and then ten minutes doing physics homework.
Brady Haran: Let's talk music then, because music's not like your… your job… your occupation but it's a huge part of your life. How did you… how did music become part of your life?
Alan Stewart: That's a good question. How did music become part of my life? So when I was a kid, my mum, I think tried very hard to encourage me to learn an instrument so when I was six years old I played recorder and when I was nine I played the violin, except I didn't really play either of those instruments because I didn't have any internal motivation to practice and I gave up pretty quickly. But then when I was thirteen I signed up for something called Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Edinburgh Award…
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Alan Stewart: …is like this scheme that… encourages young people to get involved in lots of different activities and the reason that I wanted to do Duke of Edinburgh was because of the expedition part where basically you get to go camping across the countryside and to me that sounded like a lot of fun. But the problem was you couldn't get the award if you just did the camping part, you also had to do a community element, which was like volunteering and helping out somewhere, you had to do a sport which luckily I had covered, I'm not a sporty person at all but I did… (sighs) I did happen play this quite obscure sport, so that wasn't a problem.
Brady Haran: Hang on, what obscure sport do you play?
Alan Stewart: I don't play it anymore actually but… (chuckles) so the sport… I don't know if you'll have come across it, Brady. It's called goalball. It's a sport for blind people, and…
Brady Haran: Right?
Alan Stewart: …and the ball has a little bell inside, so that…
Brady Haran: Ahh.
Alan Stewart: ...all of the players can hear where on the court the ball is.
Brady Haran: I have seen that played, yeah.
Alan Stewart: Yeah, I played that when I was at school. I was okay for the sporting element of the award, the tricky part was the skill, where you had to provide evidence that you had…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Alan Stewart: …acquired some skill, and my sister was already having piano lessons and I thought, oh okay, I might as well, you know have piano lessons. So I went along to this lady who's name was Mrs. Cooper and she seemed to teach everybody in my sort of local area of town. I think Mrs. Cooper was probably a little bit intimidated by me as a student, not because of my like personality, but… I think the normal way that children learnt is that alongside that they learn how to read sheet music and I wasn't…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Alan Stewart: I wasn't able to read sheet music because of my eyesight and so… Mrs.
Cooper had this student and yet had not idea how to… how to teach me, really. But she was very very patient and she was very very kind.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Alan Stewart: And I went to her for three years learning piano.
Brady Haran: Alan do you think… I mean we didn't mention you have got like a visual impairment which results in you learning music in this different way, and you don't use sheet music in anyway way. Do you think that has made you a different kind of musician to what you would've been if you could read sheet music.
Alan Stewart: Yeah… absolutely. I think there are so many advantages to being able to read sheet music… the ability to be handed a piece of paper, sit down at your instrument and just play what's written. I would love to be able to do that, and I really admire musicians that can do that. The way I had to learn was purely by listening and then copying. So playing by ear, and of course the best musicians in the world can also do that. They can just hear a piece of music and just reproduce on their instrument but that was my only option.
Brady Haran: (chuckles) Right.
Alan Stewart: So the process was to begin with it was very laborious. Um… I remember, you know, Mrs. Cooper would play me one bar of music, which might be just four notes on the piano and then I would have to repeat that back to her, and then she'd play me another bar of music, which would be maybe six notes and I'd play that back and then I remember actually after I'd had a piano listen at Mrs. Cooper's house I would pretty much run home because I had to get to the piano that was in my mum and dad's house and had to sit down and play what I had learned as soon as possible otherwise, you know, I'd forget it.
Brady Haran: But Alan do you feel in anyway does this untethering from sheet music, while it has it's disadvantages, do you think it's helped you on the composing side of things? Like it makes you a bit more creative or a bit freestyley?
Alan Stewart: That's a great question. Um… yes I think in a way it has been an advantage because I'm very very dependent on listening, obviously, like any musician is, but for me when I play with other musicians for example they might be reading from sheet music and I've… I had to learn how to fit in with a band and I was really lucky growing up and when I went to university that there were lots of musicians around me and so I had lots of opportunities to play with other people and it meant that if I had a melodic idea in my brain, like a little tune, then I would just be able to perform that straight away on the piano just like how if you have a thought in your brain you're able to speak that thought out loud without needing to think about it too much.
Brady Haran: Mhm.
Alan Stewart: So when it comes to composing, I feel like I do have, not an advantage because I'm certain that other composers do this as well, but if I have an idea for a tune then I can immediately kind of get that out of my brain and onto the keys of the piano without spending ages and ages trying to figure out the idea in my head.
Brady Haran: Super.
Alan Stewart: I don't know if that makes sense.
Brady Haran: I… it kinda does. I mean I'm not… I haven't got a musical bone in my body, as you well know and you will probably found out for the rest of this podcast.
Alan Stewart: (chuckles)
Brady Haran: When you have an idea then for a new tune or an idea and that, that obviously means you can't write it down. How do you capture it? Do you just have to make a recording that's an audio file that you can go back to a year later and go, oh yeah that was a good idea I had, you know, and just listen to it? That's your way of capturing it?
Alan Stewart: Yeah so when I was learning piano I didn't have any means of recording anything. So anything that I did compose, and I did try to start composing when I was quite… I wouldn't've been as pretentious to call it composing but I had certain melodies that would just stay in my brain and so I never had to write them down.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Alan Stewart: I never had to record them. Of course now with, you know, software like Audacity, which you can get for free, yeah I'll just record if I have an idea. I've got a little dictaphone as well that I carry around so if I have an idea for a tune I'll just, you know, get the dictaphone out and sing into the dictaphone.
Brady Haran: So what are your outlets for music now? Um… obviously my video's about one, (laughs) which I'm very grateful for. How else do you sort of outlet your music?
Alan Stewart: Yeah I feel very lucky. I have lots of ways that I get to play live music. I play percussion for two choirs, the West End Singers and the Southampton Gay Men's Chorus, are both fantastic community choirs and I play percussion to accompany them.
Brady Haran: Mhm?
Alan Stewart: I also play at my church, not recently of course because of…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Alan Stewart: …lockdown but before then every single week, I'd either play piano or guitar or percussion and I feel like I'm very lucky at the church because there are some incredible musicians there. A professor of jazz at the university… near the church and he makes me feel ashamed. You know, every time he sits down… every time he sits down at the piano, my mind is blown…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: …by his ability and for a very long time I pretended (laughs) that I couldn't play piano or that I didn't want to play piano in front of this guy because he was so so good, and I just stuck to playing percussion which is much easier. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Did he give you the thumbs up when he finally heard you play piano, he thinks your good enough?
Alan Stewart: He… he… he is a lovely man.
Brady Haran: (chuckles)
Alan Stewart: And he was very… very gracious when he described my piano playing.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: He said that I had a very lyrical touch.
Brady Haran: Ooh, nice. Lyrical touch. That could be the name for your next album.
Alan Stewart, Lyrical Touch.
Alan Stewart: (laughs) Lyrical Touch. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Let's speak about albums. Let's get to the business here because the reason we're recording this is you've been working on like sort of a special project, bit of a pet project of yours, something unusual, tell me what it's called and talk me through it.
Alan Stewart: Yeah, thanks. So… there's an album called Tuplets for Toddlers, which I've helped to kind of coordinate.
Brady Haran: You've sort of been a sort of a curator and an organizer of it, have you?
Alan Stewart: Yeah, so… I've got two small children and my oldest son is four and a half and he's just started at school and my youngest son is one and a half and they absolutely love listening to music. We have music on just all the time in the house.
Brady Haran: Do you play them music?
Alan Stewart: I play them music.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Alan Stewart: Yeah… um… they play music, they've got loads and loads of toy instruments, we've got Spotify on, we've got music in the car, just so much music in the house.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Alan Stewart: And some of the music they want to listen to I find very tedious. Um… you know… nursery rhymes, there are hundreds and hundreds of nurses rhymes available to listen to on Spotify but after, you know, the fiftieth time of the
Wheels on the Bus, you get a bit… a bit bored. And so at the start of lockdown I was kind of going a bit crazy listening to the same songs on repeat and I thought, actually, I could record some nursery rhymes but I could make them a little bit different, just to make them a bit more interesting for me and I thought, and maybe other parents might appreciate this too, having familiar songs but performed in a slightly unfamiliar way. So I started recording my ideas and my main kind of guiding principle was I wanted the tune's to be recognizable, so just traditional nursery rhymes, but I wanted to do something playful with the rhythm.
(Clip of a Penguin Cafe Orchestra style version of Wheels on the Bus)
Alan Stewart: (music fades down and continues) I wanted some usual timing going on that you don't often hear in kids music and in fact you don't often here in, (music fades out) you know, pop music on the radio.
Brady Haran: So you recorded some, you made some of these did you?
Alan Stewart: I did about twelve recordings of my own where I was just experimenting with some new software that I'd got which made very very easy to adjust things like the rhythm of a performance.
(Clip of non-standard version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star)
Alan Stewart: (music fades down and continues) And in fact it felt like cheating because what I was able to do was just play the Wheels on the Bus, normally, and then in the software (music fades out) I could move the individual notes to produce a rhythm that I hadn't actually performed.
(Clip of non-standard version of Wheels on the Bus)
Brady Haran: This is kind of like for adults is it? Is it kind of like when you watch a kids movie, like Shrek, that appeals to kids on a kids level but there's the occasional nod and the wink to the adults with like a slightly naughty joke that will go over the head of the kids? Are you doing the same thing with music? Is this like the kids'll like it 'cause it's Wheels on the Bus but the adults'll be like oh that's quirky, that's different and the kids wouldn't even appreciate it?
Alan Stewart: I really like that analogy. That's an amazing analogy with Shrek. I think what I want to be able to say is that, yes, I'm doing it for the adults and maybe particularly adults who are themselves musical might appreciate some of these rhythmic ideas but there is another purpose as well, which is when you hear something new in music, sometimes that can have a really big impact on your, like it might be just the sound of a particular chord and I remember this from when I was a kid, just hearing some idea in a piece of music and it would really stick with me and I'd wonder like… what's going on in that song? Why does that sound so good or why does that sound so sad? So with this Tuplets for Toddlers album, my hope is that somewhere, maybe even subconsciously, a kid is gonna listen to some of these rhythms and think, ooh, that rhythm doesn't sound like what I'm used to, I wonder what's happening in that song.
Brady Haran: Is toddler too young for that though? Is it… can a toddler have those thoughts? You know the sort of person who listen to Wheels on the Bus, are they also the sort of kid that's going to be able to think that deeply about music, or is more subliminal.
Alan Stewart: I… that's a, yeah that's a great question as well. I think it probably… I think at that age it will be subliminal, and I don't think they would be conscious that there's something slightly strange about the music they're hearing, I think as you get older you might be able to articulate that thought better in your brain and then my hope would be that when adults listen to this music they would recognize that there's something a little bit unusual about it. Even if they don't know technically what's going on.
Brady Haran: So Alan, obviously at first this was just you playing around but you've kind of expanded this and turned this into kind of a real collaboration. Tell me how things expanded in this way.
Alan Stewart: So I made these twelve tracks and they were just kind of sketches but it occurred to me that (laughs) well… like this sounds quite arrogant but it occurred to me that the idea of this album, I'd never come across this idea before, like an album for children that is going to introduce them to some exciting rhythmic ideas and I already had the name for the album, Tuplets for Toddlers, in my head and I thought…
Brady Haran: What is a tuplet?
Alan Stewart: Ah, we'll get onto that, Brady, that…
Brady Haran: We'll come to that, okay.
Alan Stewart: That's a good… yeah we'll come to that.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: I had the title for this album, Tuplets for Toddlers, and I thought, maybe, just maybe, some proper composers, professional composers, might kind of get the idea and might be quite excited by it, and one thing that I thought might have the appeal here is, the tunes already exist, you know, the Wheels on the Bus melody, I think everybody knows that, and so the composer's job is going to be much narrower. Their task is to take this well known tune and then do something fun with the rhythm. So I contacted David Bruce, he's a composer who has done a huge amount of work, he's had his work performed at the BBC
Prom, and I thought I was probably shooting quite high but…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: I sent him an email, just explaining like, I'd like to make this album called Tuplets for Toddlers, it's gonna introduce children to exciting rhythmic ideas and I really got the sense from David Bruce that he understood straight away what this project would be and he was really enthusiastic, he asked lots of really good questions that I hadn't thought about and I feel like he really helped me to shape the project. Then I started contacting other composers. David Bruce has collaborated with some other musicians before, on composition projects, so I thought well the logical people to contact is, yeah, these other composers, and it kind of went from there.
Brady Haran: And how many of you banded together? How many of you pulled together for this album?
Alan Stewart: I must've contacted maybe about thirty and ten of them…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Alan Stewart: …have contributed to the album.
Brady Haran: So the album now exists, what's the purpose here, are you… is this gonna make you a millionaire?
Alan Stewart: No. No, no, no. (laughs) So…
Brady Haran: Right.
Alan Stewart: Another purpose of the album is, I thought, it would be really appropriate if all of the money raised from the streams and the downloads were to go to charity and the charity that we've chosen is Save the Children.
Brady Haran: Okay, so this is all for a good cause as well.
Alan Stewart: It's all for a good cause.
Brady Haran: Alright then. Let's… I'm… this is the part I've been dreading.
Alan Stewart: (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs) Because I'm so terrible at this, Alan. Tell me what a tuplet is and run me through a few examples of how this work. What's going on under the hood?
Alan Stewart: Sure, sure. So I think to be able to understand why some of the ideas that the composers have used are so clever is you first of all have to have a basic understanding of how most nursery rhymes are counted.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Alan Stewart: So the fundamental idea is here counting along with the music. So, I'll play an example of a typical nursery rhyme and how it would typically be counted, so the nursery rhyme is Frère Jacques, and it's counted in four, like this.
(Plays Frère Jacques on piano and counts to the rhythm) One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. (stops playing)
Brady Haran: So even, so there's not always four notes but there's always like a count of four?
Alan Stewart: That's right.
Brady Haran: That the notes are sitting in?
Alan Stewart: Absolutely, so…
Brady Haran: Couldn't you have just counted threes instead, it seems arbitrary that you chose four? You could've just counted three.
Alan Stewart: Well, let's listen to what that sounds like, and there's gonna be something…
Brady Haran: Okay.
Alan Stewart: …a little bit off if I try counting to three. (Plays Frère Jacques on midi piano and counts of rhythm) One, two, three.
Brady Haran: Okay
Alan Stewart: One, two… (loses rhythm, stops playing) Oh! I can't even do it. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Oh.
Alan Stewart: Hang on, hang on.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Alan Stewart: It's so difficult.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: The reason that we count to four is this musical phrase, this… it's like a… like a sentence. It's (plays first four notes of Frère Jacques). (pauses) That is a little parcel of time and the way that it's most logical to count it is by counting up to four.
Brady Haran: Okay. And is there a rule about how many notes you can stuff into that count?
Alan Stewart: So, in… in simplistic terms, you can play a note that is the duration of a count of one, you could play notes that last for a count of two, you could play notes that last for a count of three or four, or you could subdivide that count into halves or into thirds. Now… to…
Brady Haran: Okay…
Alan Stewart: …to explain why some of these tracks are so clever with their counting I'd like to use Frère Jacques again but this time I'm gonna count up to eight.
Brady Haran: Mhm?
Alan Stewart: To count up to eight I'm gonna have to count twice as fast, like this. (Plays and counts in double time) One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Brady Haran: But (stutters) if I didn't hear you counting I wouldn't have noticed any difference.
Alan Stewart: No of course not. But here's the clever bit.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Alan Stewart: So the composer David Bennet has arranged Frère Jacques but with a count of seven, now, seven…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Alan Stewart: …it's an odd number and it's a little bit odd in music as well… I cannot think of the last time I heard a song that was in seven on the radio. What David Bennet has done is to take this Frère Jacques and perhaps imagine that it was counted in eight, like I just did, but then chopped off…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Alan Stewart: …the last eighth. So if I count along it would sound like this. (Plays and counts in 7/8 time) One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three… (stops playing). Does that sound… unusual to you?
Brady Haran: Well… it's hard because I heard you counting, it wasn't… it was harder to me concentrate on the notes you were playing but it sounded like the notes were arranged or packed together in a more uncomfortable way.
Alan Stewart: That is such a good description. I… yeah. I think that's a great way to explain. They are packed together and it's a little bit uncomfortable because it's not what you're used to hearing. It's not what you're expecting. If I don't count with it, it sounds like the whole thing is rushing. It's kind of skipping ahead a bit.
Brady Haran: Here's some of David Bennet's composition as featured on the album.
(Clip from Tuplets for Toddlers, a Penguin Cafe Orchestra style version of Frère Jacques)
Brady Haran: (music continues) Okay, you still haven't told me what a tuplet is.
Alan Stewart: (music continues) Ah, we'll get to that.
Brady Haran: (music continues) So David Bennet used seven, (music fades out) but David Bruce leveled up.
Alan Stewart: Because what he's doing is, he's taken Wind the Bobbin Up, which is normally a count of four and he's gonna count up to eleven. Now I don't want
David Bruce's compositional process was but the way that I understand what he's done is he's taken Wind the Bobbin Up in four and then reimagined it in six.
Can I play you what that might song like?
Brady Haran: Can you play it to me normally first as a four?
Alan Stewart: Of course, I'll play it normally in four. (Plays Wind the Bobbin Up) One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. (stops playing) That is very very standard for a nursery rhyme. Now… like I say I don't know how David Bruce imagined this as he was composing but one way perhaps to understand it is take that same tune (plays first few notes of Wind the Bobbin Up) but now let's have an underlying count of six, like this. (Plays wind the Bobbin Up in 6/4 time) One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. (stops playing) Now already…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Alan Stewart: That's a little bit odd for a nursery rhyme, you don't hear many nursery rhymes with that kind of count. But now imagine that we double the rate of counting to twelve. (tsks) So something like this. (Plays a measures in 12/8 time and stops) I'm not gonna be able to count along with that, Brady 'cause I'm concentrating too hard (laughs) but I'm playing… with my left hand twice as many notes. I play twelve notes in total. Now what David Bruce has done is to cut off that last twelfth and the effect is…
Brady Haran: Right.
Alan Stewart: …to me, when I first heard David Bruce's submission, it just made me laugh for joy like… not laughing at it but just laughing appreciating how it transformed this very very (Clip of Tuplets for Toddlers' version of Wind Up the Bobbin fades in) normal nursery rhyme into something very peculiar indeed.
(clip fades up, multiple instruments join in and plays)
Alan Stewart: (clip fades down and up and continues) Now quite a few of the other composers, they've also taken this idea of taking a normal (clip fades out) count of four and maybe adding to it or subtracting from it, so I've played all of the songs to my two sons and their favorite one by far is the one that Ben Levin has done, which is B. I. N. G. O. and what Ben Levin has done is to count up to five…
Brady Haran: Hmm?
Alan Stewart: …basically and, yeah, that's odd to have five underline the music but it's there throughout the piece. I cannot sample what Ben Levin has done because he is a creative genius and the only way to fully appreciate it why it's so good is to listen to it.
Brady Haran: Okay, let's have a little listen.
(Clip from Tuplets for Toddlers' version of B. I. N. G. O. plays): (samples of dogs barking and panting)
Alan Stewart: (clip fades out) Aimee Nolte is another composer who's contributed to this and what she's done is kind of the same, as David Bruce, in that you could count along with her London Bridge by counting up to eleven, but actually when you listen to it, it's far far more logical to count six, five and then, five, six.
Brady Haran: Ah, so changing the count during the song? (Clip from Tuplets for Toddlers' version of London Bridge fades in)
Alan Stewart: (clip continues) Exactly, so we're kind of… cranking up for the complexity level here by having the count changing.
(clip continues)
Alan Stewart: (clip continues) Now, 12tone, who is another composer on the album, has
(clip fades out) taken this idea of changing the count and he's taken it to an extreme. Can I read out… the counting that is required for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?
Brady Haran: Of course.
Alan Stewart: I don't know how interesting this would be to listen to on a podcast but, I dunno… okay, so, in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, in order to count along successfully you need to count, three, two, three, two, two, three, two, two, three, two, two, two…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: …three, two, three, two, two, three, two, two, three, three, three, two, two, three, two, two, three, two, two, three, three, two, two, one (pause) two, three, two, two, three, two, three, two, two, three, three, three, two, three, two, two, three, one.
(clip of Tuplets for Toddlers' version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star plays)
Brady Haran: (laughs) Well that's just gone… it occurs to me Alan, this would be a great way to send secret messages to people like, through like coding into the timing of a song, like play some weird bit of music and only other… other composers would be able to tell what the secret message was. (laughs)
Alan Stewart: Brady. It's been done.
Brady Haran: Has it? Right.
Alan Stewart: How… in fact Brady…
Brady Haran: Yeah, sure everything…
Alan Stewart: How do you know Brady that I haven't done it in a Numberphile video?
Brady Haran: Oh… I… I expect it has been done.
Alan Stewart: (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: Yeah. Yeah. So…
Brady Haran: Alright.
Alan Stewart: So yeah, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star takes the idea of counting and it just pushes it as far as it can go and it's like… when I heard Twinkle Twinkle Little Star immediately I felt like it was a challenge, like, I wanted to be able to count along with this music and… you know, I'm not ashamed to say it took me about… probably twenty minutes to be able to nail down exactly how this music has been counted. It's just so…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: It's just complicated.
Brady Haran: Is that a humble brag, Alan?
Alan Stewart: Well maybe.
Brady Haran: That sounds like a humble brag, it was so complicated! It took me twenty minutes! (laughs)
Alan Stewart: (laughs) (claps)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: (laughs)
Brady Haran: It would take me a lifetime. (laughs)
Alan Stewart: Yeah.
Brady Haran: You still haven't told me what a tuplet is.
Alan Stewart: Here we are! We've arrived.
Brady Haran: Alright.
Alan Stewart: So.
Brady Haran: Ah! Thank goodness.
Alan Stewart: The quintessential tuplet on the Tuplets for Toddlers have been performed for us by Shawn Crowder, a jazz and electronic drummer, and I think being a drummer, perhaps he has got a lot of experience with time and counting and what he's done is Itsy Bitsy Spider but he is counting…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Alan Stewart: …in a way which is, well, fundamentally it's the same as what everyone else has done except this is to do with the speed at which he's counting. So when you first start listening to Shawn Crowder's Itsy Bitsy Spider, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's a count of four, because, he even starts the song by clapping
(claps along) one, two, three, four.
(Clip from Tuplets for Toddlers' version of Itsy Bitsy Spider plays)
Alan Stewart: (clip cuts out) And you could probably listen to the whole track and not even detect that anything strange is happening at all and I think I can say that with confidence because when I first heard this concept of tuplets in a song, I couldn't recognize like… my brain wasn't wired to be able to identify what was going on with the rhythm and I heard it wrong. So, Brady for Itsy Bitsy…
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Alan Stewart: …Spider, I've sent you a clip of me counting along to it, and I think what makes this special is the speed at which I have to count, because what Shawn Crowder has done is to take these regular beats, one, two, three, four, and he subdivided them into tuplets. A tuplet is when you take a beat and you cut it up into equal duration segments but the number of segments that you cut it into is in some way… uh… unusual. And so what Shawn Crowder's done is to cut it into five, and when you cut a beat into five that's known as a quintuplet.
Counting along to quintuplets is not easy. Physically vocalizing the count requires practice, and you'll hear it in the clip but the way that some drummers count this is they count, one ticky tacker, two ticky tacker, three ticks tacker, four ticky tacker.
(Clip of AS counting along to Tuplets for Toddler's version of Itsy Bitsy Spider plays): One, two, three, four (counting along to claps), one ticky tacker, two ticky tacker, three ticks tacker, four ticky tacker.
(clip cuts out)
Alan Stewart: It's quite an unusual idea to use quintuplets and it's very difficult to find songs that use quintuplets. It is possible and increasingly musicians are starting to incorporate these into their songs… and my hope that is that if little children get to hear quintuplets at a young age, they're gonna be ready or at least better prepared than most grownups are (clip fades back in) for understanding what's going on.
(clip continues and cuts out)
Brady Haran: Your sort of more sophisticated nursery rhymes is kind of… conditioning children to appreciate and explore more sophisticated music?
Alan Stewart: I think so, yeah, it's exposing to them to something that they probably wouldn't hear unless they went searching for it and I'm not sure how many toddlers are au fait with the Spotify interface.
Brady Haran: Alan, why haven't nursery rhymes been written like this before. Why is this sort of, you know, experimental and new? Surely, evolution would have seen these more experimental nursery rhymes exist. Is there something wrong with them? Is there a reason they're not suited to kids?
Alan Stewart: That, yeah, that's a great question. So why hasn't someone done this before? I think the reason that these ideas haven't been utilized is possibly because they do sound strange, like, you yourself Brady described Frère Jacques in seven as sounding a bit uncomfortable. I don't wanna say it doesn't sound nice but it doesn't sound like what we we're used to hearing. Another reason I think is that psychologically and physically some of these rhythms are very difficult to perform and later on, I'll get onto polyrhythm which is where you're counting two different rates simultaneously, and that is hard to do for the musician.
Brady Haran: So one of the reasons we don't have these complex nursery rhymes is just 'cause they're… (chuckles) they're complex, they're hard to play, they're hard… (laughs)
Alan Stewart: Yeah, yeah, I think so. And, but also, there is something slightly uncanny about some of them, perhaps because we're so conditioned to hearing songs that have this counting scheme of four, that whenever we hear a different counting scheme something in our brain says, ooh, that's a bit odd. Like literally odd.
Brady Haran: Alan, do you think this is a nice album? Do you think this is a good… a nice good listen? Like are people gonna enjoy this or is this like you know, an intellectual exercise where a bunch of composers have slapped themselves on the back and said aren't we clever? But to listen to it is not a pleasant experience?
Alan Stewart: I think this album can be enjoyed by anyone and I think it'd be totally possible to listen through and not feel like anything was… weird. I think it's got this added layer for all of the mathematics nerds and all of the music nerds that we've got some really complicated stuff going on underneath.
Brady Haran: I'll tell you what I liked about it. I listen… I had a listen to it earlier today from like start to finish and the thing that I liked was it did seem a bit odd and interesting and experimental but because you were using such familiar famous songs from my childhood, it had this kind of nostalgia… working for it, so it was kind of like alright, I'm willing to go with this because you're also making me have these warm feelings about childhood. I think that's kind of the cleverness of it. You've kind of smuggled the new stuff in by you know, it's like you've sugar coated something that's complicated with enough nostalgia that I'm willing to go with you for the ride.
Alan Stewart: Thank you, Brady. That…
Brady Haran: You can put that quote on the album cover if you like. (laughs)
Alan Stewart: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great quote.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: 'Cause you know I haven't… you know I haven't wanted to play this to… loads of people because of course these composers have sent in their work and it's kind of, you know, it's… it's a project, it's in progress and… and so it's really interesting, Brady, to hear what your reaction to it is.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Alan Stewart: And I don't mean this at all offensively, Brady, but as you've said yourself, like, you don't have… loads of musical training…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Alan Stewart: …and so it's particularly interesting to hear what your impression of it was. All of the tracks so far have involved taking a familiar tune and changing the underlying counting scheme. In Three Blind Mice, which is the one that I did… what I've done is something called polyrhythm. So they're are actually two counts going on at the same time. With my left hand I'm counting up to four, and that's four equal division of time. And with my right hand I'm counting up to three, but the important thing here is that my counting to four and my counting to three are taking the same period of time.
(clip of Three Blind Mice fades in)
Brady Haran: Hmm.
(music continues)
Alan Stewart: (clip continues) Now, polyrhythm (clip cuts out) does get used. You won't hear it in most songs on the radio but it's a nice device and some of the composers have taken this idea of counting to different numbers and they've really gone to an extreme. So in Row Row Row the Boat, there are four different counts running simultaneously by the time you get to the end of the track.
Brady Haran: Wow.
Alan Stewart: And… I would challenge anyone (clip of Row Row Row the Boat fades in) to figure out what those counts are. They're whole numbers… (clip continues) but… yeah… it's good fun.
(clip continues)
Alan Stewart: (clip continues and fades out) Row Row Row The Boat was by 8-bit Music Theory. London's Burning, taking this idea of perhaps different parts, different instruments that are all playing the same tune but counting at different rates. So London's Burning uses a very very old technique called mensuration canon.
Mensuration canon was a very popular in the 15th and 16th century and what composers like to do with it was kind of show off their mathematical prowess by following some very strict rules and then creating music that sounded nice.
(pause) Can I explain what the rules are in mensuration canon?
Brady Haran: You can try. (laughs)
Alan Stewart: I can try. So… in… I'll simplify it, in London's Burning, which is a great example for this, there are basically three different lengths of note, there are short notes, there are long notes, and there are very long notes.
(clip of London's Burning plays and cuts out)
Alan Stewart: Now, the long notes are twice as long as the short ones, and the very long notes are four times as long as the short notes. And that's the way that London's Burning would normally be played, in a ratio of one to two to four. In the version that's on Tuplets for Toddlers, we've got four different instruments and they're all playing London's Burning but the ratio of the note lengths is different for each instrument.
Brady Haran: Right.
Alan Stewart: Can I tell you what the ratios are?
Brady Haran: Go ahead.
Alan Stewart: This one has been arranged by Sam Shackleton, and what he's got is the clarinet playing the normal tune in a ratio of one to two to four, then he's got an oboe playing in one to two to six. He's got a flute playing one to three to six and a bassoon playing one to three to nine. Now, not all of the instruments start together but what Sam Shackleton has managed to do is to kind of stagger their start time so that the finished piece sounds quite pleasant.
(clip fades back in)
Alan Stewart: (clips fades out) I will admit that if Sam had not sent me… a three page document explaining what he'd done, I would never…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Alan Stewart: …I can't listen to it and think, oh yeah there's a ratio of one to three to nine.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Alan Stewart: But it's in there and it's very, I think it's very clever.
Brady Haran: I was hoping you were gonna drop the Golden Ratio on me there, or something like that, or pi.
Alan Stewart: Well, some composers have taken this idea of playing the same melody at different speeds and they've taken the idea and run, really as far as possible, so there's a composer called Conlon Nancarrow who liked to incorporate some irrational ratios in his music, so for example he's got a piano piece where it's the same melody but the ratio at which these melodies are played is e to pi.
Brady Haran: You… that's just making my brain melt, so…
Alan Stewart: Yeah, so… if you're looking for the most complicated rhythmic concept on the album, (clip of Ants Go Marching fades in) look no further than Ants Go Marching which Adam Neely has arranged. (clip continues) What he has done is to take all of the ideas that we've looked at and (clip fades out) kind of blend many of them together and created something of a monster.
Brady Haran: Right. (chuckles)
Alan Stewart: There's no way that I could ever perform this, and, if I'm honest, when I listen to it, I'm not sure that I can follow all of the stuff that's happening.
(clip continues and cuts out)
Alan Stewart: So the song starts out at… seventy-eight beats per minute, but straight away there's something a little bit off because rather than subdividing the beat into four, which might be quite normal, Adam Neely has subdivided it into seven, then, what he starts to do is accentuate every sixth tuplet… (pauses) so they become slightly… slightly stronger and what we now get an increase in speed by a very specific ratio of seven-sixths. So for verse two it's now slightly faster by a factor of seven over six, but not content with that, Adam Neely has also changed the tuplet division to quintuplets, then every fourth quintuplet starts to be accented and it becomes the new pulse, the new beat, and we modulate into a new tempo, we've increased the speed again but this time by a factor of five-quarters, but he's also changed the tuplet division, now the beats are going to have four subdivisions in them.
Brady Haran: Nursery rhymes are supposed to be simple, Alan.
Alan Stewart: I know! I know. I know, it's crazy. Then… as his final flourish he's got every beat subdivided into four and what he does is to take one of those subdivisions, increase it's length by fifty percent and allow that to become the new count, so we get another tempo increase, but this time by a factor of four-thirds, but not satisfied with just sampling increasing the tempo, we also change the subdivision into triplets.
(clip of Ants Go Marching plays and ends)
Alan Stewart: Obviously we've been talking about these different ways of counting and subdividing time and so the track that's been submitted by Jessica Kion doesn't have any counting.
Brady Haran: What do you do then?
Alan Stewart: Well… you should listen to it! There's no… there's no underlying pulse at all and if you try to impose some kind of regular count on it, you'll never succeed.
Brady Haran: Like a prime number.
Alan Stewart: Just like… I wrote that down in my notes, Brady, it cannot be subdivided into equal units. (clip of Ring a Ring o' Roses cuts in)
(clip continues)
Alan Stewart: (clip continues) What I think is interesting about this concept (music cuts out) in music is called free-time, is it can be very very difficult to perform because musicians are trained to play along with a pulse, and when you take that pulse away, what do you have to cling on to?
Brady Haran: But also does that make it hard to enjoy because, isn't our enjoyment of music, our subconsciously enjoying patterns, and if you take away all the patterns are you taking away some of the enjoyment of music?
Alan Stewart: Yeah, music is patterns modified by humanity, um… no you're right, you're right. I think that's a great question about can it be enjoyed if it doesn't have that underlying pattern. I would say yes, because it does still have melody, and it sounds very pleasant. (clip cuts back in)
Brady Haran: (clip cuts out) What do you want people to do? What should people do if they're intrigued by this, and how could they not be? Presumably you want them to go and buy this thing or download it or listen to it or what's the call to action here?
Alan Stewart: It would be fantastic if people went to have a listen on Spotify or wherever they want to listen.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Alan Stewart: And if they want to buy it, then all of the money from purchases is going to go to Save the Children.
Brady Haran: Amazing. I will include links in the notes for this podcast for people to go and click on and do that or you can search out Tuplets for Toddlers. Amazing, what next? Are you already working on the second album?
Alan Stewart: (laughs) Uh… well… (laughs) I've just started back at college…
Brady Haran: Ahh…
Alan Stewart: …after a long summer holiday so I don't think I'm gonna be doing much music for a while.
Brady Haran: Back to the classroom.
(clip of Three Blind Mice plays)
⁂
(gentle piano music)
Brady Haran: Today we're talking with set theorist Asaf Karagila, he's based in the English city of Norwich working at the University of East Anglia, there his research involves exploring the mind bending world of infinities. But before we get to these lofty concepts let's start in the desert and an unconventional route to academia.
(gentle string section music)
Asaf Karagila: So I'm originally from Israel. I grew up in the desert, so it's a small town outside Be'er Sheva, very hot very dry, but there were some forests nearby so it's this kind of very nice and pluralized kind of a background.
Brady Haran: When you grow up in the desert is it like, well, how is your childhood different from people who don't grow up in the desert. Like do you play different games and do different things as a boy?
Asaf Karagila: No it's just hotter and you get used to this very intense dry heat that's the main difference.
Brady Haran: What were you into as a boy? Like, when you're a young boy what were your obsessions? Were you obsessed with sport or were you already obsessed with mathematics or…?
Asaf Karagila: When I was like six or seven, I loved dinosaurs, you know, and then it move to like fighter jets and birds and stuff like this. But my father tells a story and you know it's not that reliable, every time I get younger in this story that, you know, when I was like four or something I already knew that if you have like one tile on the floor and you have half and you have a quarter and that you can always break it to half so this kind of understanding of infinity. I always had like a little bit math in this. My father, who's not a mathematician at all, you know, when I was six we would sit and he would show me how to do long multiplication and long division and just give me numbers and I would play with it. So mostly I was encouraged to be curious, right?
Brady Haran: What did you want to be when you grew up? Like if I'd said to the little boy, hey what'd'you goin'… what job would you wanna do when you're an adult?
Asaf Karagila: I don't know, I think I comprehended the idea of being an adult even, you know?
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: I was convinced that, you know, I couldn't see life beyond like seventeen or something. Not that I'm going to die but like… that didn't exist.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: But I do remember when I was I think fifteen, we had this awful maths books for school that have like fifty question that all look kind of the same, and there were these questions on induction, which is kind of… you know all of them looked like this. You have this summation of this term and this closed form, like the sum of N square kind of thing and then the closed form and you need to prove that this equals that. And I remember telling everybody in my family who would even listen, I get the idea of the proof but I want you to tell me how you got from this sum to this closed number. How do you get it? I don't know what pure maths but I think that is what pure. And they all gave me the same stupid answer, oh you have to be able to do this in order to learn what you do that. I ended up dropping out of high school, I didn't have to learn all of that but then again also the university they didn't teach me this.
Brady Haran: Hang on a second. You dropped out of high school?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: If you dropped out of high school how am I… how am I sitting opposite you at a university?
Asaf Karagila: (laughs)
Brady Haran: There's obviously some weird… why did you drop out of high school?
Asaf Karagila: (sighs) So… you know, it sort of ran its course and by the end of the 11th grade I just felt like there's nothing left for me there.
Brady Haran: Were you a good student? Like were you getting good marks, or…?
Asaf Karagila: (sighs) Well… I was as a kid but then I was sort of a rebellious teenager and I didn't care for this as much so the things if I liked the teacher I would do well but if the teacher annoyed me I would just cut classes and never show up.
Brady Haran: Oh I like the sound of this rebellious. What rebellious things were you doing when you cut class?
Asaf Karagila: Nothing really. You, you know, just sit on the grass and enjoy the sun.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: (laughs)
Brady Haran: Okay. (laughs) Not too rebellious then, just mild rebellion.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah well let's not go there.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: (laughs)
Brady Haran: Okay. Okay. Alright then, so if you dropped out of high school how did you come back to education?
Asaf Karagila: So you can get the GED, the equivalent diploma, you can do it yourself. You just have to register and you just go to the exam and that's it. So like a few of the exams I already did in whatever school years I could do it and the rest I just did on my own with the exception of math that I postponed for a bit later and I took like a preparation course 'cause you know, that's a bit harder to force yourself to sit down. But literature you just to read some poems, read some stories, think about them enough and, you know, you can spit out whatever they want you to spit out, so I didn't put a lot of effort and I got disengaged and that was all of it for me. I hated the idea of university when I left school. For me I was like okay I'm just gonna be like a programmer or do some computer stuff, but then I went to the army and in the army I ended up getting to some computer department somewhere. You know, they gave me the freedom to just explore the system. So I had to teach myself, you know, all these kind of servers that you don't hear about or, you know, language to communicate with printers, you know which is pretty amazing, and nobody there understood it, so I just had all the fun learning this stuff and then by the end of it I was like, okay, I'll go and study computer science and math. And then found out that there's a degree that let you do both together, but because I dropped out of school I couldn't get in, because my exam grade were like borderline and it's a relatively popular program so I couldn't go in, but people at the university said oh just, you know, join the pure math and it's the same for freshman year, so you can… if your grades are good, like, over a seventy, just you can switch and that's fine, but after one semester, you know, studying some set theory and you know this kind of abstract stuff, I was like, nope! I'm gonna be a mathematician, you know, it's gonna be.
Brady Haran: So just to make sure I understand the path properly. You joined the military, presumably that was compulsory.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: It's a compulsory service in Israel. You joined the military. You got a taste for computers and computer science and thought you'd liked it.
Asaf Karagila: No, no, I already liked computers since, you know…
Brady Haran: Oh okay, so you already… and after doing it in the military you thought you wanted that as career, you went to… you couldn't get into that particular course at university because you had the insufficient schooling.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: They said use the mathematics as a shortcut to get into computer science, but then mathematics grabbed you?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah, so… kind of. So, first off math already grabbed me as a kid.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: So it just sort of reawakened this. But (sighs) the thing that the army gave me was it reminded that I enjoy learning stuff. That it's school that takes the fun out of learning and that if you have a… you know a place where you can just enjoy it then you can just run with it. And of course that if you go to university and you learn stuff and it's a lot of self-work that's fantastic, so...
Brady Haran: It's ironic though that it was being in the military that gave you that kind of freedom. People normally associate (laughs) the military with a kind of a really rigid life but you sort of…
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: It sounds like it was quite a positive experience for you?
Asaf Karagila: Well, you know it's not purely positive, of course there's a lot of downsides to it but, you know, you have to cut your hair, you know, you have to wake up very early every day.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: You know, but, yeah, and there's people telling you what to do all the time but at the end of the day I ended up in rather small place and they really appreciated the fact that, you know, I had this capacity to do things. So they just, you know, said okay, you know, just go and do those things, you know, whatever you want.
Brady Haran: Right, 'cause you were the… you were already bit of a computer nerd, so they were like let him do his thing?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. Exactly.
Brady Haran: He's best left alone. So during this like first semester of mathematics when it sounds like mathematics kind of reambushed you a little bit and drew you back in, was it inspirational teachers? Was it the content, do you remember anything specific that really, just really, hooked you in?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah it's definitely the basics of set theory. So my professor was later my advisor during my Masters, Uri Abraham, and he's a fantastic teacher, you know, through and through, but it was just the fact that you could make sense of infinity, that you know, really sort of clicked in my head. I remember there was I think like week four or five something like this there was some homework question about something with infinity and I thought I had the answer and I talked to this girl, and she was very pretty and she said something opposite and I was like, oh okay, maybe I'm wrong. And then I found out that I wasn't. And, you know, that sort of just said, okay, you know what, I love this, I'm gonna do that.
Brady Haran: You talked when you were young about liking sort of dinosaurs and fighter jets and those typical things that we all like when we're young. Another thing I know that does really inspire the young mind is the notion of infinity, when you're first young and you find out this thing called infinity exists. Do you remember infinity from when you were young, like, oh, what's bigger than infinity? Can I count to infinity? Or was it something you didn't really encounter until later?
Asaf Karagila: So (sighs) I don't really remember, to be honest. I think… like kind of the basic stuff that you know oh infinity, infinity plus one, does it make sense, does it not, you know all this basic stuff that they don't teach you about in high school.
Even though it's completely possible to talk about these things with teenagers but, you know, they just don't do it. And okay I wasn't the best high school student anyway so, maybe that's why.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Asaf Karagila: But… not as much. I was always intrigued by it because you know it's infinity. But you don't have the tools because until you do set theory you have no tools to really grasp what is infinity.
Brady Haran: Do you regret dropping out of high school? Was that a mistake?
Asaf Karagila: Best decision I've made…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: …before the age of twenty-five.
Brady Haran: Really?
Asaf Karagila: Hands down.
Brady Haran: Explain that, 'cause it… would you… but you wouldn't recommend it to other young people presumably?
Asaf Karagila: Of course I do.
(pause)
Brady Haran: Really?
Asaf Karagila: In fact when I was a PhD student the secretary said to me, oh you know there's this teenager who's like fifteen and he's been taking classes here and the set theory course that you teaching has no prerequisites so he wanted to take it, maybe you can talk to him and explain what's going on. And I effectively told him, look, if you're at fifteen taking university classes just drop out of high school, you have nothing to do there.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: You know, and the secretary said to me, what do you do! (exaggerated voice) His mom will kill me! (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs) Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: You know, he didn't drop out, it's fine.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: But… if you're smart… you have nothing to do in high school. At least in my experience, obviously other high schools might be better for you and that's great but the high school I had… and I could see my older sister, I remember this one little bit that was maybe influential in this whole thing. When she was sixteen or seventeen she was talking to a friend and she told her, look you can find, you know, the challenge and the fun part in your studies but I, you know, I just feel being forced into this kind of stuff that I don't wanna do. And I don't like doing things I don't wanna do and as a teenager in particular you don't have this, oh, okay I'll just do this and then I can do other things. Just say no, the hell with this, I'm you know…
Brady Haran: But leaving high school can knock you off the path, can't it? To get into the cool stuff later, like university, it turned out well for you but even you encountered that problem when you tried to get into the computer science at university and they said no the door is shut to you, because of… being a high school drop out.
Asaf Karagila: I mean, yeah, but again, if you're smart you're gonna go to math anyway and …
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: At least in Israel if you wanna study pure math and you have a pulse and an ID, you will get in.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: You know, it's its own filter, you know, if you don't go through the first year, you're not gonna go with it. So…
Brady Haran: Okay.
(gentle piano music)
Brady Haran: So tell me more about this, you know, the falling in love with set theory and falling in love with mathematics at university. It sounds like it was like almost a sort of love at first sight on this reintroduction.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah, you know, almost yeah. I mean… you know, you just do this… basic course and it was basic to the point that is painful to me as a set theorist now to think about, oh, that was set theory. That was nothing, that was really the most basic introduction. But, you know, it was fine, it was aimed also for people in computer science and you know, they don't need a lot more than that. So it was just this but then you touch the infinity part and all of school, all through everything else, people always tell you like, oh you know, you can't deal with infinity. It's infinity. It's not a number. It's not a this. And then you have this very good professor and he tells you, well, you can in fact do that. And, you know, it just clicked in my head and it just this kind of missing piece, you know, that you go like yes, this is home… and… yeah.
Brady Haran: I talk to other mathematicians sometimes about their path through university and the different branches of mathematics they experience and how they eventually gravitated to one over another. It sounds like you were all in on set theory really early?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. I mean I did enjoy other things. So I had an incredible professor who taught me Linear Algebra 2, and you know part of enjoying math, you play with the concept. They always tell you, oh you have to do the homework. You don't have to do homework. You have to think about the concepts and homework is just, you know, a medium through which you think about the stuff from class. I mean I would go to a pal and I would think like, oh, you know, so there's this vector space and it define over a field but what happens, you know, we don't really use all of it, let's try to define this over the integers. And I would give all these kind of fun names and I would go to his office hours and say I don't have questions about the course, but I came up with these things, you know, and he was an amazing professor. Unfortunately that was his first year at the university and the students just wore him down. I took a course with him every year and ever year it was more advanced course and by the third year I could see he was completely worn down in the big courses that he was teaching.
Whereas the smaller one, you know, it was always fun. So he was also very influential and he was teaching representation theory and it was an accident kind of that there was no P-adic analysis in my second year that I could, you know, join in, 'cause I would have maybe gone to number theory instead but they didn't have the course and there was set theory and I already liked that one so I just went there and you know…
Brady Haran: What is set theory?
Asaf Karagila: Well set theory is the way to make sense of infinity from the modern perspective. So, you know, if you go back all the way to Galileo and even before that people knew, okay, there was infinitely many natural numbers and there's the Galileo Paradox that says, well, the same amount of natural numbers so zero, one, two, three, and so on, as the even numbers, so zero, two, four, and Galileo said, well, the reason this is happening is because infinity is divine and we shouldn't deal with infinity. And that's sort of continued in this kind of fashion here and there, oh I'm sorry Galileo used the squares and the one before him Adam… of Something… I don't remember the name but…
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: It's even older, the even thing and Galileo pointed out with the squares, there's a lot of history about this. So as, you know, Enlightenment moved and rolled out and you moved from the Renaissance to this, oh maybe the Church doesn't know everything, suddenly people said maybe infinity's not divine, maybe it's something you can deal with. And that slowly progressed and you see a lot of these mathematics that is very modern coming out in the 19th century, and one of those things was Cantor saying, hang on! Let's just take all of the natural numbers as a completed object, and just work with it and we get more things and suddenly you have a theory of infinities, you know, and it's absolutely fascinating and it opened the door to so much amazing mathematics that came afterwards. It really is just about making sense of infinity.
Brady Haran: So if set theory at its core is about dealing with infinity and infinities, why is it called set theory?
Asaf Karagila: You want to think about sets, which is essentially how you think of a collection of mathematical objects that is also a mathematical object.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Asaf Karagila: So you want to study the property of these so-called sets to see what they do and how they behave and one of these axioms says that there is a completed infinite set of the natural numbers.
Brady Haran: Right?
Asaf Karagila: And from that one you just get all the way up.
Brady Haran: Yeah, so that's like your… that's your ultimate set, all the numbers, that's like your… that's your dream set.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. You know… that's the… that's not the ultimate set, that's sort of buying the land for your ultimate house.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: That's the… land upon you build your castle, you know?
Brady Haran: Okay. Okay.
Asaf Karagila: And, you know, in a very Monty Pythonesque way the first castle they tried to build collapsed into the swamp and then the second castle collapsed into the swamp and the third on burnt down and then collapsed into the swamp but then came Zermelo, and after him, you know Fraenkel and Skolem and other people and they build a castle and that castle held.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: So really what you want is to understand the properties of sets, because if you can interpret every mathematical object as being a set, what you're really studying is the mathematical universe.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: So you're not studying the sets, you're studying the mathematical universe as a whole, and you want to understand how the infinite parts of it play together.
Brady Haran: So sets can be finite and infinite?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: Right. So… what advantage do sets have that I don't have if I'm just dealing with individual numbers on their own, like number theorists and things like that? What's the power of a set?
Asaf Karagila: So a set, you know, collects stuff to it.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: If all you care about is, I dunno, the fact that N is a prime number, that's fine. But now you want to study all the prime numbers as a set, and ask, you know, things about that, or you if you want to move from just the natural numbers and you ask about sine and cosine and exponents and integrals and all these kind of things, you suddenly find yourself dealing a lot with sets. Oh a function is continuous except in this small number of points. So what does it even mean a small number of points?
Brady Haran: At what point does a set give us the power to unlock all these mysteries of infinity? Or what is it about the set that gives us that power?
Asaf Karagila: So it's not about this set, it's about what you assume are properties of sets, and effectively what you're assuming is that there is one infinite set, namely the natural numbers, and that every set has a power set, which is the collection of all the subsets. So, you know, you have the natural numbers and the even and the primes and the non-primes and you know everything which is a prime times two to the power of six or whatever, all these kind of sets, now you can collect of these into a set, that's called a power set. This is going to give you a lot of information, and then you can take the power set of the power set and so on and so on, that's sort of where the true power (chuckles) comes to set theory, from the power set axiom.
(gentle high octave piano etude)
Brady Haran: Let's go back to university. At university did you have this same rebellious streak that you had in high school? Were you cutting courses and things like that or were you suddenly finding yourself more diligent now as a student?
Asaf Karagila: I mean not really, I never really did any homework. (pause) I was kind of lucky quote unquote that my first year there was a huge strike so homework were not mandatory for the whole year.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: And second year and on they don't really grade homework so you don't… you just do it sporadically every now and then. 'Cause as I mentioned before homework is not important, what's important is to engage with the material and we were just like eight, seven, eight people doing pure math. So we were always together in almost all the courses, so we, you know, we had this very fun and engaging group to discuss these things. I never really had to do that. And, you know, there's this thing that all of my teacher… all of them without fail… told us the story, oh when I was a student I would go home and reprove all the theorems we saw in class so I can really understand them. I've done none of it. I was terrified in my second year, like, I'm not doing this, what's wrong? Am I going to be good or not? And then you find out that it's not about proving the theorems from class. It's not about solving the homework, it's about engaging with it, and if you have people who also enjoy math and you sit and over a beer, your discussion is about, oh this proof or that proof and why does this work, then you end up, you know, knowing a lot more than you would otherwise.
Brady Haran: As you come towards the end of your undergraduate course, are you thinking this is it? This is my career? Or what are you thinking your career progression's going to be from here?
Asaf Karagila: So my father was, you know, originally a historian. He didn't get into academia very well because it's more cutthroat in his field and there was politics involved but he knew academia and when I was… not even… before I even started my first year, he told me, oh you're going to do a PhD. And I said, what are you talking about? Let me finish my first year and he said, look, your older brother studied engineering, that's point A to point B, that's how you get from A to B, there's like three different ways and you use this for that and, you know, and this for this. So, people in engineering maybe they do a Masters to specify on something, but you're going into natural sciences, they just throw you into the ocean and they tell you swim and find yourself an island.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Asaf Karagila: Trust me you're going to do a PhD, you know?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: So by the end of my first end I knew that I want to pursue this.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. So for me there was no question, I originally hoped that my second year would be so busy that I can finish in two and a half, instead of three years, that didn't pan out but it did give me, like, the third year was very spaced out, whereas all my friends had like this extra courses I've already done so I could, you know, go home and take a nap.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: So, you know, that was nice. No, I already knew… I want to do this.
Brady Haran: And doing a PhD… that locks you into academia does it? You can't do a PhD and then go and work in the stock market or something?
Asaf Karagila: Oh, definitely not. So when I was a… especially as an undergraduate I used to go hiking in the desert, like every two months, you know, I would just grab a backpack and go over the night to these places. And I would hitchhike, you know, back and forth all the time and one time I was talking to somebody and he said, oh what do you study? And I said, oh pure math and he said, oh you know that's great, I'm an engineer, I would hire a mediocre pure mathematician over a good engineer any day of the week because pure math is not about this one thing that you research it's about being able to make abstractions and solve problems and then applying them down, so you know, it gives you this massive toolkit of dealing with problems and that's what's important so I see a lot of my friends that gave up on academia that went to finance, or programming, or whatever you wanna do with your life, you know, not saying that PhD in math is going to help you with everything, maybe not with cooking but it's still can do a lot for you.
Brady Haran: So… what was doing a PhD like?
Asaf Karagila: Fun. Kind of stress-free and then very stressful and then stress-free again. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Yeah? So stressful in the middle?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. Yeah. When I was a PhD I still lived away from Jerusalem, I did my PhD in Jerusalem and I still lived in Be'er Sheva and my advisor for Masters would go with me to Jerusalem for, you know, set theory classes that we had by advisor and his old advisor, you know, on Wednesdays usually, so he would pick me up and we would go talk either about math or whatever and one time he was also taking one of his friends to visit her mother in the hospital or whatever, and… she asks me, so did you have your crisis yet? And I was like, no everything's going great! I'm not expecting a crisis and they both laughed, they were like ha ha, you'll see. And later that year essentially everything I thought I had just completely collapsed. We found like a huge gap on the first stone that I laid and everything just (collapsing noise)…
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: …fell down.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Asaf Karagila: And so… I had to spend very very stressful couple of months, you know, figuring out a way out of this. I did. (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: At the end.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: But… that was my… end of my third year and I remember feeling if that was my first year I would have picked a different topic, 'cause in Israel you can do a PhD for up to seven years, you know, and even five years you still get funded, so it's… you take your time just get a good result because here in the UK it's like you have three, four years (snaps fingers) you know, start from nothing go all the way there.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: So you have no room for mistakes. But if you have five years you really can do it but after three years… you know, so you have to commit, you have to, you know, go through the fire, run the gauntlet and, you know, come with it at the end.
Brady Haran: I won't ask for technical details because, A, I won't understand and B…
Asaf Karagila: (laughs)
Brady Haran: …this is a podcast so it makes it even harder. Who found the mistake? The stone at the bottom that had the flaw? Was it you, was it like a third party reviewer? Do you remember how the mistake was and what that felt like?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah, so… so I had this kind of definition for this kind of iteration of things, whatever…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: And at the time there was a visitor for like the whole semester from Vienna and I knew that he kind of liked this kind of things and you know he agreed that once a week I sit for like… I see him for an hour and showing all everything and he would just point, oh okay that looks fine, just, you know, prove it for yourself in detail just so you know it works.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: And there would always be like these kinds of problems and I would come back the next time and say, oh, you know, here's stuff. Same with my supervisor, you know, okay, it's fine just make sure to check the details.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: And then I thought I had it fine and one of my… colleagues and friends we shared an office and shared the supervisor and we already wrote together one paper at that point (sighs) you know, I showed him what I had. And then, you know, he said, no, no, I don't agree with this claim of yours. And I said, yeah, but that comes out of the very first thing that you obviously agreed with.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: And he stopped and he thinks and he says, no actually disagree with that. And then together we came up with an example that had like less than ten points kind of iteration. It was insanely simple. But so stupid. And that was just like, whoop! (pops) everything fell down.
Brady Haran: Everything went, just from what… one mistake you might have had on a bad day?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: Three years earlier?
Asaf Karagila: It wasn't even it was a bad day it was just oversight, because I'm more of a big picture kind of idea less, you know, nitty gritty, so luckily at that point I had a lot of the big picture and I could just say, okay what do I need to recover? I need this and that and you sort of build it back up, so you have the shape of the tower but all the inside collapsed and you very quickly have to put in, you know, supports to keep it working. So I did that, it ended up overly complicated and over the years since then I've, you know, grown to say, okay, you can do this and you can do that instead and so on and so on. So it was fine at the end but… yeah, at the time it was very very intense.
(gentle violin music)
Brady Haran: Now as a, you know, professional mathematician moving up the rungs, did you take lesson from that? Has it, has it made you more thorough or cautious or careful of those foundation stones or, you know, did it teach you a lesson?
Asaf Karagila: I wanna say yes. (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: I mean (sighs) (tsks) look at the end of the day you are who you are. And if you go and you jump and you make these, you know, very far jumps and you land then that's who you are, and if you fall you just disappear from academia because you fall too often. Not necessary that you're being pushed out, you just give up because… nobody wants to live their life just being wrong all the time.
Brady Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: So you just give up after a while. And that's absolutely fine, you just say okay, you know what I'm gonna take myself and… find an industry job that pays three times as much. What I learned this is more a lesson about myself, that I'm usually wrong. (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs) That's okay, is it?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah no, being a mathematician is mostly you're wrong and you just hope that people just remember the parts you were right. Now you don't talk about the wrong parts, right? That's work in progress, but most of the time you're at a least a little bit wrong.
Brady Haran: Obviously the stuff you publish is the stuff you get right.
Asaf Karagila: I hope.
Brady Haran: Hopefully (laughs) most of the time.
Asaf Karagila: Hope, hope. Yeah.
Brady Haran: So all those wrong moments, all those false starts and dead ends that you've experienced, you know, don't get published so the wider mathematical community doesn't know about them. Who does know about them?
Asaf Karagila: So, for most people they just sort of throw it in the background and, you know, I dunno, you meet someone and you sit for a beer in some conference and you ask them about this research or you tell stories like, you know, war experiences of this kind of thing, and they will tell you how they were wrong about this or that.
Brady Haran: Hmm. Right.
Asaf Karagila: Sometimes these things are public because you know, you go on record and you say I think this, I think that, and then later you say okay, I was wrong because of these things and, you know, there's some record that… so I personally like to write these kind of experiences on my blog (pause) you know, which is, you know… a place for me to sort of spit it out and say, oh look it was so difficult and exhausting but how much I, you know, ended up with, so… just in my case it's…
Brady Haran: On a blog.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah, it's somewhere on the internet.
Brady Haran: So when mathematicians get together over a beer or a coffee or a chat, and they just tell war stories as you put it, are often those stories about things I once got wrong? You know, classic mistakes I made?
Asaf Karagila: Not necessarily, it's sort of, you know, it's hidden. We never say, okay, so I was trying to prove this and then we tried that and that didn't work because of this thing, so you frame this as, I learned the hard way that this approach is not gonna work because of this and that, so it's a positive thing, you actually proved something, but proved it by first being wrong about it. And then finding out why you were wrong.
Brady Haran: Yeah. Okay. So after you've done your PhD, what's the next step in your career from there? What'd'you do next?
Asaf Karagila: So, I didn't really wanna go to the US. And I was hoping to stay around Europe.
Brady Haran: Is that a normal route, is it, for an Israeli PhD, or…?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah normally you're expected to do at least one or two postdocs abroad and then maybe you come back to Israel. Not everybody do but, you know, at least if you're gonna stay in academia, you usually go abroad and then you come back. If you're really really good they will even tell you, you have a job waiting for you, just go enjoy a postdoc because, you know, it's a lot less stress, enjoy your postdoc, comeback, we'll be fine. I wasn't that good I guess, although they did tell me, oh you and the other guy I mentioned from the mistake, you two have to have good postdocs so you can come back and continue the tradition of set theory in Jerusalem because, you know, it has two of the world… the most prominent set theorists. I heard from like two or three people, well I hope that you do a good postdoc and come back.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: Shortly after I left they gave a job to somebody who finished in Tel Aviv a few years earlier, and last year my friend started as a tenure track, so they're fine.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. So I don't have to come back.
Brady Haran: Okay. (laughs) The tradition continues without you.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: So, I didn't really know what I'm going to do. I applied to a few places but you know, there's this approach of, oh apply everywhere and then one of the places will take you.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: But it's not a fair approach if you do something very popular… then fine, you know, somebody will take you, but if you do set theory which is, more specialized and not everywhere has big centers in set theory, then you're unlikely if you just send applications to I dunno, the University of Oxford, they're not gonna take you, they don't have set theory. So why would you even bother them? Right? So I tried to only apply to a few specific places in the US, none of it panned out… and then I ran into the person who'd become my supervisor in Vienna, who was there again, because he came often, and I said, hey do you have some money for a postdoc? And he said, yeah I should have at least for a year maybe, a year and a half, which is, you know, it gives you some time. That's how I got my first job.
Brady Haran: Okay, so you're in Vienna now.
Asaf Karagila: Well before Vienna I was applying to a Newton Fellowship.
Brady Haran: Right?
Asaf Karagila: So, I've been to Cambridge for some conference and I've met David Aspero who works here at UEA and we started working on a paper and came to Norwich to work on this, you know, at some point afterwards, and as I was looking for a postdoc, I sent him an email, my advisor ran into him at a conference around the same week and he said, oh there's this thing called Newton Fellowship. So we applied. And everybody told me you're not gonna get it, but I got it… so that was lucky.
Brady Haran: So for people who don't understand, this is a fellowship, is a sort of a pot of money they give you to fund… fund your life (chuckles) and your career while you're doing postdoctoral studies, while you wait for that next big career step.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. And so this is specifically a two year one.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: So it's not very big but you have a decent travel money.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: So, it's a nice postdoc.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: I applied to this, I was already… I talked to the guy from Vienna, to Martin and he said, it's absolutely fine if you leave early…
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: …no hard feelings because you have to be upfront about these things.
Brady Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: So the Newton Fellowship that you had been given to spend two years as a postdoc, what university was that going to be at?
Asaf Karagila: So that was here at UEA.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: The University of East Anglia, that is.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: In Norwich. Which is, you know, a pretty decent size set theory compared to other places in the UK.
Brady Haran: Mhm?
Asaf Karagila: I dunno. So this was a very, active set theory research area.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: So it was good place to go for a postdoc.
Brady Haran: So for two years you're doing a postdoc here at UEA with this Newton…
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: …fellowship. What do you do, because you're kind of… you're not the boss. You've got a… you've kind of got a boss, but you're also not like the bottom of the heap anymore. You're not like a PhD. When you're doing a postdoc in mathematics, what are you doing? What work are you doing and who for and to what end?
Asaf Karagila: There are two types of postdocships. There's, you know, being a postdoc for someone.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: That you are employed on their grant and you do their research.
Brady Haran: So they've got a big project and they might have helping with grunt work or…
Asaf Karagila: Exactly, yeah.
Brady Haran: …side projects. Okay, yeah.
Asaf Karagila: Now they could also say, I don't need help on this project, just do good math, whatever you want, but it's still on the project.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Asaf Karagila: And there's fellowships that essentially say, okay, you write the project, here's a bunch of money, go work on this project for the next how ever many years.
Brady Haran: Okay so you're… more your own boss?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah, so you have a host, it's somebody who's supposed to sort of oversee you and mentor you and all this stuff but you know, you're kind of your own boss.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Asaf Karagila: We had this project abut something that's slightly different from my PhD work, because everybody I met kept telling me, oh you have to do something different because if you just work on your PhD stuff then, you know, you don't show… any kind of breadth of… you know, subject and knowledge and whatever. So I wrote something else and… we got the… but… my real passion, whatever I did in my PhD, so every time I would sit alone in the office, I would go and work on that. You know, we worked a bit on our stuff and I would work a lot on that stuff, and that was fun, but, you know, it's only two years, it's a bit stressful, oh, at the end they ask, oh what would you do different? And I said, three years. That's…
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: …you know, because…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: You have to start finding a job almost as soon as you start.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: That's really… that's crazy. Yeah and then afterwards I just started applying to universities, I applied to Cambridge and you know obviously didn't get it, a few other places. Then the university said, oh there's this UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship thing, you now, you can try to apply for this. So… I started working and I got a lot of help here at the department and at the university level they really helped me to make this into a really nice proposal so you pass the internal sieve gate and then, you know, you submit the application and you wait and you wait…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: …and you wait some more (sighs) and then you wait some more and then… I was giving a talk in Manchester and the morning after I see my email, you know, you got back the reports, you know, the reviewer comments on the proposal. And you send it back and then you wait and you wait and you wait and they said that the announcement of who's invited for interview are going to be on the first week of December, and it comes and it goes… and your nerves are plucked completely.
Brady Haran: Are you like checking your email every twenty minutes or what are you…?
Asaf Karagila: About five minutes. You know?
Brady Haran: Right (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: It's like (tapping)
Brady Haran: Reset.
Asaf Karagila: Refresh, refresh, all the time, refresh!
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: Nothing.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: And you go like, okay, should I send them an email? Should I send them an email? And my head of school said look if they said the week you have to give them the whole week.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: Monday morning you can send them an email.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: The next Monday arrives and I said… there's like about five hundred people probably applied, I don't need to send them an email, they know they're late.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: And a few hours later, you know, I get the email and it says I've been invited to the interview and I, you know, immediately run and shout and…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: …you know, very happy. I start reaching out to people I know that have this to ask for tips, you know, do practice interviews, at least two, and get a diverse panel for this kind of practice and so on and so on and you work and you, you know, workshop your seven minute presentation and they give you a list of optional questions and what people kept saying, and that was absolutely true, is that if you got to the interview they want you to have the money.
Brady Haran: Right?
Asaf Karagila: You only competing against yourself at that point.
Brady Haran: Just so people understand the stakes here…
Asaf Karagila: Yeah?
Brady Haran: …what are the stakes? What's on offer here, what are you asking UKRI to give you?
Asaf Karagila: So the offer, and they slightly modified it in subsequent rounds…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: …was a four year fellowship…
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: …that you can ask for three extra years.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: And you also get a permanent job, with it.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: And apparently they change it so that it's not guaranteed to have a permanent job because some of the big universities don't like to, you know, hand out jobs like that, so they changed the wordings, but for my round it was still part of the deal.
Brady Haran: At worst you're looking at maybe seven years of…
Asaf Karagila: Yeah!
Brady Haran: …well funded research.
Asaf Karagila: Extremely well funded research, yeah.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: And I asked for money to have two postdocs and conferences and a lot of travel.
Brady Haran: Mhm.
Asaf Karagila: So you know, very well funded research center essentially for four to seven years.
Brady Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. And on the other hand, I had no other job offers.
Brady Haran: Right. (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: So it's this or nothing.
Brady Haran: But how did the interview… what was it like doing that? It must be like going before a firing squad?
Asaf Karagila: (sighs) Almost like the first two minutes you really feel like that, you know?
Brady Haran: Mhm.
Asaf Karagila: You have to… you don't have to wear a suit but you know you kind of… feel that you need to wear a suit. You know, I was talking here with…
Brady Haran: Did you have your hair back in a ponytail or…?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah, yeah.
Brady Haran: Right, right. Very respectable. (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: I can't wear a suit with, you know, the hair just flowing to the side and…
Brady Haran: Rock n' roll hair, yeah.
Asaf Karagila: So I talked with one of my colleagues here about this, wearing a suit, and he said well you don't have to wear a suit but if you don't wear a suit you're going to have to convince me you're a really good mathematician because you're not taking this seriously enough.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: I don't know if I agree with this, I don't think everybody I spoke would agree with this approach, but what do you have to lose? Just put on a suit.
Brady Haran: But the thing is, from everything you tell me, from even when you were in high school, it sounds like you're someone who doesn't like to be told what to do and you oughta do it your way. I can imagine you walking in jeans and a t-shirt and saying, take me or leave me, this is what I am. But you conformed on this one?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah I mean, (sighs) the first time I ever wore a suit was just a few months before that. You know?
Brady Haran: Right? (chuckles)
Asaf Karagila: For a wedding that I went to. So… (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: You know, it was a new experience and it wasn't that bad.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Asaf Karagila: So I figured, okay, well, why not?
Brady Haran: Alright.
Asaf Karagila: I even had a Formal Friday, 'cause I would normally just walk barefoot or just, you know…
Brady Haran: Mhm.
Asaf Karagila: Basic shirt and jeans whatever, and I would just come with a suit every Friday. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Alright. (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: Yeah to the university just to be more comfortable wearing a suit.
Brady Haran: So it was like practicing wearing a suit?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: It was fun, I liked it.
Brady Haran: Yeah? Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: I kind of miss wearing a suit.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Asaf Karagila: I almost wore a suit today.
Brady Haran: Oh wow, we've been doing some Numberphile videoing today so that would have been quite interesting. (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: Yeah, well, I didn't but, you know…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: It crossed my mind.
Brady Haran: Alright.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah so, you know, you go to the interview, I did this terrible mistake. So they tell you, you can come to a hotel, we can even reimburse you for this hotel, and I chose the same hotel as the interviews.
Brady Haran: Oh.
Asaf Karagila: Now that sounds smart because you say, well I just come down and go to the interview.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: But it's super stressful because it's a lot of interview. So all of the hotel was the interviewers of the different panels.
Brady Haran: Ah.
Asaf Karagila: When I checked in I went up in the elevator and this woman asked me, oh are you here for the UKRI thing? And I was like, yeah. Oh which panel are you sitting on? (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: I was, what? No, I'm… I'm interviewing. (laughs)
Brady Haran: Alright, okay, yeah.
Asaf Karagila: So it was very stressful like after interview I went for dinner with my colleague in Bristol and on the elevator I meet one of my interviewers.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: And we talk a bit… and he said something that give me the impression like I didn't do very well.
Brady Haran: Right. (chuckles)
Asaf Karagila: And I was like, oh my god… he would only say that to me if I'm not getting it. Oh no! You know, it was was extremely stressful.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: I would not recommend this.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Asaf Karagila: You know?
Brady Haran: How long after the interview did you have to wait for the news?
Asaf Karagila: So the interview was… the very end of January and they originally said, two weeks. And then they said, three weeks. And then they said, first week of March. And they actually kept it. So it was Monday morning and I had to send something back or pick something from some, you know, Hermes shop or whatever and I go out of the house at nine and I come back up just to pick it up and I said, oh I'll just check my email, it's probably not there, it's probably gonna be another week. And… exactly three seconds before they send me a congratulation email.
Brady Haran: Oh Nice.
Asaf Karagila: Do you accept?
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: And I immediately just, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, of course I accept!
Brady Haran: (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: (laughs)
Brady Haran: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Asaf Karagila: So…
Brady Haran: So now… you're set now for quite a number of years of…
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: …of security and funding and the ability to…
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: …push your research forward.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. And this fellowship comes with a lot of nice perks like I don't have to teach.
Brady Haran: Right?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah, so, I can really focus on the research…
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: …at this point. And I mean… I was going to live on an airplane for this two years, right? Just fly to here, work a bit, fly to there, invite people over, unfortunately we can't do that.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. But I can use the money for a big conference in three years when everything is hopefully back to normal.
(gentle string section music)
Brady Haran: So you mention that you don't have to teach, obviously a lot of people at universities have a component of teaching students and a component of doing their own research. You're in a situation where your grant means you don't have to teach, but from what I know of the little bit I know of you (chuckles) today even, you really are enthusiastic about outreach and communicating your subject and things like that. Are you saddened to not be teaching? Do you… would you like to be teaching students?
Asaf Karagila: I was teaching all through my Masters and my PhD, I even… so normally you do like TA work. And initially…
Brady Haran: The TA's teaching assistant?
Asaf Karagila: Teaching assistant, yeah. And initially that means that you actually teach.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: So you do revisions of what was in the class and you solve things but you also prove, you talk about the theory a little bit. So it's a lot more hands on than what maybe happens here where they just sit in a room and people come and ask for help.
Brady Haran: Mhm.
Asaf Karagila: You know, doing the homework. And so I've done a lot of teaching. And so… I felt it's fine if I don't teach for the next couple of years.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Asaf Karagila: Now add to this the fact that because of the Army service in Israel most of the students are older. They've seen the world because… nobody goes to university after the Army service. They take a year, two years, they work, they travel, they sort of unwind from this very stressful experience, so they come to the university, they're already very much adults, it's not high school plus.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: So the level of students is incomparable to anywhere else in the world.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: Again, just about the maturity and stuff, I'm…
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: …not saying that they're necessarily better than other students.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: Just, you know, the starting point is a lot better.
Brady Haran: They're more worldly wise and…
Asaf Karagila: Exactly, yeah.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: So that was all the fun, and then you come here and you see how people complain about students thinking that this is just extension of high school, you know, all of this feel that it's a bit of a… you know… a mill to produce degrees.
It's not, but you know, sometimes it feels like it.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: Sometimes it's feel like oh (sighs) why am I even teaching this. I'll give you this terrible example that I'm trying to… make people upset about. You have to write the exam before you start teaching the course.
Brady Haran: You as the…
Asaf Karagila: As the lecturer.
Brady Haran: As the lecturer, yeah.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: Now they say that this is, you know, to make sure that everything is fair for everybody.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: But how is that fair. I have seven years of teaching experience and no two years were alike because I would teach the same course like four years and then a different course for four years, so no two years are a like. Every time students have something that they saw on another course that, you know, sort of primes them for a specific subtopic, you know, to be more interesting here or you put more focus there. If I have to write an exam before I even engage with the students, how is it fair for them? I'm denying them this kind of curiosity.
Brady Haran: Because you'll have to teach to your exam, rather than…
Asaf Karagila: Yes! Exactly.
Brady Haran: …the natural drift of… yeah.
Asaf Karagila: I covered my host a couple of times when he wasn't here and was like, oh maybe you can cover one of my lecturers in the set theory course. And… one time he said, you have to teach this proof, it's going to be in the exam. That is insane! That is crazy. The reason they do it, I was told, is that some ten years ago or so there was a strike just before the exam period and the university ended up without exams.
Brady Haran: Right?
Asaf Karagila: So now they want everybody to write the exam and then if you wanna strike and not grade and… you do you, you know?
Brady Haran: Okay , right. (laughs)
Asaf Karagila: We just get somebody to read your solutions and grade the exams.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Asaf Karagila: So, that's really godawful.
(gentle string section music)
Brady Haran: What do you want to achieve in the next maybe seven years? Is there some huge problem in set theory? Is there a million dollar proof that you wanna find or is there like… what's your holy grail now? What are you working on?
Asaf Karagila: So one of the main focal points of set theory is adding axioms to your theory. So you have sort of the base theory for mathematics and then you say okay what happens if we add these axioms that increase the… how strong is the theory? You can prove more now.
Brady Haran: So axioms are kind of like these underlying statements that are assumed to be true.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: That you build all your mathematics on?
Asaf Karagila: Exactly.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: So, and you're free to choose different ones and do different work but you want to ask how much can you prove with certain axioms and this lends itself to this very nice hierarchy called Large Cardinal Axioms. So if the basic one set of all natural numbers is a set, that's, you know, it's called the Axiom of Infinity, and Large Cardinal Axioms are often called higher infinity. 'Cause they sort of take these properties that you have on the natural numbers and you say, okay now let's add this kind of thing but higher up. And one of the main axioms we use all the time is the Axiom of Choice.
Brady Haran: It's a very very famous Axiom, that you and I have spent the last two hours discussing.
Asaf Karagila: (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs) And I'm no closer to understanding it. But I know it's famous and important.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah.
Brady Haran: Yeah.
Asaf Karagila: So, a lot of people want to know, what happens when you take it out?
Brady Haran: Right. Is it necessary even?
Asaf Karagila: Exactly.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: So for somethings we know it's necessary but you can also ask how necessary to what kind of fragment of the Axiom of Choice do you need to keep in order to prove a certain thing.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Asaf Karagila: And the Axiom of Choice let's you look at this Large Cardinal Axioms and say oh I have like three or four different ways to phrase this axiom and they're all equivalent but this equivalence is very much dependent on the axiom of choice, now some of these were studied extensively in the Eighties, so you say, okay I'm not assuming the Axiom of Choice just this one way of phrasing but it's sort of the wrong way to think about this Large Cardinal Axioms and until a few years ago there were no serious works on, let's look at the actual (sighs) large part of that, you know, of the Cardinal. So I had some work about this with my friend from the PhD, we had this, obviously I think, that a fantastic paper where we break ground...
Brady Haran: Hmm?
Asaf Karagila: …and essentially create this whole new field and what I want to do is sort of push that forward and see how far I can get with it.
(Gentle chimes)
Asaf Karagila: So there's a problem that's open since 1902. When I was a Masters student I read about this. And I said to myself what do you need to prove, you know, to solve this problem one way or another? That's essentially the thing that guides me to come up with new ideas through and through and…
Brady Haran: What's that called?
Asaf Karagila: It's called the Partition Principle.
Brady Haran: Right?
Asaf Karagila: And the problem is whether or not it implies the Axiom of Choice.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Asaf Karagila: So, without getting technical you can phrase the Axiom of Choice in a certain way and then the Partition Principle says, okay just, you know, remove this one tiny bit from the formulation, is it equivalent? We don't know.
Brady Haran: Okay.
Asaf Karagila: So there's been some recent progress about this. A group of people from Brazil, none of which is a set theorist.
Brady Haran: Hmm.
Asaf Karagila: Developed this new thing called Flow and they claim that, you know, they proved that it doesn't imply the Axiom of Choice. The first paper is available on archive, it had a lot of gaps. The second paper was released two months ago, I am still reading through it. I just had… some crazy two months so I had to put it aside. But I hope to get back to it, last week…
Brady Haran: Right? So this Partition Principle is it… that's your kind of like, your white whale, the Moby Dick, is it? It's like your thing you'd love to… crack?
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. Yeah. Kind of.
Brady Haran: Yeah?
Asaf Karagila: And even if they do prove this, you know, they use this kind of very non-standard methods and its still interesting to say, okay, let's develop the standard set theory methods to the point where you can get this proof.
Brady Haran: Is it a really famous problem? Like would everyone in set theory know about it or is more just your problem? Or is it like… is it the big trophy that everyone in set theory talks about?
Asaf Karagila: So… people don't really know about that. In fact, a lot of people who teach set theory without knowing a lot about the Axiom of Choice would just assume that this is just the Axiom of Choice.
Brady Haran: Right.
Asaf Karagila: And that's equivalent and that's it and there always surprised, oh! You told me about this thing, oh really it's not equivalent? Oh it's open. But it is the oldest currently open problem, you know, in set theory. So, you know, I think it's at the very least interesting, right? And if you look at Fermat's Last Theorem, it's not a very important theorem, but on the journey to, you know, to get there so much amazing new mathematics was developed. So even if this is not a very interesting problem, you know, on paper, I think that to get there you will need to develop this very good tools and then you can apply them elsewhere.
Brady Haran: Alright, well I'll come back in five to seven years…
Asaf Karagila: (laughs)
Brady Haran: …and you can tell me how you did it.
Asaf Karagila: Well we can do an interim, you know, meeting…
Brady Haran: Alright (laughs).
Asaf Karagila: …in two years.
Brady Haran: Alright, two years.
Asaf Karagila: Yeah. (laughs)
Brady Haran: (laughs) Good. You described to me earlier that set theory is right at the frontier, like at the extremities of where you can go, which you put it in a really nice poetic way. Are you just being really biased or would most people say set theory's right at the limits of…?
Asaf Karagila: I think it's a bit of both. I mean, a lot of people will tell you, oh it's just philosophy. It's not even real math anymore because they don't do real things, you know, they deal with infinites and this crazy nonsense. But, that's not true.
It's pure math. (pause) It's just… at the end of how abstract you can be and still do pure math. You know, just in favor of completeness there are other foundations of mathematics you can go to and they're also sort of at the end… at the frontier and there would be people who tell you, oh don't study this because all math is going to be based on, I dunno, homotopic type theory (piano music fades in) in five years. You know? But that's not true.
(music fades up and continues)
Brady Haran: Well that's all for today but please see the notes for today's episode for more links and information. (music continues) Thanks to the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California for its support of Numberphile. And also thanks to the UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship for their help with this episode. (music continues) I'm Brady Haran, and you've been listening to the Numberphile podcast.
(music slowly fades out)
⁂
[ Coffin Problems ]
Summary: Edward Frenkel's fascinating mathematical journey - from the Soviet Union to the United States.
(gentle piano music)
Brady Haran: Today's guest is the mathematician Edward Frenkel. His story takes him from climbing fences and sneaking into math lectures at a Moscow University all the way to the hallowed blackboards of Berkeley. (music continues) It's the sort of story that one might write a book about, (chuckles) in fact Edward has written a book about it and today he's sharing the journey with us. (music fades out)
Brandy Haran: Where were you born in the world? Not America I'm guessing from your accent.
Edward Frenkel: (laughs) Yes, you guessing right. I was born in Russian, Soviet Union at the time.
Brandy Haran: Soviet Union at the time, whereabouts? Is it a place I will have heard of?
Edward Frenkel: A little town called Kolomna.
Brandy Haran: Kolomna.
Edward Frenkel: Kolomna.
Brandy Haran: Where is that?
Edward Frenkel: Near Moscow.
Brandy Haran: Like how far out, like you know?
Edward Frenkel: Umm… hundred and seventeen kilometers. You can google how many miles that is. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: I guess about seventy miles. One of the good things about growing up in the Soviet Union was that science was highly respected and in particular you could find books, popular books about science in the book stores and so that was something that really excited me as a kid, as a teenager. I was reading mostly about physics, I was really excited about quantum physics. Things like elementary particles, and forces of nature and the universe. And there were lots of books, some of them were translations but some of them were local, by Russian Soviet authors and they were quite good.
Brandy Haran: What was it about the culture of the country at the time that would have made science like so revered?
Edward Frenkel: Well two reasons. First of all the nuclear bomb and the research related to that as well as space exploration. The Soviet government knew that they needed scientists, good scientists, good level scientists. And so therefore there were opportunities in that area. And second everything else was controlled by the ideology and so for instance if you wanted to go into social sciences or humanities, you kind of knew you would have to be constantly giving praise to the Communist Party and the great leaders and so on, and so it would be very difficult and everything would be censored, everybody would be looking over your shoulder all the time. So in those ares you could not possibly have the kind of freedom that you could have in mathematics or theoretical science.
Experimental science, yes, for instance genetics was ostracized and people were jailed and so on because it kind of was connected to agriculture and stuff like that. So that's where politicians thought they had some sort of authority. Stalin actually went as far as writing a book about linguistics (laughs) as a result of which people… a number of people were jailed and so on, you know, so a lot of people suffered. But even he never made any pronouncements about mathematics. He knew not to cross that line (laughs) so it was lucky for mathematicians. So in other words mathematicians were given relative freedom within their profession. Of course as soon as anybody dared to say anything political they would be you know persecuted and so on. Like Sakharov is a famous example of a physicist who was one of the leaders of the nuclear project and yet he was exiled. So he almost untouchable but was exiled actually.
Brandy Haran: And are you saying as a boy like as a young boy where you're not totally as engaged with that side of things that…
Edward Frenkel: Yeah so I didn't know all that of course at the time.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. But are you saying that even at that time the authorities encourage like you know lots of books and stuff about science because they wanted to recruit?
Edward Frenkel: Going to recruit kids…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: Talented kids to go into physics and so on and math because they knew it was important for the industry and for the weapons for defense.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. But that at least is they're showing some foresight and…
Edward Frenkel: Yes! Yes!
Brandy Haran: Not just thinking about the now.
Edward Frenkel: So that was actually one of the good things in some sense and kind of a respect. There was this sort of attitude where not that they were revered scientists, but they were respected. And their were movies about scientists as romanticized. They were more romanticized as people who are spending, you know, at night in front of blackboard arguing, smoking, you know this kind of stuff. There were movies like that. And that part must have influenced me a little bit but really excited me was the subject itself.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: I was just drawn to this hidden reality. To this magical world of fundamental structures of the universe. What is this all about? What's going on?
What's really going on beneath the surface? You know?
Brandy Haran: Were you really good at it? Like were you top of the class? Were you like the…
Edward Frenkel: Yes.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Edward Frenkel: I was a kind of straight A student you know so school came easy to me.
Brandy Haran: Was it mathematics that was your number one or were you also interested in literature or physics or chemistry or was it always gonna be math?
Edward Frenkel: Interesting enough, so I was interested in literature and art and so on, but actually math was my least favorite. I hated math, I hated well… that's maybe too strong a word. I did not like what they were teaching us at school. It came easy to me I could solve all the problems…
Brandy Haran: Yeah
Edward Frenkel: But I was under the impression that what school mathematics was, you know what was presented to us in our classes was exactly what real mathematics was. Maybe problems would become a little bit more involved and so on.
Basically along the lines of you know Euclidian Geometry and some equations, quadratic equations and so on and you know. Some kind of simple manipulations with functions, and derivatives and integrals. And I just thought it was trivial and kind of pointless, and boring and stale. And irrelevant.
Brandy Haran: But easy?
Edward Frenkel: But easy, yes.
Edward Frenkel: So physics was my subject. That was the most exciting subject. Because there were all these crazy particles like quarks (laughs) you know. And this… And also I was reading about people who were making those discoveries. For instance one of them, my heroes, was Lev Landau, so who was actually a Nobel Prize winning Soviet physicist who worked in quantum physics and made some important discoveries. He was a student of Niels Bohr who was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. And he was a very interesting guy so there were books written about his life, by that time he was dead, but there were fascinating books written about him so I had all his biographies on my book shelf, so I had little photographs, so I took a picture with my little camera, took a picture of a cover of one of the books and then I printed that picture. And I had this little photo on my desk.
Brandy Haran: So instead of like a famous footballer or a Hollywood star you had this?
Edward Frenkel: I had this guy. So so actually I had this guy. I had Niels Bohr, and I had Albert Einstein.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Edward Frenkel: Albert Einstein perhaps a little bit more cliche but Bohr and Landau were my heroes as well. And I thought their stories were fascinating how these people were making these discoveries which were just astonishing and went so against common sense I would say. You know, the kind of phenomena of quantum physics are really so surprising. When you first look at them.
Brandy Haran: You're a school boy. Your heroes are these physicists. You're very exited about physics and this mysterious world of particles and quantum mechanics.
Mathematics at this point seems like a bit mundane.
Edward Frenkel: Boring. Boring.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. What happens that switches? 'Cause obviously you're sitting in front of me as mathematician.
Edward Frenkel: Yes. Yes.
Brandy Haran: What switched? Why did you change streams? What happened?
Edward Frenkel: There was… something happened… there was an event. There was a singular event, which is very interesting to me as a kind of a metaphor for a lot of things. How much we depend in our lives on our teachers and our mentors or people we encounter which it may appear at first class that it's kind of a chance encounter. But how consequential may turn out to be. I'd just turned fifteen, and I am in just about enter last year of my high school and my mother meets this guy on a bus or something or on a tram whom she had known for many years but had not seen in a long time. And he is a mathematician, so I lived in this town, this little town, population hundred fifty thousand, it was not particularly exited in terms of science education but there was one little college which prepared teachers. So it was called Pedagogical College, so pedagogy. So they were teaching students who would then go on and become school teachers.
Brandy Haran: Teaching the teachers.
Edward Frenkel: Teaching the teachers. And this guy was a professor of mathematics at this college and he had a name which you know could come from directly Tolstoy's novel, Evgeny Evgenievich. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: It was a patronymic first name patronymic Evgeny Evgenievich Petrov. So he was actually remarkable man. So in fact he was sort of out of place there because he's this brilliant guy. What is he doing there? Of course there was also back story for that, as I found out much later, that there was this famous mathematician Rokhlin, a topologist, who was basically unfairly treated by Stalin regime and he was exiled to Siberia and was almost killed, executed but because his friends pleaded to release him. So he was not allowed to go to Moscow or St.
Petersburg, but he was allowed to live in my hometown, Kolomna, where he stayed for a few years as a professor at this institute. It was during that time that my teacher was a student in that college. So you see this kind of…
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: This lineage. This lineage.
Brandy Haran: He'd identified and trained up this promising student that he had…
Edward Frenkel: Who most likely would have been lost, you know, and would not have been able to express themselves fully or achieve their greatness.
Brandy Haran: okay.
Edward Frenkel: There were a number of people. There were several others who were from that period and they stayed on and became professor of that university. Of that little college.
Brandy Haran: So this one guy who'd been exiled became this kind of seed of mathematical greatness?
Edward Frenkel: In my hometown!
Brandy Haran: In this teaching college.
Edward Frenkel: And it could have been any other town, right? So it was literally a provincial place in the middle of nowhere.
Brandy Haran: So how as it… I didn't ask what your parents did? So how was it that your mother came to become friends with this accomplished mathematician?
Edward Frenkel: Ah. So my parents were engineers.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Edward Frenkel: But of course so there are more layers to this story because my father wanted to become a physicist, quantum physicist and he was denied entrance to university because his father was arrested and put in gulag by Stalin. So in 1954. And so my father actually finished high school with honors, and at the time he was supposed to be admitted automatically to university and he wanted to become a physicist. But because he was the son of the enemy of the people…
Brandy Haran: It's like a black mark on his record sort of thing?
Edward Frenkel: Yes. So he was not admitted.
Brandy Haran: Was that… well I'm sure we'll come to this but the thing that comes into my head, does that black mark go down two generations, is that gonna affect you later on? But I'm sure we'll get to it.
Edward Frenkel: Guess what! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) We'll get to that.
Edward Frenkel: These kind of things have a tendency to repeat themselves.
Brandy Haran: Okay. We'll get to that.
Edward Frenkel: So that was important somehow for me, I think, unconsciously at least, so now I kind of see it more clearly that in many ways I was fulfilling my father dreams. So we talked about earlier about my interests in physics. And of course it I knew that part of the story that he wanted to do physics but he was unable to so he basically had to go to this engineering college and the he kind of gave up. He kind of didn't really try to pursue that dream, that he had.
Brandy Haran: Becoming an engineer seems like quite a prestigious…
Edward Frenkel: Yeah, I'm not too disparage in any way the profession of an engineer.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. What kind of engineers were you parents doing? What kind of engineering were they doing?
Edward Frenkel: Oh my father was an electrical engineer. He was basically sent to this, you know, provincial town and he thought he would just go there for two years and then try and find a job in Moscow and like in a big city. And that's when he came and he met my mother. So you know (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Change of plans.
Edward Frenkel: Change of plans. And yeah no it's fascinating to see all these twists and turns.
Brandy Haran: So your mother is friends with this mathematician somehow?
Edward Frenkel: Yes. But my mother knew him because she played volleyball, and this guy played volleyball, so they used to play volleyball together. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay (laughs) So your mum bumps into this guy on a bus or something like that. Okay.
Edward Frenkel: Oh and she's oh how are you? And they start talking and of course immediately my mother starts telling him about me. Because that's what she would talk to anybody about. (laughs) Most of the time.
Brandy Haran: Proud of her son.
Edward Frenkel: She was proud of me.
Brandy Haran: Were you the only child?
Edward Frenkel: No, I also had an older sister.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: But she was already an adult and so on and so I was still in high school, so it was kind of exciting.
Brandy Haran: So she was probably saying my son's really talented?
Edward Frenkel: Yes, and this guy's eyes light up. Because he's in this college where frankly there were not probably not so many bright brilliant students. So he's on the look out that he can talk to. And he says oh I want to meet him. And my mother says, sure but I have to warn you he hate mathematics. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay okay.
Edward Frenkel: You see?
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: And so then she comes homes there this guy Evgeny Evgenievich who wants to meet you. He's a professor of mathematics in this college. And by the way this college was literally five minutes walk from my house. And so but I was this kind of pouting teenager, you know, so I was just like math… I hate… don't you know that I hate math? (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: I didn't want to go.
Brandy Haran: No. (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: But she convinced me it was sort of like… it would not be nice. She made an appointment I have to go to this once and talk to this guy and then afterwards whatever. You know if I don't like I don't have to go again. So I said okay fine. And that was the fateful encounter.
Brandy Haran: That meeting did it?
Edward Frenkel: That meeting kind of changed my life.
Brandy Haran: What did he do? What did he show you?
Edward Frenkel: What did he do… he's a very clever guy. So I come to his office and he has these lots of books on the shelves, so right? Ah but he already knew my mother told him oh he doesn't like math. And he says well here what does he like?
Physics. Theoretical Physics. Elementary Particles. So Evgeny Evgenievich had advanced information and he used it wisely so when I came he asked me so what… I hear you're interested in quantum physics so what do you know about it? And I said well I've just been reading this book about quarks, I said elementary particles which physicists theorized were constituents of particles which previously were thought to be indivisible. Protons, neutrons, et cetera and yet turned out to contain these little smaller pieces. And I was very excited. And he said oh okay, cool. And do you know about the representation theory of SU3? And I'm like, what SU what? And he says… you don't know SU3, then how could you possible understand quarks? And it hit a nerve in the following sense that I was frustrated by the fact in those popular books that I was reading there was this represented this nice narrative. Nice captivating story, but they never explained the details. Like how did physicist actually come up with these ideas, you know? It sounded mysterious and I was longing for an explanation. So then Evgeny Evgenievich at this point he pulls out this thick book from the shelf and he opens somewhere in the middle. And I could see the diagrams some of which would be in the popular books but they wouldn't explain what they were. But here in this book it was clear that this diagrams were part of a theory, of an explanation, an actual explanation with formulas and equations. Which I couldn't make heads or tails of at the time. Right? And then Evgeny Evgenievich pointed to those pictures and formulas and said, you think what they teach at school is real math? No. This is real math.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Edward Frenkel: (gasps) (laughs) I was like yeah I might have as well been struck by lightning. It was just one of those moments was like my god there is this thing which I had no idea, you know, that exists and obviously holds the answers to all those questions that I wanted to find.
Brandy Haran: But what happens now because like teenage you now just has to go back to high school where your just being taught the basic mathematics and you're not getting access to all that stuff. So how do you get access to this thing that you've just seen.
Edward Frenkel: So exactly so I was like how do I learn all this? It looks complicated. And he says oh its okay, I can teach you, I can see you're a bright kid, so if you want you can come and talk to me every week and we'll figure it out. I will explain to you. (gasps) Wow that was so exciting.
Brandy Haran: So he became like a private tutor?
Edward Frenkel: Yes. Once a week I would go in like in the evening and sometimes we would just stay late til like nine or ten, once we were locked in the auditorium by a custodian who didn't even bother to check were there was anybody in the room. Luckily it was on the ground floor so we could get out through the window but it was very funny. And so he gave me books… he said we can't jump immediately into this stuff. You have to first learn the basics. So he gave me a few books… there was a book about linear algebra for example. So that he said linear algebra is the basis of mathematics. Interesting enough I'm teaching a big class at Berkeley of linear algebra which I have taught many times. But this was… yes you have to learn this, this is absolutely fundamental. And then there was a book about number theory, there was a book about topology which is a branch of geometry. Which probably your listeners know about. You've must have done a bunch of videos on Numberphile. And then I would read those books, I would come, and he says okay what did you read and tell me what you read, do you have any questions and we would discuss, and some nights I wouldn't sleep. I would have sleepless nights just thinking about this stuff. It's like wow, you know, it was just like a new world.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And in a way it was an escape, also. It gave me this escape from… because you know the Soviet Union was starting to deteriorate. We're talking about the early mid Eighties. So we're talking about just before Perestroika started and the soviet union collapsed and so it was kind of like depressing in many ways to be.
To live in the country at the time. But then were was this magical beautiful world and I didn't have to go anywhere to find it. It was right at my finger tips, you know, it was just really marvelous.
Brandy Haran: How was this like advanced inspiring education you were getting once a week meshing with still having to sit through boring math lessons at school?
Edward Frenkel: Well I had a newly found appreciation for this stuff. Because now I could see that through the lens of this sort of higher math that I was learning and that actually made a lot more sense I could see that it wasn't boring, it was just that it was kind of elementary and the teachers themselves they were not… they did not know how to explain the kind of… they were not properly educated themselves to make the connection to some other things which would pique the interest of the students, you see. But the subject themselves were fascinating actually if one could see them from a slightly higher vantage point.
Brandy Haran: At what point does this like new appreciation of mathematics… because I can imagine this new appreciation of mathematics is also enhancing your enjoyment of physics?
Edward Frenkel: Yes.
Brandy Haran: Because it's helping you under the physics more deeply. At what point does kind of mathematics overtake physics and you start thinking I don't even wanna do physics, I almost wanna be a pure mathematician now?
Edward Frenkel: Very quickly. I mean and he was clever because he wasn't putting as a question of substituting one subject with another. He said, if you want to understand theoretical physics, especially quantum physics, you have to have a good understanding of math, because it's all based on math. So before that you could not really do physics. He said all these physicists who theorized all these beautiful theories that you heard about or read about, they did that based on sophisticated mathematics. And it was very convincing 'cause he showed me those books and I read so, so I was like okay, then I have to do the math. But very quickly I discovered that the math that he was talking about was actually very interesting in its own right. So I became very curious about that even not necessarily because of its connection to the original… my original interests but just because they were so exciting things but they were hidden from me until that point. They were kind of veiled and then suddenly the veil was lifted and it was like okay look at this, there's this. And I was like okay this is great, so my hands were full (laughs) with just with that stuff.
Brandy Haran: Do you remember a branch of mathematics or a theorem or a field that you were taught about at this time that's a really exemplar of oh my goodness where did this come from?
Edward Frenkel: Yes. So there was this one thing which I found absolutely incredible. And that's called P-adic numbers so it's a P and there is a little hyphen and then adic.
A D I C. P-adic numbers. So it turns out in addition to the numerical system that we are used to such as well actually let's just say real numbers. So real numbers. So meaning real lines, they're called the points on the real line. Including zero, one half, pi, you know, e, the square root of two, golden ratio, and so on, right. So real numbers? It includes all rational numbers which are ratios of whole numbers, whole numbers themselves, but it turns out that there is sort of a parallel world to the world of real numbers. And that's the world of P-adic numbers, so P here is a prime number. So it could be two, three, five, seven, eleven, etcetera. Let's fix a prime number, let's say five. Then there exists this five-adic numbers. There is this collection of numbers, it includes rational numbers, just like real numbers include rational numbers. But they have totally different properties. So what do I mean by numbers? They form these numbers, P-adic numbers, they are elements of this set which have fundamental properties very similar to the properties of real numbers. You can add them together, you can multiply them, there is a zero element, there is an element one, there is negative of every element. And then there is a multiplicative inverse for every non-zero element. So it's what mathematicians call a field. And it contains rational numbers. And in a certain sense it is a completion of rational numbers, the way real numbers is a completion of rational numbers. But it has totally different properties. So for instance whereas a real number you can write in decimal form, where each digit after the decimal point represents a piece which is smaller and smaller. So for instance if you have something point one, it means like one over ten. And this point zero one is one over hundred. Right?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: So and so on, it becomes exceedingly smaller. But the P-adic numbers, a five-adic number say so let's say that P is five. P which has to be a prime we can choose P to be five which is a prime, then we have this five-adic numbers. And the five-adic numbers each next number is bigger. So point one would be five.
Point zero one would be twenty-five. So the convergence property is exactly opposite. It's like you reverse. You have binocular but you reverse the binocular. So the notion of distance for these numbers is reversed from the notion of… it's kind of reversed from the notion of distance for real numbers.
Brandy Haran: How have we not a Numberphile video about this yet?
Edward Frenkel: I don't know, okay. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) That could be next on our list.
Edward Frenkel: Alright.
Brandy Haran: So that was an example of something that… yeah…
Edward Frenkel: So that I actually remember how when I first read about it and I tried to understand what these numbers look like. It looked so counter-intuitive and I was reading… so this was I read a very nice book about them. Which my teacher, my new teacher, my mentor, Evgeny Evgenievich gave me. And I remember this I could not sleep all night long just think about it. How is it possible that this thing converges even though it doesn't converge?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: (laughs) You see?
Brandy Haran: Yeah so.
Edward Frenkel: So that was one thing which really stood out. That's one concept and it kind of helped me to see this hidden side of mathematics. When I say hidden I mean from the point of view of a student who just goes to regular classes in high school or whatever.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Edward Frenkel: Where normally they didn't talk about this stuff. This sort of really ideas, kind of like outrageous ideas. Like really crazy, like wow exciting ideas which are very counter-intuitive. Captivating things. This was to me like an epitome of that.
Brandy Haran: Take me to the end of school then. Like what happens as you come to the end of high school? You're still getting obviously excellent marks at school and…
Edward Frenkel: Yes. Yes. And I'm super exciting about all this stuff and every Monday whatever it was I don't remember which day of the week. I would go meet with Evgeny Evgenievich and so then it becomes clear so this my last year of high school it becomes clear that I want to be a mathematician.
Brandy Haran: A lot of people who I've spoken to who are mathematicians now when I speak to them, they always say to me when I was in high school I didn't even know what a mathematician was, I didn't know it was a job. But it sounds like because of your exposure to Evgeny, you did know what a mathematician was.
Right?
Edward Frenkel: Right. And he was, you know he was actually looked like a mathematician too in some sense.
Brandy Haran: yeah. (chuckles)
Edward Frenkel: So he had these thick glasses. (laughs) I was wearing glasses at the time too by the way.
Brandy Haran: Okay. (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: I was a totally nerdy kid (laughs).
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And he was wearing glasses and he was just a chainsmoker also. (laughs)
Not necessarily a good thing.
Brandy Haran: No. (chuckles)
Edward Frenkel: But and he was just sort this guy very smart, you know, and he had this stubble of a beard you know…
Brandy Haran: Did you want to be like him? like was…
Edward Frenkel: So in some ways I guess I wanted to be like him, yes. Yes.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. yeah.
Edward Frenkel: So he fit the profile. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay, so you were at the end of high school, I wanna be a mathematician, what do you do next? How does this happen?
Edward Frenkel: So I talk to him about it and he says look, there is basically only one place in Moscow. First of all I would have to go to Moscow, obviously not applying to this little school, you know, this little college. There was not much opportunity after that, getting a diploma. Even though remarkably it had a professor like that, you know, so it wouldn't be such a bad thing necessarily but yeah I was shooting sort of for the stars. Okay I wanna go to Moscow, which was not that far away. And Moscow had the best schools in the Soviet Union, also St. Petersburg which was much farther away.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: Okay so the only school, only place where you could study pure mathematics. Not applied mathematics in other words mathematics in connection to some real world problems. Specific problems, but pure mathematics just for the sake of it so to speak, which is what I had been studying for a year by then. That place was Moscow State University. And was just this grand building you know like, sixty or seventy story building, beautiful in Moscow which I had seen on postcards and I had seen it when I came to Moscow so it was clear that I have to apply to that. It was the department of mathematics and mechanics and that's where all the best mathematicians of the Soviet Union worked.
Brandy Haran: Okay so you've applied…
Edward Frenkel: And I applied. Yes. And interesting enough the year was 1984, I'm not making this up (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: So the readers of George Orwell will see the parallel. This is the last year before Perestroika. So Gorbachov comes to power in 1985 and the Soviet Union starts changing. First slowly then faster and faster and then to the point in '91 it disintegrates and collapses, right?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: But this is 1984 and exactly the quiet before the storm. So the total stagnation, the total everything is controlled by the party Apparatchiks, and ideology and so on. And one of the consequences of that, unbeknownst to me, because you know I was sixteen years old, I'm sixteen years old at the time?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: When I present myself to the exams, entrance exams, unbeknownst to me in Moscow University they had this sort of cabal of anti-semites, these professors who kind of completely controlled the admission process. And this happened… there actually there is a bunch of articles about this that had been published in recent years. Apparently it all started in the Seventies. So by then they were deeply entrenched for about ten years, these people. And they completely controlled the admission process. And they had a very sophisticated in place to fail students who had anything to do with Jewish nationality. Not religion mind you, so it's very interesting. Because in the United States or in Europe people say Jewish it usually means in a religious sense.
Brandy Haran: Yes.
Edward Frenkel: But we're talking about the Soviet Union where religion was all but nonexistent. My father was Jewish by blood, not by religion, so he was not… he was an atheist actually. And his parents were not religious either. And my mother was Russian and the only religious person in my family was my maternal grandmother and she was an Orthodox Christian. So she actually went to church and she would cross me before my exams. (laughs) You know so that was the only exposure to religion. But the authorities tracked nationality, they call it nationality, so it means by blood. So for instance everybody had a passport, internal passport, where they would put your first name, patronymic name, last name, date of birth and then number five, the fifth line would be nationality. And so in my case the nationality was written as Russian. One parents was Russian, was deemed to be Russian, the other parent was deemed to be Jewish. So I could choose. But my last name clearly sounded Jewish. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Right.
Edward Frenkel: And in fact my father in his passport had Jewish as nationality.
Brandy Haran: I know you weren't aware of this discrimination that was happening, but were you very aware of your Jewishness? Like would you have known oh yeah my dad has Jewish in his passport and…
Edward Frenkel: That's a very good question, so I was… when I first found out I was shocked.
Brandy Haran: Right?
Edward Frenkel: I was completely…
Brandy Haran: So it wasn't part of your upbringing? It was just… yeah?
Edward Frenkel: Not at all. My father had no interest somehow in actually in language or culture.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: Which is not necessarily a good thing, but in the Soviet Union it was kind of dangerous to venture into those territories. And there was a lot of unfortunately anti-semitism at the kind of domestic level. You know kind of like just kind of… I'm sure that some parents would make remarks to their kids, so it was just sort of in the air. It was sort of in the air. So when I was about eleven or twelve there were a bunch of kids in my school who took on you know bullying me and taunting me, like you're a Jew, you're a Jew. And that's when I found out. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay so…
Edward Frenkel: According to them I was a Jew, so I didn't know what it meant, but it meant to endure their insults.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: Luckily there was one guy, there was one classmate of mine, only one who stood by me.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Edward Frenkel: And so these people… these kids they would surround me if I were alone they'd probably beat me up, but because there was this friend who would always stand by me, and interestingly enough he came from the poorest family. He was very bright guy but he came from the poorest family. But he had a moral, you know, compass. I would say, many years, you know, I had the opportunity to thank him for this.
Brandy Haran: Brilliant.
Edward Frenkel: Because I said you know, you really did something important, for me. So he would stand by me so these bullies were not, they were afraid, because I was kind of… I wasn't… yeah I was nerdy kid but I was strong, so I could hit back. You know and then with my friend together we would actually… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay, you had the firepower (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: …beat them back… but that was the first time I found out that I was Jewish.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: In that sense, that's being different.
Brandy Haran: But you didn't think this could potentially hold your career back.
Edward Frenkel: But… I did not, not at all.
Brandy Haran: Did Evgeny know? Evgeny sounds like he was a man of the world and knew mathematics. Could he not say, hang on you might struggle here to get into the university? Or did he not know that either?
Edward Frenkel: Well because we lived in this provincial town, people didn't really know what was going on in Moscow. In Moscow everybody knew, but we were kind of under the impression we though… why would anybody bother with mathematics because it's nothing to do with Defense for example or anything like this. We were naive kind of, me and my parents we were naive, and we didn't know any stories of people who were denied entrance.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: But we knew stories of physics departments where Jewish students would be denied entrance.
Brandy Haran: Oh okay.
Edward Frenkel: And the story was it's because the government is afraid that they would emigrate to Israel with their secrets and take with them the State secrets or something. You know, But math? Who cares about math secrets?
Brandy Haran: So what happens when you apply to Moscow then? Do you sit the exam and like do you actually sit exams and...?
Edward Frenkel: There was a written exam, mathematics written exam, then mathematics oral exam and then there were two more, there was literature composition and there was a physics. So written mathematics exam I actually solved… I just went and solved all the problems. Even though everybody said you cannot solve the last problem. It's an unsolvable. But I didn't know I couldn't do it so I did it, you know (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay (laughs) and solved it!
Edward Frenkel: I solved! And so afterwards I came home and Evgeny Evgenievich came to our place and I explained to him all the problems and solutions and said everything's correct. So I was actually happy, what are these people talking about, by that time I kind of got the whiff that this might happen, that they might fail me, I got some idea about that, but I was in denial.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: I was very upbeat, and kind of like okay they're gonna give me an A and I'm just gonna sail through.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. You'll be the exception because you're so brilliant.
Edward Frenkel: Exactly! Exactly, how can they fail me? Right? So then there was an oral exam a few days later and that's when crazy stuff started happening.
Brandy Haran: Oay.
Edward Frenkel: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: So what they were like saying solve the Riemann hypothesis? (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: (laughs) No! In some ways it was much much worse. First of all you are in this room with like twenty other kids and you have to pick out a ticket so it's like a ticket a little piece of paper, and there're two questions… there is a list of questions which is given in advance, there may be eighty questions, each students gets two, have to answer two, and then there may be follow up questions.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: So I get my ticket, my two questions, and then I have to sit down and prepare and my ticket, and first of all I knew all of it. Through and through. And those were particularly simple, after two minutes I raised my hands, I'm ready. And there are three examiners in the room and none of them… they all look through me. They don't come to me. So finally I grab one of them by that time in like half an hour or fifteen minutes other kids start you know raising their hands.
One of them I just grabbed his by his jacket and I said why are you not talking to me? And he says we are not supposed to talk to you. That's when I… is like the reality hit home. You know it's like, uh oh.
Brandy Haran: So you eventually did get to do it, did you? The oral exam?
Edward Frenkel: So then a special group…
Brandy Haran: Ahh…
Edward Frenkel: A special two examiners arrive.
Brandy Haran: Oh okay.
Edward Frenkel: And they come to the front table in front…
Brandy Haran: Okay the bad cops
Edward Frenkel: …and they are like (grunts) and they point at finger at me. I was the only one, the ostracized one in this room.
Brandy Haran: Okay. okay.
Edward Frenkel: And I was like okay my inquisitors have arrived.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: You know?
Brandy Haran: The men in black.
Edward Frenkel: The men in… well yeah much worse. It was on the one hand well… when I look back… on the one hand really what a terrible thing to do to a sixteen, seventeen year old…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Edward Frenkel: …child you know, and a lot of my friends who went through this, future friends who I met later, who we shared the same story, so some of them never recovered. So they kind of really suffered from this.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: Because the way they… it was approached was the worst possible. If they actually came to us and said, look you are fifty percent Jewish, fifty percent of you blood comes from Jewish you know family whatever and that's why we cannot accept. So okay, so you are like this is a draconian unfair you know policy.
Brandy Haran: Mmm.
Edward Frenkel: But it's not because I'm not good enough, it's just because that's how it is, so I will have to deal with it. That's not what they said. Because it would be illegal to say that, because in the Soviet Union of course all nationalities are equal.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Edward Frenkel: So they had to trick you and give you questions which on the surface looked like normal questions but would ten hundred times harder which they would never give to regular applicant. And then they would pretend those were the real questions that they give to everybody and because you didn't solve them you are actually not good enough.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Edward Frenkel: And that a lot of people including myself were traumatized by at some level. So you know it was really really tough experience. Because my exam was about four hours and I fought with everything I got. You know (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah
Edward Frenkel: But in my… well I'm not sure how much in my book Love and Math, I actually describe some of the questions that they give me.
Brandy Haran: Right?
Edward Frenkel: And there is a lot of testimony… there are actually articles been published with lists of problems. It's actually to see now it's a kind of a historical artifact. To what length these people went to be able to deny something to people that they hated for no reason at all. My examiners had never met me. In fact interesting enough after the exam I happen to be one on one with one of them in the elevator and he was giving me compliments. He said you're so brilliant, you know. So why was he doing that? And to what length to go to do that to somebody you never met, right? To what lengths, how much effort they put to create these problems, meticulously. These problems which look like… they were called Coffin Problems for some reason.
Brandy Haran: Coffin Problems.
Edward Frenkel: Coffin, yes, coffin. Because they want to put you in a coffin, you know?
With this problem. So it is deceivingly simple, you know but then… and you can if you do google Coffin Problems Moscow State University you'll find plenty of them. If any of the listeners are interested they can find essays… nowadays if you don't think too much about the history and what this actually meant to a lot of human beings, real human beings who suffered tremendously from this, but you just look at it as a mathematical problem it's actually really interesting. It's kind of an interesting challenging quest, come up with some problems which look like high school, like regular high school problems and yet… even professors will be stumped by them. You know so really complicated, they're really hard to solve. So that's what happened. So in the end was I was denied… I was failed.
Brandy Haran: Did you come away from that experience with what you talked about thinking I'm not as good as I thought I was? Or did you know they stitched me up? I am good enough but they stitched me up here. Which of those two were you?
Edward Frenkel: I knew. I knew that they stitched me up. I knew that it was unfair. So…
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: Luckily for me.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: Luckily.
Brandy Haran: It's almost like your ego was intact almost because of that?
Edward Frenkel: No actually, more… it was more than that I was resolved to prove them wrong.
Brandy Haran: Ahh.
Edward Frenkel: So it gave me that fuel actually. So…
Brandy Haran: But what can you do? There's only one university to do this?
Edward Frenkel: Yes so… an interesting thing happened at the end of this four hour exam.
Is that one of those two inquisitors, one of those two… and they were so nasty you know, they'd be like this is wrong, like what is the definition of a circle? And I'm like a circle is a set of points on a plane equidistant from given point. And he says no! That's wrong! I was like… what? How could this be wrong? It's a set of all points equidistant from a… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Right.
Edward Frenkel: Yeah it was like you didn't put the article in the right place.
Brandy Haran: Okay, yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And they'd be so cheerful about like finding this little nitpicking, you know?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: But suddenly when after the exam I told him I actually want withdraw my application. They were worried because sometimes people would apply and then they would have to clean up the mess sometimes, you know, so that it will then come out easy for them if the person is broken by this process and they just withdraw themselves.
Brandy Haran: Okay, yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And not appeal. Sometimes people appeal… there was an appeal process.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: But I decide not to go through thank god because it would be totally futile. And I said you know I want to get out of here and he said… and I said but by that time it's like seven or eight PM and it's like how could I get my application because there's actually stuff like documents which I actually like left in their admission committee. And he said oh it's okay I take you there, I have a key. And so we were in the elevator for a couple of minutes or a minute, just the two of us and that's when he suddenly starts giving me compliments and he says oh you are so brilliant. How come? You know. And I was like… you gotta be kidding me.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: But he gave me a good advice, he told there is one school in Moscow which takes students like you…
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: (laughs) You see…
Brandy Haran: Like you… yeah.
Edward Frenkel: Like you… and it was… and he gave me the name it was a university which was called Oil and Gas University. Which sounds strange, right? Why an aspiring mathematician would want to go to Oil and Gas Institute? But this Oil and Gas Institute had a small applied mathematics program.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: And so I took him at his word, because I figured why would he be lying at this point?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And I actually applied and indeed they did accept me. And moreover ninety precent of the kids… it was much smaller program, there were like one-tenth of the Moscow University Math Department but ninety percent of my classmates in that school… suffered the same fate that I did.
Brandy Haran: Right. So they had Jewish parents?
Edward Frenkel: Jewish parents, or they were… some of them, but almost all of them were from Moscow. So they actually went to special schools and stuff and so for them it was even more outrageous. Like I came from this provincial town so in principle you could say you come from this provincial town, your knowledge is just not good enough here in Moscow.
Brandy Haran: You were sort of almost still ahead of the game because now you're at least at a Moscow University.
Edward Frenkel: Right right, but those kids they shared stories and their… in some sense what happened to them was a lot more outrageous…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: Because they were like… like they had classmates like dozens of classmates who were accepted and whose oral exam would be like fifteen minutes and they would be like you know, you're in! And for me it was like hours and for them as well. So anyways, so that was how I got a foothold finally in Moscow. And that university was really nice in many ways… it gave…
Brandy Haran: Was that an inferior education though? Was it?
Edward Frenkel: No… well it's not inferior. It was just different because… certain level was really high and people, the professors were really great as human beings and as professionals that we didn't have obviously the greatest mathematicians some of who were at this Moscow University. But also the drawback was that because it was geared towards applied area some of the hardcore math courses, pure math courses, were not taught. So I had to learn this on my own basically.
Brandy Haran: Hmm. Okay so there was again the little bit of self education on the side?
Edward Frenkel: Oh yes, a lot. So here's what… it's interesting that what happened was so first of all I was lucky to be at this school because as I said many of my classmates actually came from the tradition of like really best math education in Moscow. In Moscow there were specialized schools for mathematics. And most of the kids in my class, my classmates you know, at this Oil and Gas University were from those schools. And so they knew… they had many classmates who actually were accepted to Moscow University, so they could find out what's going on, what courses, what seminars and so on.
Brandy Haran: Oh okay.
Edward Frenkel: And for instance one of the kids who was a classmate of several of my classmates his father was like a great mathematician who was a professor at Moscow University and he was very kind and he always welcomed us at his seminars.
Brandy Haran: At Moscow State?
Edward Frenkel: At Moscow State. However to get into Moscow State was not easy.
Because the building was guarded by the police. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: You know its funny because I… at some point after my book was published I was interviewed by somebody and I recounted this part of the story and the interview you know she said, hmm interesting she said in this country they tried to keep students inside (laughs) the university.
Brandy Haran: You're sneaking in!
Edward Frenkel: In Russia they tried to keep… so at uni they tried to keep you outside.
Brandy Haran: How were you getting in? Were you having to sneak through backdoors or…?
Edward Frenkel: So my classmates they were, you know, clued in. You know, so they knew what was going on so they said there is a way. So you go on the side of the building where there is an entrance for the trucks for the cafeteria…
Brandy Haran: Ahh.
Edward Frenkel: And there was a gate which was a little bit crooked and so you could kind of climb up almost to the top of the… and it was big it was like a big gate maybe up five, six yards. You climb to the top and then it kind of gives you an opening and you can sneak in.
Brandy Haran: Sneaky.
Edward Frenkel: And then we would walk into the cafeteria and through the cafeteria with all these cooks looking at us who are these guys?
Brandy Haran: Yeah. You're like, we're here! Where's the mathematics? (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: (laughs) and run through the cafeteria and come out and then take the elevator to the… it's crazy you know if you think about it. Later on, two or three years later, I was able to get an ID, a pass to be able to walk through the front door. But you could not get through the front door, there was a policeman, there were several policeman there, so they would not allow somebody who is not registered as a student. But we found a way, we'd climb over the fence and go. So I was continuing to meet Evgeny Evgenievich occasionally when I came home, you now, on the weekends…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: But basically it was kind of after a year or two of in this school I was kind of running out o steam. And that's when I was… I lucked out again. So there was again a human being, a generous human being who took me under his wing. And he was a great great mathematician. His name is… since we follow the Tolstoy tradition, so his patronymic name Dmitri Borisovich. Dmitri Borisovich Fuchs. And actually interesting enough Fuchs immigrated to the United States about 20 years… no more than maybe… almost thirty years ago and he's a professor at UC Davis. Not so far away from me and he just turned eighty.
Brandy Haran: Uh huh, right.
Edward Frenkel: On October 1st… on September 30th. And I actually dedicated to him my… one of my recent math papers. So it's kind of an interesting…
Brandy Haran: How did…
Edward Frenkel: …reminder to me of how much I owe him, you know, and his generosity.
Brandy Haran: How did you come to cross paths with him?
Edward Frenkel: It was kind of by chance. The whole thing sounds really improbable but there was a person in my school who kind of took a note of me. And then he had a… he was a very good mathematician in his own right and still is. And he had a problem that he had to solve which was in the area of topology which was an area where Fuchs was king. And so in those days it was quite common that these people they all knew each other. So he would ask Fuchs how to solve this problem. And Fuchs said I don't know but it shouldn't be very hard. Normally I would give it to a good graduate student to solve. But since you work at this Oil and Gas Institute with these unfortunate souls who were denied entrance, why don't you find a bright guy in there and give him… him or her my phone number so that I could supervise their little research on this.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Edward Frenkel: In private.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: You see?
Brandy Haran: YEah.
Edward Frenkel: So my professor… so Fuchs could give it to somebody in Moscow University but he was mindful of what's going on and people like him they wanted to help, they wanted to find some little way in which to at this to help somebody to overcome the system, you see? So for me it's always like this story like people say…
Brandy Haran: Is his thinking… could there be like you know a Ramanujan hidden there in the Oil and Gas or is it like, this is sort of cheap grateful labor or…?
Edward Frenkel: Oh no not cheap or grateful labor… for sure not! No, I think it is really a human being, a decent human being trying to help those who were unfairly treated. Treated unfairly.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: You know? And so to me it's like people… you know… I talk to all kinds of people and over here there's like the system is so rotten and so on you know?
Yes, it's true, perhaps, you know, but in some sense that's the job the system to be rotten. So the job of the system is to block. That's how… it's kind of an inertia. So of course sometimes it takes grotesque proportions, like denying you know sixteen year olds entrance to university which is absolutely atrocious and terrible. But by and large you have to expect that there will be obstacles. So in my case there were maybe a little bit too much but all of need for obstacles. One way or another. If you try to do something different, if you try to do something sort of even slightly off the beaten path…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: sure enough you will meet resistance. So first of all don't be surprised, don't take it personally, and keep going and keep following your heart, keep following what you think is right and at some point somebody will come and appear and open… so I had to climb over the fence…
Brandy Haran: Literally…
Edward Frenkel: Literally. And yet because I did not give up for two years, you know, doing this in Moscow. There was this man who appeared and he basically he's like okay, here is a hidden door, I'll let you… I'll take you.
Brandy Haran: And you impressed him?
Edward Frenkel: And then I impressed him and I very quickly I wrote my first paper, so I was eighteen years old you know, and my career took off. And three years later I was a visiting professor at Harvard.
(gentle violin music)
Brandy Haran: How did you get from writing your first paper at eighteen to suddenly being at Harvard? That seems like a quantum leap.
Edward Frenkel: But can you imagine! So for me now to speak about that kid you know, that teenager that I was, can you imagine the drive. Can you image how much he wanted to succeed and to prove those people wrong.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: You thought I was not good enough… well let me show you. Let me show you. So in that sense when I look back of course that… being failed… having been failed like this brutally you know it was a horrible horrible experience yet at the same time if I was strong enough then it gave me that energy.
Brandy Haran: Hmm. Hmm.
Edward Frenkel: That energy.
Brandy Haran: Steel.
Edward Frenkel: Steel. That motivation. To work harder. And that's why you realize that actually these obstacles have these two fold, there are two things. So the essence it may be something very difficult
Brandy Haran: It would break a lot of people though
Edward Frenkel: It actually could break people too but if you are able to just hold tight and kind of say no I'm going to do, then actually you can turn it around. It's kind of like a Jiu Jitsu kind of move, so suddenly you use that momentum of your opponent to actually propel you to the next height. You use that energy to actually go further that you would… I would never have got… I'm pretty sure I would have never achieved, you know, as much as I did in such a short period of time had I not been subjected to this very unfair treatment. You know where I knew deep that it was wrong. And I have to show… I have to prove. So that was important. Of course then as I said I owe this tremendous gratitude to my teachers. So there's was Fuchs and then there was another fellow, who was his student and his co-author. Boris Feigin who became my teacher… my real like close collaborator and teacher and so by fourth year he and I wrote… Feigin and I wrote a bunch of papers which kind of became well known. So they say. And based on that reputation I receive a letter from the president of Harvard University… barely twenty-one, in last year of college in Moscow. And I receive a letter and the letterhead of President of Harvard University, signed by Derek Bach who was the president of Harvard University at the time, 1989. Saying we would like to invite you as a visiting professor.
Brandy Haran: Huh. Amazing. So obviously does this mean mathematicians at Harvard had seen your papers and just said, we've gotta get this young guy?
Edward Frenkel: Yes. And there were people who were apparently had high opinion of me who kind of also whispered in the ear of those who made decisions.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: So there were many angels so to speak. Many guardian angels who helped me so along the way.
Brandy Haran: This sounds like a stupid question, I'm sorry if it is. Did you speak English at this point?
Edward Frenkel: (laughs) It's funny you would ask.
Brandy Haran: (chuckles)
Edward Frenkel: I had difficulties, you know. The first time I went to the supermarket in Boston, I couldn't find salt, you know?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And was… I kept… well part of it was that I was overwhelmed by the abundance of food…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: Because in the Soviet Union at that time… in 1989… there was nothing on the shelves. Nothing you had to know somebody to buy from the backdoor, you know? From a supermarket. There was no such thing supermarket, actually, they were like small shops. Anyway so I was just… I think I was hypnotized by this. I was just wandering the aisles… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: It's like what is this?! And I tried to ask people where is salt.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And I couldn't understand what they were saying.
Brandy Haran: So you could speak like broken English?
Edward Frenkel: I could speak, I could give seminars at Harvard, you know, I could talk my mathematical work and in fact I wrote my paper which brought me to Harvard in English.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: But my colloquial English (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Was just not good?
Edward Frenkel: Left something to desire.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Okay.
Edward Frenkel: So the way I learned actually… what was helpful apart from looking for salt at… (laughs) Boston supermarket, was watching late night television.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: David Letterman was… (laughs) king of… well as far as I was concerned anyway was king of late night at the time. And I was watching him religiously.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: And then videotaping and watching the next day and trying to like… would play the same sentence several times to understand what… what was it that he was saying.
Brandy Haran: So without being too… without being too technical and if it's possible.
What is the area of mathematics at this point that you've made your name in?
These papers you wrote that were so groundbreaking and the things that brought you to Harvard? What's this area of mathematics called?
Edward Frenkel: The general area which I mean it's the focus of my research is called the Langlands Program after a mathematician Robert Langlands. He's a Canadian born mathematician and is currently Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where incidentally he occupies the office of Albert Einstein.
Brandy Haran: Huh. Nice.
Edward Frenkel: So about fifty years ago he came up with these groundbreaking ideas about connecting problems in two different fields of mathematics. Number theory and harmonic analysis. And there were a lot of people got very excited about this and it sort of became this big area of research. But actually what happened next was even more surprising that other mathematicians found very similar patterns, similar things in other areas of math. Including geometry, and then later quantum physics. So in fact… (laughs) you will… those who will listen from the beginning will appreciate this (laughs) my research in the last few years had been on the interface of mathematics and quantum physics.
Brandy Haran: Ah you got there!
Edward Frenkel: Exactly the kind of stuff I wanted to do, you know?
Brandy Haran: You got there in the end! (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay, right and…
Edward Frenkel: It's a Hollywood ending, you know. Although it's a continuance in some sense.
Brandy Haran: Did the move to the United States really boost your ability and your career? I can imagine to some extent it might make you… fat and lazy?
Edward Frenkel: Oh, sure.
Brandy Haran: You might think I've made it, I don't need to prove anything to anyone anymore. What became your motivation to keep succeeding once you succeeded?
Edward Frenkel: (chuckles) Right. Right. Well, I guess the spring was coiled so tight you know.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: After that exam that it could last many more years.
Brandy Haran: That one day… what that one day did for your life.
Edward Frenkel: That one day, oh my god yeah.
Brandy Haran: The scars of that one day.
Edward Frenkel: It's incredible, yeah. And took so many years for me to actually come to terms with. Because for many years I was in denial of what happened. So I didn't fully appreciate what a traumatic event actually it had been for me.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: So it took a lot of pain and sort of difficulties took actually reconcile myself with that child, that sixteen year old, whom I kind of left on that battle field.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Edward Frenkel: Which is normal. You know that's what we do. But if we are lucky we come back, eventually when we get stronger we come back and so and to bring him back and to be more in touch with that reality and also appreciate that reality also. So it was tough but we made it, you know we did well. You know? And so but why do it? So I guess it's because I'm really interested. I'm really… I think as we reach a certain middle age you know, I'm now fifty-one so I think it's natural to start asking why do it. So I had this period a few years ago when I actually start questioning, do I actually love it or do I do it just by inertia, you know? And there was a lot of sort of contemplation of this, it wasn't clear what the answer. And I knew that I was ready to move on to something else if I don't like it anymore, you know?
Brandy Haran: What… away from mathematics?
Edward Frenkel: Yeah. I could. I would. It was like why… and this came with these discoveries of my past and like I said early the really understand what happened when I was sixteen and a lot of other things that happened in Soviet Union which some of that was beautiful but some of them less so, you know? So when I felt much more in touch with myself and I was kind of more prepared to be honest with myself with what am I doing? Why am I doing this? And also the fear of… so like I saw how much of my daily life and my research even is driven by fear. So I want to be relevant for instance. I want to still produce articles that people cite and invite me to conferences and stuff like that. So I'm still relevant, you know? That idea is based on fear. So it's like I'm afraid to be… that you don't remember about me. So who cares? What matters whether you love doing it or not, right? And so… because it's very easy to get… just go by inertia. Write one paper, then write the next one and just go day after day. Writing my book, which was about six years ago it was published was very helpful because it helped me appreciate more what mathematics really is about. The beauty of it. Because I had to… I felt compelled to articulate for others and articulated for myself as well (chuckles).
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: I remember that night I mentioned earlier, you know, when I couldn't sleep because of these P-adic numbers. I still get goosebumps when I think about it, you know, so there is that thing which is just… I just love it, I am curious about. I want to know, you know. So that's ultimately I think is what motivates us. It's because we're really curious, because it's such a beautiful subject.
Unfortunately very few people get to see how beautiful this… unlike art or literature or movies where it's much more readily available. Mathematics is hidden. So but more and more people now doing a good job exposing this beauty to others.
Brandy Haran: So your book, and I will link to your book in the notes to the podcast, it's sort of your book seems to have two threads. It's this biographical story and you really wanna get some of this stuff off your chest about what happened in Russia and how wrong you think that was. But you've also got this agenda of wanting to talk to people about the beauty of mathematics and how that's not shown enough. What should someone take from the book? What were you trying to accomplish? What was your main goal?
Edward Frenkel: Interesting enough, what I discovered through this process is that whatever the author thinks, they're doing. Will not be the case… but true because there could be some unconscious motives which he or she is not aware of. So that certainly was the case for m. Here's how I would describe… if you and I had spoke about it, you know, in 2012, '13, when I was writing it. So the analogy I make is imagine an art class in which they only teach you how to paint fences and walls but never show you the paintings of the great masters. Then of course you will say, I hate art. But in fact what you would really be saying is I hate painting the fence, and so it is with mathematics, we teach our children to teach them how to paint fences and never show them the mathematics of the great masters, right? So and for me being exposed to all this I just felt ashamed that we, mathematicians, are not finding ways… of course it's more abstract than art in some ways, you know? So and there are no museums already now, although now more and more math museums appear as well. I felt this urge to share. I thought it was such a shame. I was really ashamed that I'm not doing enough. So here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to write this book and I'm going to let other people see that beauty that I can see.
Brandy Haran: So you were gonna like showcase some of the masterpieces?
Edward Frenkel: Yes! But how to do it? Because I understand it's difficult.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And I tried to do it other ways and I could see how difficult it is so I decided to wrap it in a personal story, as a kind of trick to show this kid who is so excited about the subject and then he faces obstacles, has to overcome them and yet he has this drive. But why? Because he finds it beautiful, but what is about… so the reader would then come, I thought would come across this and say, what did he find so exciting? And that's when I will explain.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And the reader would be well motivated to listen. You see?
Brandy Haran: Because there's a character they want to… empathize.
Edward Frenkel: There is a character. It's a story and yes so that was the idea. But what I realized later is actually I had to tell the story to myself also. Because a lot of that I was… I knew this as a third… in a third person. Not in a first person. I did not fully identify myself with that kid who was ruthlessly treated. Unfairly treated at that time. So as I was writing it, it brought me close to that… to myself, right? So however interestingly enough when I was writing I think, what was… who was writing? It was the sixteen year old who was writing. So I think this way I was able to connect to the readers. It was not Edward who was you know in his forties at the time who was writing but… I was not yet communicating with my sixteen year old. But I allowed him to write. To speak. His voice to be heard through the book because I wanted the book to be successful you see. And interesting enough through this process I got to know him more and so soon after the book was published I was actually able to see more clearly not at a conceptual level… oh there was this guy I went there, I sat there, and I did this I did that. But to actually feel, to feel the pain which he felt. Which was tremendous amount of pain.
Brandy Haran: So do you think the books greatest success is it's ability to tell the story of the pain and Edward's journey, or do you think it's success was showcasing the masterpieces, which is what you set out to do?
Edward Frenkel: But how can you separate the two? (laughs) You see?
Brandy Haran: When people talk to you about it what do they want…
Edward Frenkel: Both! Both, so but sometimes interestingly enough because sometimes I think the way we communicate with each other, so for example somebody can be touched by a story because it may actually remind them, of something about themselves, but they may not be ready yet to frame it in these terms. But yet they could be drawn to it. So they might contact me and speak about how they were fascinating by the mathematics of it. But sometimes I can actually feel that actually there is more. So sometimes it is just a straight forward interest in mathematics. But usually it's more than that. I think that it touches upon some, one could say archetypal, you know, things in our lives… because we all have to overcome and we all have to go through pain and suffering. And you know in that sense just like mathematics is universal language so… Pythagoras Theorem means the same thing to everybody right anytime… x squared plus y squared equals z squared. That's why we love mathematics it's because it brings us together. But so do these personal experiences because when you tell me about something that you had to overcome, that you were mistreated and so on and yet you were able to succeed. That you failed and then you were able to succeed, I am with you at this moment because it reminds me of something that happened to me. And that's how we also find that we are not that different from each other.
Right so in that sense, these two parallel tracks are kind of… they are meant to be together! Because they are there to remind us of who we are, ultimately.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: I have to ask about one other artistic endeavor of yours. This is your controversial… (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …can I call it controversial?
Edward Frenkel: Yes.
Brandy Haran: (chuckles) Your controversial film which I have seen… which means I've seen a lot more of your flesh than I may have expected when we first met. Tell people about what this film is, how it came to be and what happened.
Edward Frenkel: Okay. Well, so first of all, this is crazy kind of thing. So and now in retrospect, so it's been ten years since this film was made, in 2009 in Paris with a group of really amazing dedicated people most of all with my co-director, Reine Graves, who is a French film director. This was really crazy crazy project. And I understand it now more clearly. Again I did not understand at the time so much. But it was sincere. It was a sincere effort, that's what matters in the end. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to… (heavy sigh)… break out of the kind of… I felt, you know, a little bit too… my life to be too circumscribed, too constrained. And of course a lot of it was… I'm not proud for the narcissism of it, in some sense, which kind of comes through a little bit. I want to be this guy on the screen. And of course yes, I did have this aspirations to be seen, you know, my naked body and so on. You know? Okay I admit of course. But it was not only that, so. There was more and so I was actually criticized for this film.
Brandy Haran: Can you describe like just in a nutshell what the film is, for people who are unfamiliar with it? So that it makes more sense.
Edward Frenkel: Okay. Well, I mean in some sense there are spoilers.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: But okay so at this point I guess it doesn't… whoever wants to see it… it is available by the way online.
Brandy Haran: Oh Okay.
Edward Frenkel: On a very nice website called labocine.com. First of all it's a homage to Japanese film by the great author Yukio Mishima who also himself played in his film.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Edward Frenkel: Which was called Rights of Love and Death, and our film is called Rights of Love and Math. So that came before the book, so in fact the title of the book was a riff on the title of the film.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: And but they're unrelated. Although they're related by the idea of trying to show mathematics in an unconventional way. In the case of a film the idea was to have mathematical formula not written on a black board, but tattooed on a body.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And I think actually its a very good idea by itself because it kind of shows you that mathematics gets under your skin. So it kind shows this visceral character of it. So that a story of a researcher, story of a mathematician, a truth seeker if you will, it is a romantic story in some sense.
Brandy Haran: I'll tell you what as well, Ed, you were before you time, because these days when I meet young people and mathematicians, everyone has mathematic formulas and things to do with mathematics tattooed on their body.
Edward Frenkel: Well thank you for saying that, so…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: For me it was just an insight. It was just this a boom, it just came to me. And I was collaborating with this amazing french director and we bouncing ideas for a few months in 2009 about how to make a film where a viewer would be just kind of… we kind of wanted to shock the viewer a little bit. To just mathematics in a way which nobody ever had seen it before. And then suddenly you know what, what if we had a tattoo of a formula. And so then and one thing led to another and then we came up with this story and it's kind of a… it's a fairytale, it's a kind of a mythical story. And it is actually unfolding on stylized stage of a Japanese Noh theater. So it's a homage to this Japanese film, although the story is totally different. The premise of the film is that a mathematician played by me (laughs) of course… a mathematician finds a formula of love. So what happens next? Right. So he is elated that he has found this source of eternal love and beauty but of course… and youth… but of course the formula has a flip side. It can be misused. It can be used for evil, he discovers it quickly and now he is being chased by these sort of evil people. That are not specified. But actually see ten years ago I saw that which many of us are very much aware of the dangers of mathematics through surveillance, through actually the very first Numberphile I did was about the NSA putting a backdoor in a popular encryption algorithm, right?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: So some years before that I was already kind of interested in this idea that mathematics could be misused and used for evil. Also artificial intelligence, and all this stuff, so that is very much in the media, in the news, in the public domain.
At that time it was not so widely discussed in 2009. So that was one thing I was interested in. So he's being chased but of course there is a woman, there is a woman he is love with. And he wants to make tattoos of this formula on her body. Now a lot of people took this literally. And they were offended by this because they said why is mathematician a man and his love interest is a woman. I think a lot… many people who complained most of them actually did not see the whole film but maybe a trailer. And maybe they got slightly wrong idea but I think if they see actual film from beginning to end. And it's only twenty-six minutes. I think they may actually see it's not… how to say. It's not so trivial, you know. Yes, I agree and I am kind of… in retrospect maybe it would be more… it would make more sense to reverse the genders.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: Because I personally think that… and am not just being facile, or facetious, but I really mean it, I think that under-representation of women and minorities in general in mathematics is the single most important problem that we have to deal with. Because a lot of other things are consequences of that. And definitely we have to make an effort to bring more young women and minorities to mathematics. And be more… not just bring but be supportive, be compassionate.
Be aware of the plight of the difficulty of being in a minority, you know? So it's not something to say as slogan but something that requires sustained effort.
Having said that, the film was very personal for me and I see now it more clearly because actually I was both that man and that woman. So because in the end he kills himself, but she… at the end of the film she actually rises with that formula on her…
Brandy Haran: On her body.
Edward Frenkel: On her belly! So that was me. I wanted to be reborn. That feminine side which I had felt perhaps suppressed for many years, it wanted to burst out. So for me it was very personal, so the gender role distribution was a consequence of that very very personal character of this film. I could not articulate at the time. Actually I understood this later. Some people… interestingly enough some viewers saw it right away. That what I was talking about. I did not know it. I understood much later. And I saw very clearly that this was my desire, my wish to become more whole. More myself, to know who I am, to become more whole and more at peace with myself. And that included and required in fact reconnecting to my feminine side, also. So that moment in my mind in that film, that was me, that was that part… you see what I mean?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And so , so and of course she is… who is she? So the whole thing is a fairytale so we don't have to take it literally. She is mathematics herself. She is the truth. And in fact there is a painting on the wall which says, The Truth in Russian. So there's lot of stuff which is woven into it and I would just invite anybody who comes across this film not to rush to judgement or conclusions but try to see it and try to… try this to speak to you, not in conceptual terms but in more visceral terms. And see what you come out with. And of course nowadays we are so quick to label things and so on and so if somebody wants to label then maybe it's not for them this film. But I think somebody who wants to contemplate, who wants to see what is it like to experience something… because for us it is like a tattoo for us, because tattoo is painful, you know? I actually don't have any tattoos myself, but I know people who have and so its painful. But so is discovery in mathematics. It does not come for free. Nothing comes for free. You have to make an effort. And it's a metaphor for that. That it gets under our skill, and we carry it with us. Like a baby. One could say like a baby. That tattoo is made on the belly, you know, it's like his baby, you know? He's dead, he's gone but she… he… survives in that formula which is eternal.
Brandy Haran: In the film Edward's character does the tattoo, and it is an actual formula, is it?
Edward Frenkel: Yes.
Brandy Haran: Does it mean something?
Edward Frenkel: Oh yes it does. And it is from quantum physics of course (laughs) it's from one of my research papers with my two good friends physicists Andrei Losev and Nikita Nekrasov. Two Russians. Brilliant physicists. You know when we were making the film the question arose, which formula? So of course we don't want to do something cliche like E equals MC squared. Which is already well know, and so then I was like continuing this narcissistic streak I was like…
Brandy Haran: (chuckles)
Edward Frenkel: I want it to be my formula. Formula from one of my papers.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: So I did a casting (laughs) so I was like leafing through my papers…
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: …to find something which kind of looks nice, you know?
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Edward Frenkel: captivating, not just meaningful but also… because actually if you look at it… a lot of people kind of were touched by it I think. Got a lot of comments just that still image of the tattoo on the body. It's like wow, you know? So if… I felt if wrote the formula on a blackboard (chuckles) and tried to explain it most of the audience would walk out. But here we could… I think people could feel that energy of it. That it's not... spurious, it's not superficial mathematics. It's not… devoid of passion. It is not separate from our lives. It is actually a product of passion. A product of love. Everything that we do with our heart is something that is meaningful, and something that is like a work of art in some sense.
Brandy Haran: Was it one of the more obscure formulas? Or was it like a key plank of one of your papers?
Edward Frenkel: It was a very important formula, from our paper.
Brandy Haran: Okay, okay.
Edward Frenkel: Oh yes, definitely.
Brandy Haran: It wasn't just like a footnote on page eight that looked nice? (chuckles)
Edward Frenkel: Oh no, no no. No it's very… I'm very proud of this formula and I think it still hasn't been fully explained actually.
Brandy Haran: Has it got a name?
Edward Frenkel: In the movie it's called Formula of Love, (laughs)
Brandy Haran: yeah. What's it called in your paper?
Edward Frenkel: It has a certain numbering… I don't know. five point seventeen or something but…
Brandy Haran: oOkay. yeah.
Edward Frenkel: When… I know when I have show the film in various… at film festivals and stuff like, so invariably somebody would ask, so is this the Formula of Love, you know? (laughs) So…
Brandy Haran: How do you feel when you watch the film now? Cause talking to you I get like a feeling like… a feeling that you are proud of it but there's also like regrets or things that you would do differently, like how do you look at it now?
Edward Frenkel: I had a very complicated relationship with it. So I kind of didn't like it when it was… for many years. I was uneasy about it and it is a crazy thing. You know? I kind of like cannot believe I did this… honestly.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: I mean it's really crazy. But I am proud of it and I hadn't watched it for a long time and then a couple of years ago I watched it again. And it suddenly hit me what it was about, you know? And it was kind of emotional moment for me because when I saw what was unspoken. I was not ready to consciously… I was not consciously aware of a lot of things happening inside me and they spilled over on screen, you know, in this way. In this weird way, it is a weird film, I mean there's no question. So…
Brandy Haran: There's not a lot of talking in it. For people who…
Edward Frenkel: It is silent!
Brandy Haran: Yeah it is a silent film… with music.
Edward Frenkel: With Wagner! With… Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. My god it's incredible. That music.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And to have that. But I owe that… we owe that to Mishima because his film also had a Wagner score, although a different recording and different parts of the opera. But there are a lot of interesting things in there. Hidden things. So one thing maybe I write a book about it, because there are so many references which are I think people may not even be able to realize. So I have a complicated relationship with it. The way I see it now it… one could argue about its merits and so on. It's unusual film, it's a weird film. But what's… it was something that was necessary for me at the time. Without this film there wouldn't be my book, you know? Without it I would not be able to understand certain things about myself.
(violin music)
Brandy Haran: We often hear like you know mathematicians do their best work when they're young. You know, we have the Fields Medal for under forty year olds and things like that.
Edward Frenkel: Right.
Brandy Haran: Is your best work behind you? Or is your best work ahead of you? But also is your best work mathematics or artistic? Because you seem to like doing the arts and the math stuff now.
Edward Frenkel: (laughs) Well I sure hope my best is ahead of me. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Edward Frenkel: I may not be… actually interestingly enough, a lot of people know me not from my research, not from my book, but from my Numberphile videos. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (chuckles) Well then I hope your best work is ahead of you.
Edward Frenkel: So that's how I might be remembered actually, Brady. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Well you need to make more Numberphile videos then. (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: Yeah perhaps, perhaps. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Edward Frenkel: And so… yeah I don't know I mean I was just… I gave this talk in July at it was a public lecture in Sweden and I was quoting from a great compatriot of mine Sophia Kovalesky who was a Russian mathematician and she was the first woman mathematician who in Western history, you know Western civilization's history as far as we know who was a university professor… who had a PhD, was a university professor… was an editor of a prestigious mathematics journal, that was in the second half of 19th century and in Sweden in Stockholm, even though she was not allowed to take courses in Germany for instance. She was a student of great German mathematician Weierstrass but he had to teach her privately because being a woman she was not even allowed to sit in let alone be registered. So of course there is some parallels with… (laughs) I can see some parallels, you know?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Edward Frenkel: And so maybe that's why I feel with certain kinship with her. And she was also a writer. She was a great writer. She wrote a number of books which were successful, and she died a t a very young age. She was barely forty, from tuberculosis unfortunately. But absolutely brilliant human being and mathematician and writer and everything else inbetween. And so she wrote in a letter to somebody that you could not be a mathematician without being a poet at heart. A poet is someone who sees thing differently, sees farther than other and that's the job of mathematician as well. And I was really struck by this and when I was giving this lecture in July and then I kind of blurted it out, I wasn't preparing to say that but I said you know actually you don't have to be a mathematician to be a poet, you know, so anything you do that really comes from something deep inside that you really care, something we say from the heart but maybe it's a bit over used this expression. So let's just say from passion, that you are passionate about. Something you are passionate about is poetry.
That's what it is and so it's so easy to forget. So a lot of my math I would say is poetry, but some of it is not. So and it's okay, you know, there's certain things which are routine and so and so you can of do, but there are certain bursts of inspiration and I think we live for that, and it doesn't have to be math, it can be… or you know it doesn't have to be even a profession, it could be something in one's personal life. Helping somebody… that's passion too, that's poetry. And so in that sense I don't really care anymore, I guess, if I'm remembered as a mathematician or whatever, or if I'm remembered, you know, it doesn't matter. So it's more like do I do the right thing right now, do I do something… do I follow my passion today? So for instance I come to this to speak to you, Brady, and I honestly I say no to everybody these days, I don't want… there was a time in my life when I was super interested in being on the stage and being like…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Edward Frenkel: You know getting accolades and applause and so on. I really don't care so I care when it's meaningful and so I know you. That you do some… you do really incredible work with Numberphile and I deeply appreciate so when you give me this opportunity to speak I said yes without thinking because…
Brandy Haran: Thank you.
Edward Frenkel: It's just I feel like part of the family of Numberphile.
Brandy Haran: Yeah!
Edward Frenkel: And so it's a pleasure to speak, you know? So that's to me an example of something I did today which was from the heart. From the passion, you know? So it's real and I can sleep well tonight, you know? (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay, what's the thing you're chasing now though, is there something in the Langland's program that I won't understand, like is there?
Edward Frenkel: Oh yes!
Brandy Haran: So there is… what do you… what's motivating you in your passionate for mathematics now? There is a result out there you want, or a…?
Edward Frenkel: Yes, so there is this new version of Langland's program which I'm working on now. Kind of a new strand, you know, if you will, like a DNA, a new strand. With two great colleagues, one of whom was actually my classmate in
Moscow, in this Oil and Gas place.
Brandy Haran: Right?
Edward Frenkel: Believe it or not, but we never collaborated. He's a professor at MIT, his name is Pavel Etingof and the other one…
Brandy Haran: It sounds like that Oil and Gas University it produced some pretty good mathematicians.
Edward Frenkel: Yeah! Oh my god, yes! If you look at the list, it's like wow, you know, there's some really…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Edward Frenkel: I'm really proud to be from that school. And it's a separate story that I'm really grateful to that university, and it was not easy for them to do what they did. They gave us home, which was really really nice. But the second co-author was my actually one of my mentors when I came to Harvard, he's now a professor in Jerusalem, his name is David Kazhdan. So it's a very exciting project I've been working on with them for the last year and just this morning I was spoke with David on Skype, you know he's in Israel, I'm here. So it's like it's really exciting.
Brandy Haran: Are you winning that battle or losing? Who's winning (laughs) against the…
Edward Frenkel: We are going I think we're doing great. I think we're, yes, we'll keep progressing.
Brandy Haran: I have one more question. What happened to Evgeny? Did you say in touch with him?
Edward Frenkel: Yes! We have been in touch, yes, by email. I haven't seen him in long time.
Brandy Haran: He's still alive?
Edward Frenkel: Yes, he is. Yes his health was not so great recently, I'm keeping my fingers crossed but…
Brandy Haran: But he got to enjoy your success?
Edward Frenkel: But he read my book where I speak about him.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
(gentle music fades in)
Edward Frenkel: And he was happy about it, I say sometimes that my book is a love letter to my teachers you know? It's like… that's really the real heroes in this story.
(music fades up)
⁂
[ A Chance at Immortality ]
Summary: Mathematical greatness can strike at any time - even on the train between Oxford and London.
(Gentle Piano Music)
Brady Haran: Today's guest is Marcus Du Sautoy. A successful mathematician based at Oxford, Marcus is more widely known for his public communication. BBC TV shows, an assortment of books, and in more recent times even in music and theater. I met Marcus at his home shortly after he'd popped some bread in the oven.
(Gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: Am I going to have your undivided attention or is your brain really on the sourdough bread baking in the oven? (laughs)
Marcus Du Sautoy: No, no, no (stutters) the bread is quite good at looking after itself. So I won't be going…
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Marcus Du Sautoy: Suddenly saying, bread's dough power sour.
Brandy Haran: The most important question is, how do I pronounce your surname? And where does it come from? 'Cause it's quite, to me it's quite an exotic name but you seem very… English to me.
Marcus Du Sautoy: (laughs) Yeah, it has origins in France. And… funnily enough I used to apologize for how I pronounce it, 'cause we pronounce it du Sautoy (De-So-Toy) and I thought that must've been anglicized because when I go to France, you know, they say Monsieur Du-So-Twa (exaggerated accent). And then a professor in Oxford at French, oh but when did your family actually come to England? And I said well, 1745, 'cause actually it was Catholic family helping the Scots fight the English. So they came over with Bonnie Prince Charlie to Scotland and then this Pierre Francois Du Sautoy got caught and was made a prisoner of war in Basingstoke, too many roundabouts and he couldn't find his way out (laughs). But he explained, well, you know, the French Revolution they changed so many things. They tried to change the names of the days of the week, the weights and measures, time, and they actually changed pronunciation. So, people will know French is for the king, le roi (current pronunciation), but actually it used to be le roi (roy) and you could tell whether somebody was a revolutionary or not if they said le roi, they were Ancien Régime, or le roi and they weren't a revolutionary. So Du-So-Twa was du Sautoy. So actually I now do not apologize for the way I pronounce my name. It is actually an old French pronunciation.
Brandy Haran: And give me it… du Sautoy?
Marcus Du Sautoy: du Sautoy.
Brandy Haran: du Sautoy. I mean that's so long ago, do you sort of identify with any kind of French heritage-ness or is it just a quirk of history now? Or do you feel something about it?
Marcus Du Sautoy: Well weirdly, we're sitting in my office at home making this recording and next to me I have a portrait of a Pierre Francois du Sautoy. So it's very interesting… you know, there's a kind of mathematical element to this, because of course every generation you sort of got two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents and so, you know, that one name du Sautoy comes from a very sort of singular branch of this huge tree, yet, because of this name and it being taken down I do strangely picked up on something. I have a sort of feeling of connection to this one person. But why him as opposed to the many other powers of two people that I've descended from? But I think, you know, it's quite a kind of romantic story, you know, he was caught, made a prisoner of war, stayed here, he probably avoided being… having his head chopped off. There are no du Sautoys in France anymore. Just this kind of band of us in the UK. Weirdly if you Googled du Sautoy, you'll get a lot of maths, but you'll also get some Bond movies. Not that I've been in a Bond movie.
Brandy Haran: No? (chuckles)
Marcus Du Sautoy: But one of our other relatives Carmen du Sautoy was an actress with the RSC and she actually appeared as a Bond Girl in one of the Bond movies, so you'll also see some pictures of her as a Bond Girl.
Brandy Haran: Oh, wow, there you go. I have Googled you. I obviously haven't Googled deep enough. I have not come across that yet.
Marcus Du Sautoy: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Have you gone back to France and found some… hole or cottage that they were from or something or…?
Marcus Du Sautoy: Well, I'm really hoping for a chateau rather than a cottage because I'm really hoping for the reinstatement of the monarchy (laughs) in France and then I'll be able to reclaim this… this chateau because they were quite an aristocratic family. Which is why they probably got wiped out during the revolution so… but I'm not holding my breathe on that one.
Brandy Haran: Alright, well then let's go to your childhood then, like after all this sort of highfalutin aristocracy and what not. What was your childhood like? What was… where were you born? Where are you form?
Marcus Du Sautoy: Well I was born in London but we moved out within a couple of years to Oxfordshire and so I really grew up, you know, not too far away from where I now, you know, work. Which is the University of Oxford, and that's probably significant because I spent a lot of my time doing music for example. That was one of my big passions and I would go up to Oxford a lot. Play in the Oxford Youth Orchestra, and so I've always sort of had a connection to Oxford through my music and I think seeing all the students and how much fun they were having I think that sort of helped kind of set my sights on… yeah I thought that looks a really fun place to hang out and be a student and to think. But I just went to normal comprehensive school in my town, so kind of nothing fancy there. But that said, you know, I had fantastic teachers and I do credit one teacher in particular, Mr. Bailson, who sort of picked me out at the end of a class and I thought I was in trouble and but then he sort of took me around the back of the maths block and I thought I'm really in trouble now but then he said well I think you should find out what maths is really about. And he recommended a few books to me. One was called The Language of Mathematics and that was really intriguing because at the time I was really interested in learning languages. I thought that's what I wanted to do was… 'cause my mum had been the Foreign Office and I sort of thought that was kind of a fun… actually I thought she was a spy, frankly.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Marcus Du Sautoy: She gave us this image that she was basically double-oh-eight or something.
Brandy Haran: Do you know for sure that she wasn't?
Marcus Du Sautoy: Well, no, exactly, of course!
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Marcus Du Sautoy: You know, that's a fantastic cover, but (chuckles) I was finding languages really frustrating because there were so many irregular verbs. There's a lot of learning you had to do. I really didn't have a very good memory and so that's why mathematics particularly appealed to me because you can reconstruct from first principles, and I loved that. Everything made logical sense so you didn't have to just remember things. And then this book, and I still have it, it's up on my shelf here, the one we bought after my teacher recommended it. It revealed, you know, the power of mathematics as a language to describe the universe and that's when I started to…
Brandy Haran: Maths wasn't your passion at this point, but you were obviously good at it because Mr. Bailson had seen this?
Marcus Du Sautoy: Yeah. Well that was what was interesting. I actually had a chance to… I did a radio program for BBC Radio 4 which is called Top of the Class and it's a chance for you to go back to your old school and spend some time with a teacher. You choose a teacher that inspired you and I asked him at the time. Why did you pick me out? I mean did you do this sort of on a regular basis, you know, just if I throw a dart enough times one will hit the bullseye? (chuckles) And he said, no, no, I didn't do it with anybody else. I said so why did you pick me? 'Cause I wasn't that… particular fantastic at that point. And said, I could see you were responding to abstract thought. And I just knew this would be a wonderful place for you to spend your life. And so right he was. I mean I just… loved this… this… the imaginative side of being a mathematician. And that's what's interesting as well 'cause one of the other books he recommended and has been very important throughout my whole life has been A Mathematicians Apology by G. H. Hardy. And in that book he describes what it's like to be a mathematician. And he continually compares it to a creative artist rather than being a kind of useful scientist. And through my time at school what I loved doing was playing music, being artistic, I loved doing theater. These were my passions and…. but I still wanted something which was kind of scientific in nature which was exact, precise. I think I was a quite an insecure teenager and I think I'd like the security of mathematics. It's one thing, you know, I've done quite a lot of work on A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, I did some work with the theater production version of it and Mark Haddon and I have done events together. And I think it's very clever that Mark Haddon… it's about a kid with Asperger's but why does he love mathematics in that book? Because… he just enjoys the security of knowing that something's gonna happen a particular way and it will happen the same way again. Whilst people are very unpredictable and so there's a security that mathematics provides and I think that also appealed to me. But… I think this book A Mathematician's Apology coming back to that. It showed me that mathematics was the perfect bridge between the creative world of the arts where you can use your imagination, make worlds that don't exist but are consistent and weird things happen in them but still being a world of science as well.
Brandy Haran: How gradual or violent a process was Mr. Bailson's intervention from this dream of… that seemed to involve language and music to becoming a mathematician? Was it overnight or was it a gradual drift?
Marcus Du Sautoy: I think as soon as a teacher takes interest in you and sort of gives you that sort of positive feeling, you wanna respond to that. So I think that was a very key moment and I wouldn't say it was overnight but gradually as I learnt more and, you know another really important thing that was… that I feel was very lucky in my trajectory was that at school we did something called SMP mathematics.
School Mathematics Project it was called. And this was an educational kind of experiment which in retrospective probably failed because many people got completely lost in it. But the idea was let's show our students at school real mathematics. So this course showed us the ideas of topology. It showed us the axioms of group theory. It showed us set theory and that just… really excited me and I think I was lucky to have a teacher who understood the mathematics and I've talked retrospectively with a lot of teachers who taught that course and they said well the… you know it was a great course but the trouble was that most of the maths teachers, they didn't have a maths degree. They didn't understand it themselves, and so it sort of basically failed because… you really… those very deep ideas need somebody with a lot of depth in the understanding to be able to teach it.
Brandy Haran: So many people I've spoken to, on this podcast actually, have talked about when they got to university mathematics was completely different to what they expected but it sounds like for you it wasn't. You had been given…
Marcus Du Sautoy: I had completely the opposite and in fact it had a slightly bad effect because the first year, you know, they were teaching us all these axioms of group theory, topology, and I said I've seen all of this already and actually I spent far too much time doing theater and music and slightly flunked my first year because I thought, oh, I know everything that's in the lectures, we've already done this at school (chuckles) you know, I realized you still have to do some hard work (laughs) to learn this stuff. But yeah you're right, I actually I think I was lucky to see some real maths. And you know what I feel that's one of my missions as a kind of communicator of the excitement of mathematics. I really want to try and show people the real mathematics. The big stories and I think that's what I responded to, rather than all the just grammar and kind of the… the scales and arpeggios, you know, play some real music. I was lucky that my teacher and my course at school played some real mathematics to me and you know I heard the Beethoven, I heard the Mozart, I didn't just have to play scales all the time. And I think that's what we're missing. We're not being brave enough.
Brandy Haran: So when you're at high school and presumably you're applying to do mathematics at university, that you've decided that's your thing. What were you thinking your career was gonna be? What did you think you were gonna be when you grew up and you finished university as a school boy?
Marcus Du Sautoy: A mathematician. I really already had identified that I wanted to spend my life telling stories in this language. I had a few role models. One of them was Christopher Zeeman. He'd done the Christmas Lectures in 1978, and I was very lucky that my dad managed to get me a ticket to one of the lectures and we watched the rest on telly. It was the first time, Christmas Lectures, I mean, started by Faraday in 1825, it was the first time they'd ever risked doing it on maths because what on earth going to show people? You can't blow things up.
Brandy Haran: So for people in America for example, these Christmas Lectures run by the Royal Institution is this sort of once a year, real national profile showcase of a science and some famous scientist does like a grand lecture that gets show on TV and everything.
Marcus Du Sautoy: That's right and so kind of series of lectures, five lectures. They're broadcast on television at Christmas, amazing kind of exposure but this was the first time they'd ever been done on maths. And Christopher Zeeman is one of our greatest… I mean he's not died now but he was one of greatest mathematicians.
He solved one version of the Poincaré Conjecture for I think dimension six. And so this was a real practicing mathematician who spent his time that Christmas talking to kids. And I thought, you know, I said I want to be him when I grow up, that's amazing, he seems to be really enjoying…
Brandy Haran: You did become him when you grew up!
Marcus Du Sautoy: I know (laughs) weirdly I did because I…
Brandy Haran: Yeah, (laughs).
Marcus Du Sautoy: I actually got invited in 2006.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Marcus Du Sautoy: To give these lectures myself and I ended the lectures saying to the kids sitting there, you know what? I was like you sitting in the audience in 1978, and here I am up here, you know, living my dream, doing mathematics, telling people these mathematical stories and I hope that one day one of you will be up here saying, I went to the lectures that Marcus du Sautoy did in 2006.
Brandy Haran: Did you find like a screenshot or a still of you in the audience?
Marcus Du Sautoy: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: In the Zeeman lecture? You've never found one?
Marcus Du Sautoy: I've never found.
Brandy Haran: No?
Marcus Du Sautoy: No.
Brandy Haran: Alright (laughs).
Marcus Du Sautoy: And hopefully nobody else will because I was a horribly spotty (laughs) teenager at that stage.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) You said that at high school you already knew you wanted to be a mathematician, did you properly know what a mathematician was? Like if you went to spoke to that boy now would it be a naive, his perception? Or do you think you pretty much had it nailed?
Marcus Du Sautoy: No, I think, you see that book, A Mathematician's Apology, really… is a fantastic description of… I mean a lot of people criticize that book and I've been very critical… it's opening really puts anyone off trying to communicate maths to the general public 'cause it says, you know, he writes, it is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The job of a mathematician is to prove theorems, not to talk about them. So he's basically saying, nobody should try and do what I'm doing. But I think it was a very good description and I think that it gave me a very good idea about what it was I wanted to do. And it's interesting 'cause at Sixth Form I went to… so my school didn't have a Sixth Form and so we all went to a Sixth Form College which fed the comprehensives in the area into it. So it was like a massive like school about eight hundred seventeen and eighteen year olds, it was amazing. It was almost like a transition to university. But I remember my maths teacher there saying, ooh maths rather difficult, pretty difficult to get into Oxford.
Why don't you do engineering? You'll probably get in, you know, there's much better opportunities for jobs and I said, that I do not want to be an engineer. I don't want to get my hands dirty in kind of (laughs) messy stuff. I love just the purity of this subject and I was already tending towards kind of the more abstract end, what one would call pure mathematics.
Brandy Haran: That sounds quite grown-up. Quite a mature attitude for someone of that age to not be thinking, oh I want to drive a Ferrari or play for Arsenal or something. I want to like you know, I want to do these esoteric things and proofs.
GS: I was an incredibly nerdy kid at school. And, you know, I loved sort of the idea (chuckles) not doing things in the normal. You know I saw my mates were getting into punk rock, I was getting into Wagner and you know, I loved going to six hour Wagner operas.
Brandy Haran: Right. (laughs)
GS: In Oxford at the theater there, so yeah.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Alright.
GS: It's now that I'm sort of living my teenage… you know I go with my kids to Glastonbury and like… but that was not me as a kid.
Brandy Haran: What was… you went to Oxford University, did you, as an undergraduate?
GS: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: What was that like then? You said the first year was… you didn't do that well your first year you said?
GS: (laughs) Well, you know I have a lot of other interests other than just mathematics which, you know, helped me do my mathematics actually because you can't do maths all the time and you need the sort of down time. So doing the music, doing the theater actually often helps my mathematics so it was wonderful just being in an environment where so many theater productions, so many orchestras playing and so I spent a lot of time with that. I was very lucky to go to Wharton College, which had a lot of other state school, so you know, people's impressions of Oxford is rather a kind of posh stuffy place, but actually there's people from all spectrums of life and I actually was lucky to be in a College which was very much people like me who came from state schools and… it was a very political time. It was 1980s. There was a lot of reaction to Margaret Thatcher here so I got very… mixed up it sort of left-wing politics and stuff. But it was a joy because, you know, we were doing fantastically exciting mathematics, especially towards the end of the course but also just, you know, it's where I kind of cut my teeth doing other things as well.
Brandy Haran: So, it sounds like, you know, there was lots of distractions for you but you did quite well as a undergraduate, didn't you? Like you kind of got back on track and…?
GS: I got back on track and it was, you know, I realized actually my dream is to become a mathematician, I need to do my doctorate. I need, if I'm gonna get to that place I need to do really well on my finals. So, at some point I just gave up everything and burned hard on mathematics and did well enough to get my grant to do a doctorate. And that's actually mathematics really started. 'Cause even up to that point you're still really learning the scales and arpeggios, even at university. I think we only started to see… seeing real mathematics almost in my last year, a little bit, but it's that transition and it's a massive transition from undergraduate mathematics to graduate mathematics. You know, suddenly the problems aren't solvable in an hour, with the material that you've been given.
(chuckles) You know every problem up to that point is manageable. And suddenly your supervisor's saying read this, read that, they're totally un… I didn't understand any of these papers I was given. I had to learn to read in a different way not step by step which is you know a kind of school and university mathematics. It was about getting a an overall impression of what is this paper talking about and then going into the details when needed. I learnt a completely different way of reading mathematics and then again dealing with the uncertainty of your supervisor giving you a problem that they don't know how to answer and it may not even have a recognizable navigable answer. That, you know, as a now mathematician supervising other PhD students, I spend a lot of my time actually as a psychologist, not a mathematician. Managing, dealing with the uncertainty of going into the unknown, that is very very unsettling and a real transitionary stage. But that's when I really started to buzz because suddenly I was reading… real mathematics for the first time. You know, in that first year I did my own first contribution to mathematics and that was just such a buzz to realize, oh my gosh! Nobody has ever thought this before and it's now something that with my proof will be there forever and that is one of the just… joys of mathematics, you know? The other sciences are very evolutionary in nature. A theory will survive for a bit but then new insights will me it falls away.
Mathematics has a, you know, robustness about it because of proofs so I know that the things that I've proved will last til the end of time. And in fact G. H.
Hardy talks about that in A Mathematicians Apology, he says immortality is a bit of a fancy word but mathematicians probably have the best chance of achieving it.
Brandy Haran: You make me want to be a mathematician.
GS: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: So (laughs) Youtube videos don't quite have that permanence I don't think. Obviously towards the end of your undergraduate and then starting as a graduate, you have to specialize in a subject. Can you give me just the very very brief outline of what you specialized in? And more importantly why you specialized in that, of all things?
GS: Yeah so… it goes back to something I learnt at school was which was… I mean I'm actually a group theorist so this is a language that was developed first of all by this rather romantic historical figure, Évariste Galois, killed in a duel at the age of twenty over love and revolutionary politics in France at the beginning of the 19th century. Yet already he'd developed this language which became group theory and it's the language I write on my yellow pads which my office here is kind of piled with them. So this is trying to understand symmetry and what symmetries are possible. So the ancient Greeks for example proved that the platonic solids, there are five of them, you can't make a sixth one, these are the shapes that make a dice, but I'm looking at sort of symmetries in like higher dimensions. What dice are possible in higher dimension spaces. My other passion is number theory. So I find that by combining very different ways of looking at things you can make extraordinary progress. So I actually use a tool which is used for trying to understand prime numbers. Something called a zeta function. But I… this is trying to understand a wild, you know these wild numbers, the Primes, which we don't understand any patterns to them. But I'm using the same tool but to look at what symmetries might be possible. And using that kind of set of glasses from number theory to look at a completely different area in group theory. Yeah it's interesting, I don't know what that seed that was sown at school… may be the reason that I ended up doing that.
Brandy Haran: Was it do you think you just have like, you know, an innate interest in that subject or was it did you have a particularly inspirational lectures who drew you into it again or…?
GS: Well… you know what I think it comes back again to that passion for languages. Because I think mathematicians divide into two types. The ones that view mathematics very pictorial and they're very good at just drawing diagrams or pictures. Roger Penrose, my colleague in Oxford, you know. Twister theory comes out of his just ability to kind of crystallize in diagrammatic form complex thought. Whilst I'm somebody who likes to change things into language, so I'm very linguistic in the way I do my maths and I follow the rules of that language to make insights. Rather something which doesn't sound linguistic at all.
Symmetry is about geometry, isn't it? Isn't it about pictures, about patterns? But this was the great power that this language had, it threw away those and so you don't get distracted by what the thing looks like. And you're gonna understand it's structure and make things in dimensions that you can't even see, so I think… you know, why I… felt happy in this world was I think partly because I love manipulating language and seeing what the consequences of that are.
Brandy Haran: You did a PhD, obviously.
GS: We call it a DPhil, interestingly in Oxford.
Brandy Haran: Ah.
GS: Yeah, we're sort of unique in that and we're a bit nerdy about saying I didn't do a PhD (exaggerated stuffy accent) I have a DPhil, (chuckles) but it's the same thing.
Brandy Haran: Okay, you did a DPhil. Doing this seems like a traumatic experience for many people I speak to and this… apparently there's this time in the middle where everything falls away from under you and you think you're not doing it right. Was it a traumatic process for you or was it smooth sailing?
GS: No, not smooth sailing at all, and in a way… you know I think that's important. You know one of my favorite films is Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon is a janitor in a math department, there are these problems up on the blackboard and he just solves them really easily and professors come in next morning and go, oh my god. I think, you know, ultimately he doesn't become a mathematician in that film, because the maths is too easy. You know, there's no challenge, for him it's the women that are the challenge, he doesn't understand them at all, there's no algorithm. So for me I think, you know, it's important that things are difficult, and you have that really tough time and I did. But then there's something very exciting about maths where you can get a sudden surge of insight and understanding and things can happen very quickly and that happened to me. I find train journeys very conducive to mathematics and indeed my great insight happened on a train journey, not a very romantic one, it was back from London to Oxford but I think there's something about the way the landscape is going past you. It's sort of creates something… the speed of it… just right for stimulating mathematics. And so I… I kind of had this just like oh my gosh I think I see how to do this thing and then it turned out to be a good breakthrough in this area. I got published in the top journal, The Annals of Mathematics, where Andrew Wiles has published Fermat's Last Theorem, it's our dream that Journal. So my doctorate was published there, and that really launched me.
Brandy Haran: You remember that train journey very well, obviously? (chuckles)
GS: Yeah… I think, you know, I've got a few moments in my life of those moments of just extraordinary insight and you live off those 'cause most of the time you're wrestling and you're having a really hard time and nothing's working and so you hold on to those euphoric moments.
Brandy Haran: Did you keep the ticket?
GS: (laughs) I didn't keep the ticket.
Brandy Haran: (groans) No!
GS: No.
Brandy Haran: Wouldn't that be great?
GS: Gosh, yeah.
Brandy Haran: Have that framed on the wall. (laughs)
GS: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Do you find yourself now, if you're stuck on something mathematical, booking some unnecessary train journey in the hope of… rattling something loose?
GS: (laughs) Yes… it's… I mean I certainly value those kind of spaces where you can kind of let yourself just… I mean it's funny 'cause I don't find… you now someone people find plane journeys quite good because it's kind of a space of thirteen hours and they're going to California or something from London, but I'm afraid I just use those to watch movies that I haven't watched for a while so… it's train journeys are the ones for me.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: Today's episode has been supported by G-Research. A leading quantitive finance research firm based in Europe. They're always looking to hire the brightest people to help tackle the big questions in the world of finance. It's a chance to work with the very best in machine learning, big data, and some of the most advanced technology used to predict movements in financial markets.
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(gentle chimes)
GS: Well I think there's an important thing to learn here because I had, you know, this great theorem that I proved, it was in the Annals and I had to learn to deal with the downtime again. And I remember I spent some… a period of time in Israel at the Hebrew University and things weren't going really well and there were a lot of eyes on me at that point.
Brandy Haran: Because you'd had this good…
GS: Yeah, yeah, you know, what's he gonna do next?
Brandy Haran: Mhm.
GS: And I think there's something rather nice about being a PhD student, a DPhil student, is, nobody's looking at yet and so it's quite… and I always say you know enjoy this period, to my PhD students. It's space for you to experiment, play, and nobody's watching too much. But one of my professors that I worked with at the Hebrew University, he said, you got to learn this. That it's like a sine wave, but unless you've actually experience a sine wave actually oscillate you think oh my gosh there's a peak and then I'm down again and maybe it just stays down here and I'm done and… so it was really important to learn that there was going to be another up and once that happened it helps me now to always think, yeah okay… it's a sine wave, it's not a (chuckles) you know, a parabola where it's sort of just one height.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
GS: And so my journey was kind of like doing, I had a postdoc, a summer in Oxford then I spent some time at Hebrew University. Very important for me because that's where I met my wife, and so I got a very strong connection to the Hebrew University. I was spent some time in Cambridge where I did a lot of number theory with Professor Coates in Cambridge and then I came back to Oxford doing my mathematics. But, you know, already sort of early on I was… I had this wonderful thing from the Royal Society. It was called a University Research Fellowship, and it was kind of like a Post- postdoc. And most people would be going into a lectureship and the teaching starts to overwhelm you. This was a period of about ten years when I could carry on doing my research and I really made some major breakthroughs during that time. But one of the things that was really important was the Royal Society were encouraging us to actually not just do our research. They didn't want us teaching because it was meant to be timeout but when I wrote an article for the Times newspaper, actually about the Fields Medals. It was before Matt Damon made Field Medals famous because they talk about them in Good Will Hunting. And I wanted to write an article just to tell people about my excitement about mathematics. Partly starting to think about that Christopher Zeeman who'd made the effort to talk to people. And I was worried what my community would think if I wrote this article. And I spent ages on it. It's a thousand words and it took me a month to write it. It was just… painful. I'm not a natural writer. And you know that sentence I quoted the beginning of Mathematician's Apology basically we were living under the specter of G. H. Hardy saying, do not talk about mathematics just do it. So I was really nervous that people were thinking I'm selling out or…
Brandy Haran: Being a bit showy or like sort of…
GS: Being a bit showy or oh maybe got nothing else to say mathematically so he's talking about maths. You know…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
GS: So but then I got this… incredible feedback from the Royal Society. They were very… they looked after their Research Fellows and would come and visit me in Cambridge, make sure everything was already. And they said you know that article you wrote in Times? We think that's a really great idea, because we think it's really important that scientists talk to society about the importance of their work and don't just stay in the ivory tower. And that support from, you know, our scientific body, you know going back to Newton, was really important in thinking, okay yeah I think this is an important part of being an academic.
Being a scientist, being a mathematician , is actually telling people about why we're doing things. Why it will be important. What impact it will have. And so that started me on this extra part of my career which is now become very important. Probably why I'm now probably talking to you is that realized that making mathematical discoveries is important but talking about them and telling other people is when they start to come alive. We do that in our seminars, in our journals, but actually if we do it more broadly people will realize why maths is so important.
Brandy Haran: Some people… particularly people outside the UK might not know this about Marcus but he's known to most people for being like, you know, a real face of mathematics, you know you're on lots of BBC TV shows and the radio. So you know, you're very omnipresent when it comes to mathematics and communicating mathematics. You're a real sort of champion of it. But that thing you were worried about when you were writing that Times article, that kind of snipeyness or jealousy in that… was that well founded? Do you still find that?
Do you think people think, oh Marcus du Sautoy is just a… he's a TV guy. He's not a real mathematician or do you think people have kind of accepted you can be both?
GS: I was really encouraged by the feedback I got from my fellow mathematicians and a lot of them said, oh it's so important what you're doing and, you know, as time has gone on, I get so many people telling me, (scoffs) we have these things in England when you're applying to university you have to write a personal statement about why you want to do mathematics. And they said time and again people just write that they've read Music of the Primes and got so excited about the unsolved problem of prime numbers, the first sort of major book that I wrote. And that's… you know and I get that from PhD students, they say, oh you know the reason I'm here… one of my PhD students, he's now graduated, but he came and knocked on my door and he said I came to a talk you gave in New Zealand when I was at school and my dream was to come and work with you and here I am, I'm now done a degree. He's a Korean guy. Now I done a degree in Oxford and I want to be your PhD student. And that's so exciting and so the feedback's been, you know, incredibly positive.
Brandy Haran: Do you feel a pressure to keep doing math research and publishing to keep like your street cred?
GS: I don't feel a pressure. I actually love doing it. I mean, it's hard juggling all of these things but weirdly, you know, we've just been through, hopefully coming towards the end of coronavirus and lockdowns and things. That's given me space to actually revisit a couple of mathematical problems I've been working on and really made progress with them. Because it's tough doing mathematics. You have to kind of get into this rather Buddhist state of… meditation, not letting things crowd in and so lockdown for me has been wonderful in sort of re-exploring some challenges that I'd kind of left bubbling. So yeah, I think why am I communicating about mathematics? Because I love doing mathematics. So it's really important to me to carry on doing the thing I love doing along side telling people why it's such an important subject.
Brandy Haran: You talked about the Fields Medal before which is famously given to young mathematicians. You have to be below forty don't you, to receive it?
GS: That's correct.
Brandy Haran: And you also talked about how you hit a couple of home runs really early on, you know your PhD… your DPhil was published in the Annals of Mathematics. Have you still got it now? Do you think you're as good at mathematics now as you were when you were a younger man?
GS: I think there is something about youth which is helpful and that's a certain sort of ignorance and arrogance. I often compare it… one of my favorite Wagner operas is Siegfried and in Siegfried he's able to kill the dragon Fafnir because he doesn't know fear. And I think one of the troubles is that we begin to learn fear of big problems like the Riemann Hypothesis about prime numbers. And that can sometimes play us out of the game. We don't take the risks that a young person might do because they don't know they shouldn't be trying that or something.
Brandy Haran: What is the risk? You mean the waste of time, or...
GS: Yes.
Brandy Haran: What are you risking by taking on a big dragon?
GS: Yes, sort of waste of time, I think. That, you know, if everyone else has tried this, you know, what new am I bringing to this? But sometimes it's still things that we haven't tried. But mathematics has become very rich and complex that experience can actually be a helpful component so knowing about a lot of other areas that you can bring those insights to a problem is actually… means that having a bit of mathematical maturity I think it is still… very helpful. This weird thing about having to just dedicate yourself to something which many people think well why are you spending all your life doing that, it doesn't seem… you know, there seem to be only about ten people in the world that really understand what you're doing. So sometimes as you grow older just the indulgence of doing mathematics can be quite hard to deal with actually. So I think… dealing with that it is something a lot of people face, you know, there's a kind of slightly, I mean I talked a little bit about Asperger's before… and I think having that incredible focus and not really being interested in anything else is an extremely helpful trait for a mathematician. And in fact, you know, Simon Baron-Cohen who's one of the experts in autism and Asperger's, he did a piece of research recently looking at the correlation between very high mathematical ability, looking at those mathematicians who had won prizes and just seeing where they are on the autistic spectrum and seeing whether is that a superpower… you know… we've heard talk of that being a superpower… I think it is a really helpful superpower for a mathematician.
Brandy Haran: I imagine you're also can have a bit less of that when you have to worry about sourdough bread and kids and all the different things that come with an older age.
GS: Yeah, exactly! A lot of my PhD students say, you know, I have a lot of respect for you now having, you know, suddenly started my life and trying to keep doing mathematics with all the noise outside and I think being able to shut out the noise from all of the demands from your faculty, from your family, and that's… you know can be very annoying sometimes for your colleagues and your family if you… if you do that but it's really important.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: As you said there's a bunch of yellow notepads around as at the moment. You said you've been getting back into a bit of mathematics just lately and I saw them strewn around your leather chair here. Are you tackling dragons at the moment or are you dealing with smaller things?
GS: I think it's really important to… to go for smaller things. 'Cause often the dragons you find the back way into attacking them not from head on. So I think anyone who solves the Riemann Hypothesis will probably not have been working on the Riemann Hypothesis. I bet they will be working on something that was… seemed unrelated and then suddenly they see a connection and they go oh my gosh this is the way forward. So I think it's really important. At the moment I'm just working on a very small example of something but I know that if I understand this one little example it will give me the insight into the whole theory. So I've picked an example which is rich enough to have the complexity but it still manageable where (chuckles) I can actually kind of write out the equations on my yellow note pads. So I think that's a strategy that I give my PhD students. Don't try and go for the big one in a first go. Just go for the example of it and see whether that has enough of the kind of richness that you see what's going on in general.
Brandy Haran: One last thing about doing mathematics. How do you do mathematics? I always hear people like you say, I'm gonna sit down today and do maths. Like what does that actually… what does look like?
GS: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I can't… by not being a mathematician it's one of the hardest things for me to understand. You sit down with a black piece of paper and just start writing things and then adding things together? Or… what does doing math look like?
GS: Well I think that was one of the motivations for the second book I wrote which is Finding Moonshine, or in America it's called Symmetry just simply. And it is the story of symmetry but that's what my research is about. Trying to understand symmetry. It's the story from, you know, the first objects that people made, these dice through to classification of finite simple groups today and the things we're still doing. I kept a diary for 12 months when I wrote that book, which was my attempt to answer this question. You know, my parents would ask me that, my girlfriends, my…
Brandy Haran: What are you doing all day?
GS: Yeah! What are you doing all day?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
GS: And it is a kind of slightly mysterious thing. So I kept that diary to sort of examine my own process about how I do things and actually if you do open the book then the yellow notepad's the flyleaf in the hardcover book. But I think there's a lot of playing going on. That's why, you know, people who play are good at mathematics. 'Cause you just need to try things out, try different avenues and to keep questioning things and that's really being able to ask good questions is almost more important than being able to come up with slick answers.
Brandy Haran: Now a huge part of your job, and it is part of your job description, is public understanding of mathematics and outreach and doing slightly more out there things. You've written books and done TV shows and we'll link to all sorts of that sort of stuff but a thing I do want to talk to you about is theater and plays. 'Cause that is a bit more unusual when it comes to outreach.
GS: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: And what not. Tell me a bit about what you've been doing in this area, 'cause it's… it's different.
GS: Yeah, as I said, you know, music and theater were always very important to me. But actually in a funny way they were always places I would escape when my mathematics was not going well. So when I was in Oxford I worked with a community theater. The Pegasus Theater in Oxford. And it would be where I escaped to when the maths wasn't going well and when it was really going badly during my PhD and postdoc period I remember, I lost fantasied about running away with a theater company. I downloaded a application form to a theater… school in Paris several times…
Brandy Haran: In what role? Where you like an actor or like were you…
GS: Yeah I liked different things. So I liked acting. I liked devising pieces. I did some directing as well. But there was a theater company I met whilst working in that community theater called Complicité and they were doing theater in a completely different way and it was quite a mathematical way. They would set up kind of theater exercises, which were essentially little algorithms, that they would then let run and see what would emerge from this and I really loved that, you know, they wouldn't come with a script and then you'd learn your lines.
Completely the opposite. The script, if it ever emerged, would be right at the end of the process and they would use this kind of experimenting. Using the theater stage as a kind of like almost a place to play, you know…
Brandy Haran: Like one of your yellow notebooks?
GS: Exactly. You know my maths started going well and I went the mathematical route but just shortly after I published Music of the Primes, which talks about the story of Ramanujan, this Indian mathematician who comes to G.
H. Hardy 'cause he's got insights about prime numbers. But then this theater company contacts me and say, oh we're doing a play about Ramanujan and Hardy, would you come in and give us some of your insights about the story and what we want to do about the maths. Turned out to be this theater company that I always loved, Complicité, and they say, you probably don't know who we are. And I wrote back this such fanboy letter…
Brandy Haran: Yeah (chuckles).
GS: I said, I know exactly! I've been fantasying about running away with you.
Brandy Haran: I'll be there tomorrow.
GS: (chuckles) Yeah! So I was there tomorrow.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
GS: And actually they were quite surprised to find a mathematician who understood the language of theater and so I set all of these theater games for them to explore the maths that Ramanujan and Hardy…
Brandy Haran: They must have've think, oh we've bitten more than we can chew with this guy! (laughs)
GS: Well, exactly. But the weird thing was that the guy who runs the company, Simon McBurney, he would just love this. That there was… and so he said, are you free tomorrow? I said, yes. And I kept on coming back. Eventually the producer said… when Simon asks you to come back tomorrow you've gotta say no 'cause he's gotta write a play and he's just getting obsessed. You know, he wants to know what a mock theta function is and this really is a bit too far for him.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
GS: Anyway, so this reignited my passion for theater and out of that piece of work which became a play called Disappearing Number, I met another actress who actually had a mathematical and physics background. And we started working together about ten years ago. We started making this piece. One of my favorite writers is Borges. Argentinian short story writer. And he writes very interesting mathematical scientific kind of short stories. And one of them, the Library of Babel, is actually an exploration of what the possible shapes of the universe could be. It's actually (chuckles) a story about the the Poincaré Conjecture weirdly. This kind of inspired me, oh I'd love to make a piece of theater which explored the way a universe might be looped. In a way the universe… for the theater is the stage. That is your universe and then you can ask well, yeah but how… what's the rules of this universe? If you exit stage right, what happens? Well perhaps you enter stage left. And if you go through a trapdoor perhaps you drop in through the ceiling. And so I thought oh this is fun, you can make actually a torus out of this theater space and so it sort of began this journey and then we created a piece with two characters called X, I play X… you know if you're gonna write a play I better have a part of myself, so I'm X and Victoria Gould played Y, and we used this process of devising to create a piece which ultimately we did in many places but it eventually arrived at the Barbican.
What an amazing dream for an actor, let alone one who started as a mathematician, to actually perform their play at the Barbican. And it got its name then which is now it's called I is a Strange Loop. And we've just released it on the Maths Institute, Oxford Institute, Youtube channel. So you can see it there. The most exciting thing for me is that we've also published the play. And it's published by Faber and Faber is… you know… it's where every playwright wants to be. It's where Beckett is published, it's where Tom Stoppard is published. It's a real dream to have the play sort of crystalized there. So that's been… you know as you say rather unusual way to communicate scientific mathematical ideas. But that's been my passion. Not just to talk to the people who will come to a science festival or would naturally log on to a, you know, science Youtube channel like Numberphile. You know, great, it's important that we give them great material but I think the real challenge is getting to people who wouldn't naturally choose Numberphile or a science festival, but might got to the theater and then suddenly say oh my gosh. There's mathematics in this, but I didn't realize that was maths. The way a space is connected together. So I'm very exciting by using sort of a rather unexpected platforms to tell mathematical stories.
Brandy Haran: Am I being anti-snobby by suggesting, are theater goers the sort of people who are ignorant of mathematics and the important of academic studies? It feels like this is like one area where there wouldn't be a desperate call for, c'mon we need to get these people educated.
GS: You'd be surprised and I think it plays to this still two cultures idea of either you're into the arts and the humanities or you're into kind of science. So I think you'll find quite a lot of people who perhaps enjoy the world of the theater still wearing their oh I'm rubbish at maths as a badge of honor. And what was very curious is the place we took this play to where we got the most extraordinary reception and we found our audience was India. So we took it to the Mumbai festival and we did a couple of performances there and it was extraordinary. People on their… feet whooping during the performance at seeing mathematics on the stage. And I think there was something interesting here because, yeah they are… there's a mathematical literacy in India because, you know, they value mathematics. You can't wear I'm useless in maths as a badge of honor. No parent would allow their kid to say that. Yet they still consider mathematics as something which is in the classroom or in the university and for them it was the shock of seeing mathematics in a completely different environment. They were just blown away by it. And I think that is true that you know audiences in… the UK are more used to seeing sort of ideas of science creeping into the theater. You think of Copenhagen, Michael Frayn's play exploring Heisenberg's Uncertainly Principle or Tom Stoppard in Arcadia exploring chaos theory and fractals. So you know, we're a little bit more used to seeing science in the theater. For this Indian audience they were like totally blown away.
Brandy Haran: What was it like for you as someone who for most of your life when you like write a math paper and that, there's probably a hundred people in the world who can even understand it, yet alone critique it to suddenly be putting yourself out there. Being reviewed by theater critics and your writing being… criticized by a whole new group of people who don't have to understand mathematics to say you're good or bad at it. What was that like for you?
GS: Well I always love new challenges… so for me, you know, I'm always looking for something else to challenge myself. So, you know, it was frightening but exciting as well and I think there's something which actually is a common thread throughout all of this because even though you might say I'm only talking to a hundred people at a conference… that is still a performance and I think, you know, we're all natural storytellers. We're all natural performers. You know the audience might be a bit smaller and might be a bit more esoteric of group theorists from around the world. But I didn't feel it was so different to now standing up on the stage of the Barbican, in the Pit Theater.
Brandy Haran: But you're on really solid ground when you're giving a talk about group theory, 'cause you're one of the world's best group theorist.
GS: yeah (laughs)
Brandy Haran: When you're acting, you're probably not in the hundred best actors in the world?
GS: No, no, and I think that was a… I wasn't very nervous about that. And… what was really exciting was to get feedback at then of a performance and people… you know talking to people… and people going, what? You're actually a… professor of maths? I thought you were a professional actor. So that was really reassuring to, you know, I would have taken myself out of the play had it weakens… and got somebody else to perform it. You know it was fun devising it.
It starts with some just physical movement by me. I do basically ruler and compass construction using my body of a hexagon in space and that requires some really very important skills of holding a point and moving and making sure the point that you're holding does not move with you. That sort of the thing that, you know, you learn in Lecoq, in this school in France. And so, you know, I have done a lot of theater, so it's not a completely new world to me. But it was… this wasn't just learning lines. This was a very physical part.
Brandy Haran: Are you… what's next? Are you doing another one?
GS: Yeah. Well, I am. I've got real taste for this. So during lockdown I wrote a new book which I actually delivered early because my diary got gutted so I've written this new book called Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut. But then I delivered it two months early and my editor said, oh my gosh you authors you've been so productive during lockdown. You know, I've got so many books, it's gonna be a couple of months before I get back to you. So I actually spent that time writing a new play and this play is about my heroes in mathematics. André Weil, a French mathematician.
Brandy Haran: French again. You and the French.
GS: Oh yeah, maybe it's… some resonance there.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah.
GS: Going back to… people might know him because he was one of the people who created Bourbaki. This fictional mathematician. You know, if you go into a maths library you see a lot of books by this guy Nicholas Bourbaki and you think, wow that's the most productive guy out. But it turns out he's a fictional mathematician created by this French group to try and write under a pseudonym. So I use him as a kind of chorus figure in this play but then it's the story, rather extraordinary story of André Weil and his journey… the play starts in prison with André Weil in prison and you think why is this mathematician in prison? And in fact in prison he makes the most extraordinary mathematical discoveries. He proves a version of Riemann Hypothesis, not for primes but for counting solutions to equations. And so it's sort of the story of the breakthrough that he makes whilst in prison but also the journey of how he got to prison. And he's very obsessed with India and the Bhagavad Gita and he makes a trip to India. So I've actually used the Bhagavad Gita which is a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna. Krishna the god, Arjuna is about to into battle, he's very nervous about the deaths that will ensue but Krishna explains to him his duty is to go into battle. Turns out that André Weil decides not to go into battle which is why he ends up being in prison, because he's deserted his army and it's kind of his journey. So I have a… I created this new character which is his cellmate who is kind of Krishna to his Arjuna. It's just a play on paper on the moment and in a couple weeks time I'm going into a studio working with four actors to take this from page to stage and if that goes well and it's working as a piece we're gonna pitch it to the Vaults Festival which is our kind of like festival here in London for Fringe Theater. So hopefully in the coming years you might get a chance to see this piece of theater.
Brandy Haran: Do you type it or handwrite it?
GS: So this one I actually typed in.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
GS: Yeah, not handwritten. My writing, when I'm writing books and I'm writing plays, I'll use my computer. When I'm doing maths I never use my computer. That's why all the yellow notepads around the office here. I have to use the non-linear nature of a page.
Brandy Haran: I have one last thing to ask or one last concern. And now this might be silly concern. You're talking about how… you know, finding mathematical breakthroughs and discoveries and proofs are like immortal. They're a chance at immortality. That really appeals to me. And you're lucky to be blessed to be one of the people capable of making such breakthroughs. And then I hear you spending about all this time you're spending writing books and plays and giving talks and doing all this outreach which is really valuable. I feel like you're eating into the hours you have to solve the Riemann Hypothesis or make the next big discovery, like how do you reconcile your passion for these other things and outreach and that and the finite number of hours you have to do another great mathematical thing?
GS: Because… the great breakthroughs are very often done on the downtime and the time not looking the problem. And often, you know, I've always used these kind of other activities to help me come back to a problem and see things from a kind of new perspective. So, you know, that was always when I did theater as a PhD student, it helped me. I got stuck and there was no point sitting at my desk any further, I would just get deeply depressed. I needed to go and do something else and then when I came back it was like I was looking at the thing from a new angle. So for me these things… it's always been part of the journey of mathematical discovery.
Brandy Haran: So this is like… this is part of your mathematics, is it?
GS: It is.
Brandy Haran: Alright. Alright you can keep doing it then. Look I reckon you need to check on that sourdough bread. (laughs)
GS: Oh yeah? (laughs)
(gentle music)
⁂
[ A Proof in the Drawer ]
Summary: David Eisenbud's entertaining stories about mathematics are a fascinating glimpse into how math works - how it really works.
Brady Haran: Are you worried that I'm gonna give you too easy a time, that's the question? I don't you're worried about that, the way I always embarrass you in my public talks. (chuckles)
David Eisenbud: I am not worried.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: I don't mind the embarrassment either.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: Today's guest is a true Numberphile VIP, and let me explain why. David Eisenbud is a well respected mathematician. He's got an impressive array of papers and books under his belt. These days he's at the helm of a place called MSRI, that's the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. It's in Berkeley, California.
(music continues)
Brandy Haran: That name my sound familiar, because MSRI has been a major supporter of Numberphile for many years. I spend several weeks each year at the Institute meeting and interviewing top mathematicians who visit there. It's become bit of a home away from home for me. And over that time David's become a person I'd consider most responsible for like my mathematical education. I don't mean teaching me calculus or how matrices work, although he has tried that from time to time too. What I mean is that David's taught me how the world of professional mathematics works. About universities, about how like research gets done, how papers get published.
(music continues)
Brandy Haran: Like any field of endeavor, mathematics is full of gossip and politics, personalities. It's a very human world and there are few people who know it better and seem to be better connected within it than David Eisenbud. Today's interview with him is very typical of the sorts of conversations we have and I hope it gives you some insights into not just David's life but how mathematics works. How it really works.
(music fades out slowly)
Brandy Haran: If I had met you… as… a boy…
David Eisenbud: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: … would I have thought, ah yeah this guy, he's gonna be a mathematician for sure.
David Eisenbud: You would certainly have thought I was a nerd. I was one of the kids in my science class who liked to present articles from the Scientific American in fact. Which was a weekly thing, but I was one of the few who really wanted to do it. But I began announcing to my friends and family that I was gonna be a mathematician when I was twelve. And I don't remember how that came about.
Brandy Haran: Did you know what a mathematician was then? 'Cause a lot of people I've spoken too would say when they were young I didn't know mathematics or mathematician was like a job. But you'd figured this out?
David Eisenbud: Well my father was theoretical physicist, a mathematical physicist. Student of Eugene Wigner. So they were all around me and I think actually mathematics, why mathematics? I think it was sort of the right distance from physics at the time though later on I thought I would be a joint math-physics major in college and I got in over my head in physics and finally fled. I didn't like the labs. And then I took a mathematical physics course, a graduate course, which I was sure I was gonna fail, but by good luck I did well. Pure good luck. There were all kinds of special functions and equations I had no notion about, but I happened to read about vortices the night before the exam and vortices have the funny property that the more energy is in them the more slowly they propagate. And I knew that. And I got an A as a result (chuckles).
Brandy Haran: So this twelve year old, David…
David Eisenbud: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: What were you imagining? Like what was the fantasy? Was it sitting in a room with a notepad and doing famous proofs or was it being in front of class and teaching? What was the dream?
David Eisenbud: Oddly enough I don't think there was a concrete dream associated with it. I wanted to be like my father and he sat in the room a lot and with a pad and there were no computers at that time. But he had taught me quite early and that was a very exciting thing for me when I was in, I dunno, 7th grade I think, he taught me how to solve simultaneous linear equations. And that was quite exciting and then later on he taught me how to prove elementary geometric things like Euclid propositions using vectors. And I won some science fair prize for that. That early bonding with him was enormously central I think in my choice.
Brandy Haran: But you were good at it too? You were like top of the class getting the As and…?
David Eisenbud: By that time I was good at it. When I was in 4th grade I was in the very last group in arithmetic in the class. And for a good reason actually. And I remember I somehow got into the next to the last group and the teacher complemented me on my great achievement (chuckles) but I was adding my own way. I was adding from left to right rather than from right to left. Of course I was inaccurate and approximate and that was not considered okay.
Brandy Haran: Did your father foster this? Was he like, yeah be a mathematician or was he like, no why don't you consider other options? 'Cause he knew that perils of academic life and was trying to steer the son away, or…?
David Eisenbud: I don't remember any comment from him one way or the other. I think he was happy that I took this path. But I don't remember any concrete conversation. My mother said she always hoped that he would push me towards science and that therefore I would be a writer, which was her dream. She was a psychoanalyst, also very important in my early life.
Brandy Haran: Why did you not become a writer?
David Eisenbud: I don't know, really. I wrote some short stories early on. I write a lot now in my current job and you know I've written a lot of books and… a lot of papers by now. So I consider myself a writer in a way and I think a lot about style in writing. But I never aspired to write fiction, although I read fiction a lot. I like fiction a lot.
(violin music plays)
David Eisenbud: So my parents moved a lot in the early days. My father had been blacklisted. He had worked for Brookhaven National Labs in the late forties, around the time I was born. I was born '47. And he was working there but my mother's sister had been a genuine communist. And he was called in one day, into his boss's office and asked to name her friends. And he refused and was immediately fired. And then he couldn't get a academic job for ten years.
Brandy Haran: Huh.
David Eisenbud: This was in '47.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: They wandered a bit and I grew up in that early ten years in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania mostly. He found a job at a private research institute, it was located on the Swarthmore campus but not part of Swarthmore.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: A little bit like MSRI on Berkeley actually.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And it was from the roof of that institute that he… he took me up to the roof to see the first Sputnik for example, in '57.
Brandy Haran: Wow.
David Eisenbud: That was very exciting.
Brandy Haran: Oh yeah.
David Eisenbud: All his colleagues of course came too.
Brandy Haran: Did those difficulties he had during those years, you know, in this sort of wilderness in the difficulties that was caused…
David Eisenbud: Yeah?
Brandy Haran: …did that affect you in anyway? Or were you like a bit young and a bit blind?
David Eisenbud: I was blind. I didn't really know about it til after.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: Anyway the in '57 he began to get, you know, academic offers. Actually one at Brandeis which he turned down in order to go to Stony Brook. And he was one of the founders of the Stony Brook department which is now very illustrious.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: He did a lot for that. He recruited Dirac for example to come to that department for a year as a visitor.
Brandy Haran: Wow, alright.
David Eisenbud: My parents knew Dirac, and his wife who was Eugene Wigner's sister… pretty well.
Brandy Haran: Okay. So let's go to you. What happens to you? Are you excelling at high school?
David Eisenbud: So I skipped a couple of grades in high school. I was sick of high school in my junior year and in April of my junior year I decided I would like to go to college the next year. Instead of going on to be a senior in high school. And so it was too late to apply at much of anywhere. But somehow my parents knew people at Harvard so they were willing to look at me and they decided no.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: (chuckles) Which was I think extremely lucky for me actually. Also at Chicago, somehow I got an interview and they did take me. They had a habit of taking early young kids, so I entered there when I was sixteen. And was already mostly paying attention to mathematics and music, not so much anything else.
Brandy Haran: Sixteen at college? Would you be like the baby of any group you were in?
Was it hard being a sixteen year old in college then or…?
David Eisenbud: I was young. Most kids enter at eighteen. I wasn't the youngest person in the room.
Brandy Haran: What was university like, were you good like were you again like top of the class and excelling? Were you just a sort of a middle of a road or…?
David Eisenbud: I was pretty good. Chicago had a very rigid system, lots of requirements and so I placed out of them and so took math classes. And pretty soon graduate classes.
Brandy Haran: Placed out of them? I don't know what that means.
David Eisenbud: Oh so, you could take an exam instead of taking the course and took the exam and I was good enough and so I didn't have to take the course.
Brandy Haran: Oh, alright.
David Eisenbud: Got out of the requirement.
Brandy Haran: Is that something we can still do today, that sounds like… that would make like…
David Eisenbud: I'm sure Chicago still does that today.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: Lots of places do it. All universities have placement exams, usually to place people into the lower level where they really belong instead of the higher lever where they want to go but it works both ways.
Brandy Haran: And was this time at college was this the formative time? Was this were you started seeing specializations and strengths and did a clear path emerge then is that when it looked…?
David Eisenbud: So certainly it was very clear to me that I was doing mathematics and soon it was clear that I was not doing physics. So that was clarifying. There were no other questions in my life actually.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: I thought… just before I went to college I thought I might be a professional musician and that was a lucky thing I didn't choose that. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Well, you don't know you could have been… world famous!
David Eisenbud: Oh I dunno. First of all I don't think I had the talent. I was a flutist. On second, the life is miserable compared to… at least compared to a happy academic. Academic lives ccan be difficult too.
Brandy Haran: Was there a discussion to have with your father when you had to confront him and say, Dad I'm not gonna be a physicist?
David Eisenbud: Again I don't remember any such discussion. I certain told him… I must have told him my relief of passing this course. But yeah that I remember my terror to this day very clearly.
Brandy Haran: What? When thinking you were gonna fail and have to tell him you'd failed it?
David Eisenbud: Yeah, basically, right? The two memories of teachers I have from that era both of whom influence me a lot and they couldn't have been more different.
One was Antoni Zygmund who was a very famous analyst. Built like a plumber somehow, short and very compact and solid looking… and a Pole. I remember he used to stand in the ramrod stiff at the edge of the common room when it was his seminar time and clap twice in the air and turn his back and walk out and all the analysts would troop along after him.
Brandy Haran: Right?
David Eisenbud: And he was just a lucid lecturer. Incredibly beautiful prepared lectures. This was Lebesgue Interval that I took from him. It was a graduate course that I took. But just a beautiful beautiful talk. And the other course was taught by Otto Kegel who was the most disorganized person. He was teaching an elementary kind of algebra class, in second course in linear algebra. But he had decided to do in a Bourbaki way, very abstract way, for which I wasn't to ready, nor was the class I think. Also this is a course about vectors. Vector begins with a V and so typically in that class every letter is a V or a W and being German and having just come to the United States, he couldn't really remember which was Fau and which was Vhey and which was V and which was W so they were interchanged freely…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: In his speech.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: And his handwriting was also more or less inscrutable so there was completely chaos and confusion but somehow his enthusiasm for the subject and love of it was just infectious. So at the end of my… I also finished college in three years and at the end of my time my parents said well you could go to Europe if you want for the summer and I chose to go to Frankfurt where Kegel was an assistant and work with him on mathematics that summer. And that was where I wrote my first paper which was wildly exciting.
Brandy Haran: What was your first paper called?
David Eisenbud: Oh it's real juvenilia. It was on order… order morphisms of infinite ordered sets.
Brandy Haran: Ah yeah. Oh I think I've read that one. (chuckles)
David Eisenbud: (laughs) Someone did read it.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: But not many. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: So you went to work with this man just because…
David Eisenbud: Because I was so excited by his presence somehow.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And it was a good choice too. He gave me this problem, he helped me into it. And let me run. I was a terrible nuisance. I mean I couldn't stop talking about this subject and so I was, you know, really not very socialized at all.
Brandy Haran: Was this a formal thing? Like were you working thing or have some place…
David Eisenbud: No, no.
Brandy Haran: …like it sounds to me like you were on holiday and you just turn up or…?
David Eisenbud: More or less. I wrote to him of course to say I would like to come. But it was an interesting summer. Reinhold Baer who was a very famous man. So Kegel was Assistent (pronounced as the German title) by Baer at that time. That's a whole class of people we don't have here. But the assistants, just an assistant, had positions and they were more or less the servants of the professor and at that time still the system was in the old style and so some of Baer's assistants took his wife shopping for example.
Brandy Haran: Right. (laughs)
David Eisenbud: Which would no longer be tolerated but was then.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: Quite normal.
Brandy Haran: And also Baer took his whole mathematical family, which include me as the very junior member to this conference center called Oberwulfach. At that time the senior professor in Germany, you know, you could be a proper professor which was pretty good already or you could be a professor with week at Oberwulf, so he had sort of right to bring his mathematical family.
David Eisenbud: Okay.
Brandy Haran: And it was wonderful, and, you know, this place in the Black Forest. I've gone back… many many times since to conferences and I just love the place.
(gentle piano music)
David Eisenbud: Well I wanna talk a little bit about my graduate school experience, it has an unusual twist I think. I started working under somebody I don't need to name and I've discovered that I really didn't like him personally. Just I ran away. So I took the advice of one of my fellow students which was forget about the subject just look around whom you like. And work with that person, you'll like the subject soon enough. So that's what I did.
Brandy Haran: Is that good advice?
David Eisenbud: For some people it's very good advice I think. (pause) Yes. I tell students that not exactly that now, I tell them to look around and find the group of students who have seen most integrated and happy together and work in that area. If they like the area at least.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: Saunders Mac Lane was then my target. And he was a wonderful guy. I was one of his last students of many many. He was a very forthright sort of honest direct person. He was a wonderful lecture. I have to tell you my first meeting with him I was a, you know, a precocious undergraduate so I came to class early. So at the beginning of the semester there I am, sitting in the front row waiting for people to show up. And I'm working on something, reading something, I'm, I mean, completely oblivious to the environment and so finally the professor walks in and it's Mac Lane, I didn't know him at the time at all, I didn't know that he wasn't teaching that course, and I was in the wrong room. So… Mac Lane started talking about category theory, which was his passion. I… didn't know a thing about category theory and I was not prepared for the class. You know, my eyes glazed over in the first minute or two but I was sitting there as if… paying attention.
Brandy Haran: Why did you not leave?
David Eisenbud: Why did I not leave? I don't know. Embarrassment. I was sitting in the front row. Famous professor, all these people around. Maybe I was interested in being a spectator too. Anyway at a certain point Mac Lane, who was very proud of being aware of his audience and what they were understanding, I looked up and there he was pointing at me and said you, you didn't believe that proof did you? So of course I was paralyzed at that point, I didn't say anything.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (chuckles)
David Eisenbud: And so he went back to the blackboard and proved it again to what he thought was my satisfaction. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Right. (laughs)
David Eisenbud: And then the lecture could proceed. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay. (laughs)
David Eisenbud: But years later at his seventy-fifth birthday party, I reenacted this scene with him. With him in the audience.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And he denied everything. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay. (laughs) I'm sure it's burned into your memory a lot more than his.
David Eisenbud: (laughs) It sure was. I liked him a lot. I listened to all his classes, I really admired him. And he was a big shot around the department too. So I decided I would work with him.
Brandy Haran: He had to decide that too, didn't he?
David Eisenbud: He had to agree to it, certainly.
Brandy Haran: You picked him but why did he pick you?
David Eisenbud: I guess he… I had a reputation of being an interesting student somehow. I don't know the answer to that question. But we liked each other, we became quite good friends. So I thought I would work in category theory.
Brandy Haran: Which was his…
David Eisenbud: Which was his thing.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: And it didn't really work. So I kept thinking of different problems. I never found a problem in category theory that I really liked. And then he went away for a quarter and so I was drifting around and I knew lots of people in the department and there was a postdoc, Chris Robson, who was there working with a different professor, Israel Herstein, on a different subject, non-commutative rings. But I knew something about that subject, not very much, and I was interested so I began talking to him and we worked together and proved a few nice theorems. Then Mac Lane was returning and I remember sitting in a cafeteria opposite of a group of students, a bunch of us went out to dinner, chatting about this and the person opposite me said something which indicated that he thought my thesis was about non-commutative rings. And a light went off in my head, that I had written a thesis without worrying.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And without a thesis neurosis. And I was so pleased by that thought I went back to Mac Lane and said you know are you willing to have this be my thesis? He talked to Robson to make sure that Robson thought I had actually done something and he agreed and very generously read the document and corrected lots of things. His system was that he would begin at the beginning and read until he had marked twenty-five places where something needed to be improved and here he would give it back to me.
Brandy Haran: Right. (chuckles)
David Eisenbud: Then he would start again when I rehanded him a fixed copy.
Brandy Haran: A linear editting.
David Eisenbud: And this went through three times.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: And finally he approved and that was my thesis.
Brandy Haran: I mean this seems like some kind of academic infidelity that he went away…
David Eisenbud: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …and you went and found a whole other topic but did he allow this out of kind of like a graciousness or did he think oh this is good I'm off the hook here? I've got a…
David Eisenbud: My problem child has…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: …you know, fixed it. Well, he was famous for having students in lots of different areas. He would teach a course on something, which he didn't know much about 'cause he wanted to learn something. And then one of the students in that class would become his student, work on that subject, become famous, and in the meantime Mac Lane had moved on. So the most spectacular example of that is a man named John Thompson who… was very central in the program to classify finite simple groups and Thompson was his student at the moment when Ma Lane thought he was teaching a course in group theory. Thompson was an interesting guy in terms of thesis too. He wanted to settle what's called the Burnside Problem. Uh… well… never mind.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: But… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) You love it. This is a trait of David he goes up on these tangents…
David Eisenbud: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: …and then realizes hang on, this is actually quite complicated isn't it? (laughs)
David Eisenbud: Yeah. Thompson spent a year working very hard and Thompson was really a hard worker.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
David Eisenbud: And at the end of a year he packed his notes into cubic foot of cardboard box and threw them out. Decided he was not gonna get that problem. And did something else. Also very good.
Brandy Haran: Oh wow.
David Eisenbud: That was a brave thing.
Brandy Haran: What was your thesis called?
David Eisenbud: My thesis was called Hereditary Noetherian Rings.
Brandy Haran: Was it a good one?
David Eisenbud: (pause) It was okay.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
David Eisenbud: It was pretty good. I was very close with another math major undergraduate, a man named Joe Neisendorfer, whom I still know. So he and I were kind of inseparable Bobbsey twins as undergraduates and we took courses together. One of the requirements of the department was a logic course. And so we took a logic course, and it was given in the philosophy department. And at least half the class were philosophy majors who didn't know any mathematics and we felt the course was below us. We wanted out. So after a quarter, it was a two quarter thing, we went to the math department and said look find us a… please find us a reading course in this subject and we'll go on. Nobody really wanted to give a reading course to undergraduates on that subject in the math department. But John Thompson was buttonholed because he'd once written a paper on recursive functions which was close. And so he agreed mistakenly I think to give us this reading course. This was a period when he had just had a divorce. He was working like crazy on a now very famous paper. And I think he was sleeping under his desk, he wasn't leaving… it was a mad time for him. But here are these two undergraduates coming once a week to talk about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem which was not what he was interested in.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: So we would come in and he would sort of put the book down. Clearly he had just opened the chapter we were supposed to read.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And so we would spend the time talking about the first page so to speak of each chapter but it was still a wonderful thing to have worked with him a little bit.
Brandy Haran: Is it different today? Like do you look at the people, you know, the young ones today doing PhDs and think, yeah your life and your experiences are similar to mine, or is the landscape changed at that level?
David Eisenbud: Interesting question. Different universities are very different. So Chicago had a pretty rigid system. Everyone took the same three first year courses and then went on to other things. Berkeley, the faculty is too broad to agree on any three courses. So students are just sort of do something. It's very different that way. But once you settle on a thesis I think it's very similar. And there are these little clumps of seminars and people working together. What's really different though is the job market.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
David Eisenbud: When I was ready to graduate, I applied to exactly two places because I was… one of them I knew the person I wanted to work with and the other one Kaplansky told me to apply there and I did. Yale and Brandeis. I got offers from both of them and I went to Brandeis as I had intended. That's just unheard of now.
Brandy Haran: What's it like now?
David Eisenbud: Now people apply to hundred places. And it's scattershot and you try to get noticed so that it isn't quite so random. I find the whole process rather unpleasant now.
Brandy Haran: Is the problem that there are now too many applicants or too few positions?
David Eisenbud: People from Berkeley get positions, reasonable positions by and large, so it's not that I mean… I'm talking about Berkeley experience now.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: Different places are different. There are more applicants but not that many more. Are there fewer jobs? Maybe than in my year the balance has changed. I was at the end of the sixties. And things were very different in the sixties. One of the things that's different is that it's trivial to apply to a hundred places. Because of a wonderful institution or horrible one called Math Jobs. You fill out one application, your people upload their letters and it goes to any place you check off and you check off every place.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: Which is good for students in a way and bad in a way because there's so much noise in the system then it's easy to get overlooked. It becomes a different game and if your thesis advisor is well-known it still matters. It used to matter in a different way but unfortunately it still matters.
Brandy Haran: So you end up at Brandeis and you're there for quite a while.
David Eisenbud: I was there for twenty-seven years. I was a postdocwith a very temporary position.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
David Eisenbud: I guess I was called an instructor. Post doc word wasn't so common. And then I was promoted to an assistant professor tenure track. At Brandeis about a quarter of the tenure track people got tenure. It's different in every place. My first job was in 1970, and got tenure in '75 I think. '74 or '75.
Brandy Haran: And without melting my brain what was your area of expertise?
David Eisenbud: So when I got there I was still working on non-commutative rings.
Brandy Haran: Which you'd done your PhD on.
David Eisenbud: Which I had done my PhD on. It's become a pretty hot field now but at that time almost nobody in Boston working on non-commutative rings. And I'm a gregarious person as you've probably have gathered and so… after a semester I was unhappy. I went to Buchsbaum who was the person because of whom I'd come, I had heard him lecture and liked what he did. And said, look, I know a little bit about commutative rings, you know about commutative rings, but I have a lot of energy and I'd love to work on a problem with you. And so we began working on the conjecture. It proved to be a false conjecture and that was rather a disappointment. So I've always had a pessimistic view of conjectures.
Brandy Haran: What was it called?
David Eisenbud: It was called the Lifting Conjecture. And had I known enough algebraic geometry I would have known that it should be false. At that time there was no proper counter example but there was such a strong hint of a counter example that it really wasn't in the cards.
Brandy Haran: So mathematicians always when there being altruistic tell me it doesn't matter if it's true or false, what matters is that we found the truth. That's all that matters. But deep down you want it to be true.
David Eisenbud: Oh, it's yes. Yes. It's more glorious if you prove a theorem than if you find a counter example. Though the counter examples are awfully useful. They keep you from trying to prove the theorem.
Brandy Haran: And what did you move on to next? What was the field that became…
David Eisenbud: So then I really worked in commutative algebra with Buchsbaum, he was my mentor. And we worked together very closely over the next… nearly ten years. It was a very very profitable thing for me. He was my mentor in many senses. Mac Lane also had been engaged in the mathematical community. He was a member of the National Academy. He was an editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy. He was a social mathematician. He had been president of the American Mathematical Society, as I eventually was too. So that was a kind of model but Buchsbaum was also very engaged in department politics and university politics. He brought me along with him in some way. He would tell me about what was going on and so I became aware of those things and aware of it as legitimate thing to think about.
(violin music)
David Eisenbud: I proved some theorem. There was a conjecture… or there was a weak theorem proven and I thought, gee it would be if it were true more generally and I proved it. And I put it in my drawer because I thought, you know, I'm gonna run out of ideas sometime and then I'll take this out of my drawer and publish it and I'll at least have a last paper. So this was in the first couple of years. I was really worried about the well drying up.
Brandy Haran: So you were like staggering out your… genius?
David Eisenbud: Yeah. Right. I got over it and I finally did publish the paper.
Brandy Haran: There was no fear of being scooped?
David Eisenbud: It could have happened but it wasn't. It didn't. As I've grown older and this is true of quite a few people, it takes me longer and longer to publish something. So I do the work, it sits around, I do a little more work on it a year later. Two years later sometimes five years later. And before it becomes mature and goes out. So that could be scooped sometimes it is. Doesn't bother me so much as it would have then. But I have retained a sense of competitiveness when I'm working I want the good result that I got to be mine.
Brandy Haran: I was looking on Wikipedia like, you know, looking at things about you and obviously there are a certain conjectures and things with your name on them. I mean I don't understand what they are and I'm sure in a podcast we can't explain what they are but what's that like? Having something named like the Eisenbud thing?
David Eisenbud: Especially when it's false later. The Eisenbud Conjecture.
Brandy Haran: This happened to you, didn't it?
David Eisenbud: Oh yes.
Brandy Haran: This was recently wasn't it?
David Eisenbud: Oh, it's happened more than once but it's happened recently.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: I've disproved some of my own conjectures.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: But other people have disproved some too. Kaplansky always used to say that you should sort of think of the best possible thing that would be true and make a conjecture, it'll get other people working. It'll show the way, it's a kind of light… a search light ahead of what might be there. And I always take that seriously.
Brandy Haran: Has anything become a theorem that kept your name on it? Have you had any wins?
David Eisenbud: Yes. That too.
Brandy Haran: What's your proudest one? What's the one that, you know, they'll etch on your tombstone or something?
David Eisenbud: The paper's that most quoted I think is my paper on matrix factorizations from about 1980. That was a fun discovery.
Brandy Haran: Well I'll put a link in the notes for the show for people who want to…
David Eisenbud: Sure.
Brandy Haran: …try their luck. (laughs)
David Eisenbud: So that's one. The three things I guess I'm best known for are the early work with Buchsbaum, and that theorem and the things that came out of it. And then my work with Joe Harris on modulis space of curves and something called limit linear series which cleaned up a large number of conjectures in the theory of curves.
Brandy Haran: I know you're still working and doing research, perhaps less than you'd like 'cause of your other responsibilities, we'll come on to that shortly I'm sure. But did you have a white whale? Did you have one that got away?
David Eisenbud: Ahh.
Brandy Haran: Your Fermat's Last Theorem or your Riemann Hypothesis or…?
David Eisenbud: Not so much. There are people who really spend many many years chasing a particular thing. In my very earliest time with Buchsbaum we chased this conjecture quite hard and it got away because it turned out not to have been there to begin with (chuckles), a will o' the wisp. But I tend to work on things that I can do rather than things that are the shining glory of a problem. You know, there was this recent film about Hardy and Ramanujan. And in the film
Hardy is declaiming that the important thing is to achieve immortality by proofing the great theorem. That was never my idea of what was fun in mathematics or interesting in mathematics.
Brandy Haran: You know so many mathematicians. Are they two types? Are there ones who just do what they can do and are there others that just… are like a dog with a bone with one problem for their life?
David Eisenbud: Yes indeed there are. Many people keep their thesis problem for all their lives or things related to it. And sometimes its such a good problem that that's a really good thing to do and sometimes its a terrible problem and they're just stuck on it.
Brandy Haran: It's quite tragic. (chuckles)
David Eisenbud: It's quite tragic yes. There's luck involved and taste and who your thesis advisor was. I once was talking to a young student at some conference and I asked, her it was, you know, what are you working on? And she told me her problem and we discussed a little bit and became clear that it was really her thesis advisor's problem which he hadn't solved. And it wasn't a very good problem and I thought oh I wish I could do something for her. But of course you can't at that point.
(gentle piano music)
David Eisenbud: Brandeis, I'm sorry to say lost it's ideal of being a real strong research university. A number of bad things happened that were not Brandeis' fault. They over invested in some building project, the Chancellor who had been so connected to the Jewish community and such a wonderful fundraiser retired finally, does happen to people. And was replaced with someone who was not a good fundraiser. Actually there was a funny story about this guy which I think is worth telling. Which was told to me by one of the fundraisers. He said, you know, if you're president of Brandeis, there's one word you've got to be able to pronounce correctly and that's Brandeis. But when so and so says it comes out Princeton.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Right.
David Eisenbud: So anyway, that was a problem. It was a problem that Harvard dropped its anti-Semitic quotas and so that rich Jews felt comfortable about giving money to Harvard instead of Brandeis. So there was a whole complex of things that happened. The Seven Day War in Israel, also diverted resources to that.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: And so Brandeis began to lose resources, tried to fix it by recruiting more undergraduates. The grade point averages of the incoming students, the SAT scores went down. It became less of a prestige place to go. This spiraled a bit.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: And the glory days of funding of science in the sixties also passed and so the whole institute became sort of unsupportable in it's former form. And… math department was cut to a fraction of its size. I was chair a couple of time during this period and I was mad as hell at the administration.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: And so I was easy bait.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And when I heard about this job in Berkeley, I can tell a story about that too.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: I was eager.
Brandy Haran: You were ready to jump?
David Eisenbud: I was ready to jump. I had been visiting Bernd Sturmfels in Berkeley when he was a new faculty member here. And we were chatting very idly about retirement. This was infinitely far in the future for both of us.
Brandy Haran: Yeah (chuckles)
David Eisenbud: But a friend of mine had said that she would really like to retire in Berkeley when she retired. So I repeated this story. And we joked about a bit. And so at the time when the job in Berkeley became available Bernd sent me an email with the subject line, which I still remember, which was Retire in Berkeley? question mark.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: (laughs) And that was the lure.
Brandy Haran: You just replied, yes? (laughs)
David Eisenbud: Yeah (laughs) It was quite a bumpy road before I was hired but never mind.
Brandy Haran: So you came to Berkeley but you didn't come to Berkeley just to be like a math professor down in the math building and teach and research you came with another role?
David Eisenbud: Right. Right. I came to be director of MSRI.
Brandy Haran: This is the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.
David Eisenbud: Yes.
Brandy Haran: For people who don't know.
David Eisenbud: Yes. I would have come to be a professor had they invited me.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: But I was more attractive I think as a director of MSRI.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: Than as a professor. Though they were willing to hire me fortunately. I would not have come without having a tenured job a Berkeley either.
Brandy Haran: Why would they have targeted you to run MSRI? What had you done?
David Eisenbud: Well, not much actually. To be perfectly honest I did not have the required experience. I was a bit of a dark horse in every sense. I had been a year… a visitor for a year at MSRI. But… how shall I say, the other candidates were less suitable. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Right?
David Eisenbud: One of them was perhaps more suitable but there were other political problems that occurred and kept it from happening.
Brandy Haran: But I mean you'd been chairing a math department.
David Eisenbud: I twice chaired a math department, I'd run big meetings. I'd been very much involved in organizing things in the community.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
David Eisenbud: In small ways I'd been involved with the American Math Society, so…
Brandy Haran: You're quite a networked guy then?
David Eisenbud: I was quite networked but not particularly with people at MSRI or Berkeley.
Brandy Haran: So when you come to MSRI, this is already an established Institute.
David Eisenbud: Yes.
Brandy Haran: And it's doing it's thing, what was your big thing? What did you want to be like your legacy or what was the change you wanted to bring? Or were just wanted to keep it ticking over?
David Eisenbud: So… Elwyn Berlekamp was the chair of the board at the time and he took hiring a director very personally and very seriously. Even came to visit at home in Newton, Mass.
Brandy Haran: Right?
David Eisenbud: To see whether I lived right.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Oh right, unannounced or…? (laughs)
David Eisenbud: No! Announced.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: So I was nervous about this of course and I invited Buchsbaum to come over and join us for the talk.
Brandy Haran: Okay. Wingman.
David Eisenbud: Which he did.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And after Elwyn left, Buchsbaum said boy I'm glad he's not hiring me!
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: He gave you a thorough going over, did he?
David Eisenbud: Yeah that's right.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: Anyway apparently he liked what he saw.
Brandy Haran: Yep.
David Eisenbud: So eventually I got this offer.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: Berlekamp also taught me about fundraising. I had really not done any fundraising though I was interested.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
David Eisenbud: And I went and I spent endless time with… Berlekamp in the car going to visit his friends and him telling me stories of MSRI and of…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: Of such things.
Brandy Haran: Yes.
David Eisenbud: And he was my mentor very much in those first years. I've been extremely lucky over time with mentors.
Brandy Haran: Were you lucky with mentors or are there people who just are amenable to having mentors? They are like more sponge-like. Like is it a skill of yours that you're willing to accept mentorship?
David Eisenbud: I think it's partly a skill of mine and I played this card pretty consciously. That I could go to someone and say look, I'm young and I have lots of energy and you actually know something about this field, let's work together. Then really plunge into their problem.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: And that stopped working at a certain point 'cause I grew up.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: But then it sort of has worked in the other direction. Former students of mine and I have collaborated very… very happily.
Brandy Haran: I know you still do mathematics and I don't want to belittle that but this does seem like a time where you've transitioned from being like a mathematician to more of a administrator and mathematical politician or for whatever, you know, the lack of a better phrase is. Like… did you enjoy that? Did you feel like, oh it's time for a new challenge or is that just a natural progression for someone in their career that they have?
David Eisenbud: Well it's actually a little different than… at least I perceive it a little differently than that. I've been really quite productive in these years.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: So I see myself now as doing both… with some frustrations of course. I'm sure I would have more proved theorems if I weren't director. But that I'm very happy with the trade off. I feel I've done a lot of good for mathematics… in this way. Probably more than those theorems would have done. I'm very proud of MSRI and the changes I've been able to make there too.
Brandy Haran: I mean also does the fact that you're in so many rooms with so many mathematical people…
David Eisenbud: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: …give you bit of an advantage too? Can you sometimes cherry-pick someone who you think you can collaborate with on your own work?
David Eisenbud: (pause) Sometimes, yes. I had a fantasy of knowing all of mathematics from the beginning. I have to tell you.
Brandy Haran: Yeah (laughs)
David Eisenbud: So I wandered. I worked in algebra early on… sort of category theory then algebra. I was interested in algebraic number theory. I was interested in operator algebras. I then moved into singularity theory. I moved into algebraic geometry. At one time I thought I'll move from area to area, I'll know a lot of things. Of course that has dried up a bit because I don't have the time to both be productive and learn a lot of brand new areas. I have to choose. But… when I came to MSRI I had the fantasy that every semester there would be a new program and I would really learn something about a new area every semester. But it's been too busy a job for that and I've been… the process of staying productive mathematically has… ruled that out to some extent.
Brandy Haran: Give me your best explanation of what MSRI is. I've heard you give this explanation a few times and I have my own way of doing it. Give me your best one that you give to someone who's not a mathematician at all. So if you're in a cab and you're being driven up the hill to MSRI for example and the taxi driver says, what happens in this building? What's this all about? How do you explain it to them?
David Eisenbud: Well, I've often said and I think it's true, that MSRI is the world's greatest collaborative math research institute. So it's primary a math research institute where people come from all over the world because they want to talk to each other about their favorite problems and we host programs, we don't create them, but we host extremely good people and people who are just developing. So that's one of the things MSRI does. Another is to cultivate talent in lots of areas, lots of different levels of people. Undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and others. And the third really is public understanding of mathematics and math education which are related but different areas. And you're my finest achievement in public understand of mathematics. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Alright, well okay. (laughs) Well that's disappointing then. (laughs)
David Eisenbud: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: It's important to emphasize there aren't like professors and staff who are employed by MSRI.
David Eisenbud: There are no permanent staff, scientific staff, at all.
Brandy Haran: Just the people who run the show, like, you know yourself.
David Eisenbud: People who run the show have term appointments or like me, or like Héléne serve at pleasure, but presumably… fairly long term. I've been there pretty long too by now.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: It's twenty… twenty-one years since I came.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: I did take off six years in the middle.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: But, it's been twenty years.
Brandy Haran: Do you wanna hear how I explain it to people?
David Eisenbud: Please, yes I do.
Brandy Haran: Alright. I always say, it's this amazing building up on top of a mountain overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It's this building amazing place and it's like Top Gun for mathematics. And every semester they'll pick one or two big hot topics in mathematics, like things you may not have heard of but to mathematicians are like one of the real big deals at the moment. And then, they'll get all the best mathematicians from all around the world to all come and hang out in this place for half a year and just throw themselves into the topic and talk amongst themselves and have seminars and lectures and gather around blackboards and just like talk about this for six months and see if they can advance it. And then they'll all just go off back to where they came from but for this six months it was this amazing attack and collaboration on the problem.
David Eisenbud: It's pretty good. I might steal some of that. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Top Gun for mathematics though like. 'Cause in Top Gun where they train the pilots.
David Eisenbud: Uh huh, yeah.
Brandy Haran: And that's always the pilots from all around, like the Navy, all get picked, like the best…
David Eisenbud: Uh huh.
Brandy Haran: …dozen or so get to go to like San Diego just to immerse themself in the best training and the best other pilots. And then they just go back to their aircraft carriers like Maverick.
David Eisenbud: People tell me I need a better… name for MSRI.
Brandy Haran: Top Gun?
David Eisenbud: M S R I, is hard to remember.
Brandy Haran: It is.
David Eisenbud: It's hard to say.
Brandy Haran: And sounds like misery, you always tell me. (chuckles)
David Eisenbud: Ah.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: Well, emissary. Shall I tell you that story?
Brandy Haran: Go on then.
David Eisenbud: So at the end of the eighties people had gotten into the habit of calling MSRI, Misery, which is a terrible thing if you're… also trying to be important in the world and raise money and things like that.
Brandy Haran: Jokingly? Like to be derogatory?
David Eisenbud: Jokingly! No, completely, you know…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: It was such a wonderful place to be.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: Ha ha, we call it Misery.
Brandy Haran: So it's like irony that…
David Eisenbud: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Okay right.
David Eisenbud: And the first laser printer that they had was called the Miserable… Laser Writer, right?
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: So that was all too catchy, I'm sorry to say.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And Bill Thurston, one of the things he decided to do was try to fix that. And so he was a very clever guy and he said well if you pronounce the letters rather quickly and with a French accent, Em-S-Air-EE, it sounds like emissary, so let's call it Emissary, that's at least a word.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Yeah.
David Eisenbud: It's pronounceable. Not bad.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: Uh, he didn't make friends with this idea because he would say at the beginning of every workshop, now we're changing the name to Emissary so please repeat after me Emissary. And of course the mathematicians don't like to repeat after me at all.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: So this was kind of a negative for the name. There are still people walking around who call it Emissary but not very many. And so I abandoned that attempt when I came and just use MSRI.
Brandy Haran: A few questions that could potentially could have boring answers or could have interesting answers, I don't know.
David Eisenbud: Hmm. Yeah?
Brandy Haran: I'm curious about how the topics are picked. Like I don't understand any of the topics that come in these seminars, I read the titles…
David Eisenbud: Certainly not.
Brandy Haran: They bamboozle me. But it seems like it would be sought after to have your area get picked for a program at MSRI.
David Eisenbud: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: 'Cause it's like this is great if it's there there's a chance I get to spend six months in Berkeley and have this great experience.
David Eisenbud: Paradise, right.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah.
David Eisenbud: We should rename it Paradise, but…
Brandy Haran: Top Gun, I've said! Top Gun! (laughs)
David Eisenbud: Top Gun, yeah.
Brandy Haran: I get to go to Top Gun for… so like…
David Eisenbud: That's right.
Brandy Haran: Is there jostling is this like a political backstabby thing or is it… who's making these decisions and how do they do it?
David Eisenbud: So the decision is made by the so-called Scientific Advisory Committee which is advisory in name only. It's a committee with the power to make those decisions.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: They're ten top mathematicians who serve four year non-renewable terms and they work hard. They come in person to MSRI for two days at a time twice a year and they work in between as well. And they donate their services to the institute because they believe in this thing.
Brandy Haran: But are they being pitched to, like a Shark Tank or Dragon's Den… or?
David Eisenbud: Yes. So they receive proposals from the outside and they also instigate proposals. So every meeting, One the largest agenda item is consideration of the proposals on hand. And thinking about how to pair them. We also have this schtick which… is that we run two programs at a time typically and we try to choose them so that they have some interesting relationship to each other. And sometimes that's been very successful sometimes it's not successful.
Matchmaking is always perilous. But it can be very good and so the committee spends a lot of time on pairings and things like that.
Brandy Haran: When it's announced like the winner, is this like being told you're gonna get to host the Olympics? Is this like a really big deal for that math community? It's like oh we got… I can't believe it we've got an MSRI slot, or is it a bit more low-key than that?
David Eisenbud: People work hard as organizers. So it's a little more muted celebration I think.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: But it is very good for the field and people are eager to do it for their field or to have someone else do it for their field preferably.
Brandy Haran: And then how do you pick who gets to come and actually be on the program?
David Eisenbud: So the first thing is that a program is chosen with a set of organizers.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
David Eisenbud: The organizers have proposed it. Every program comes as a proposal whether it was instigated purely from the outside or sort of seeded by the committee. It comes as a proposal and it's judged on that basis.
Brandy Haran: So they've started almost as like pitchers and or advocators and now… now you actually have to run the thing?
David Eisenbud: That's right.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: So… Brady makes the proposal to work on, you know, Numberphile mathematics.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. yeah.
David Eisenbud: And is accepted and then that's three years before the program.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: So we choose almost exactly three years in advance.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And of course it's been a consideration before that. So the proposal was submitted probably four years in advance or something like that.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
David Eisenbud: Three years in advance you get the green light and then you begin advertising in your community. Who wants to come, oh boy we really need these three people. I'm gonna tell them to apply. But every person who comes has to make an application. And that's actually something which is controversial. We feel it strongly because it levels the playing field.
Brandy Haran: So even if I'm a Fields Medalist or something like I've got to…
David Eisenbud: You have to put in an application. You know, there are ways of making it easier for you.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: And the organizers can write the recommendation letter but there has to be such a letter and people get quite mad at this. I'm a Fields Medalist! Or I'm a Whatever! Actually the Fields Medalists don't mind.
Brandy Haran: Right. (chuckles)
David Eisenbud: (laughs) But the people just below the Fields Medal… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Okay.
David Eisenbud: …might be pretty angry.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And so we fend off this criticism a lot. And the other institutes don't do it. I think we're the only one who really takes that mantra seriously.
Brandy Haran: Right, right.
David Eisenbud: Anyway so people apply and they apply in different categories. There are research professors, members, and postdocs.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: And some graduate students come with their mentors too. But there's a long list of applications. The organizers submit their recommendations to the SAC which has the power to decide, the Scientific Advisory Committee. And the Human Resources Committee also combs the applications to make sure nobody… no women, no minorities are being missed. And so all that information gets to the SAC, and they make a final decision. And then they call in one of the organizers and say, you know we're thinking of changing your recommendations in the following way, tell us why we're being stupid.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
David Eisenbud: And then there's a negotiation and then there's a final list.
Brandy Haran: Is it over subscribed? How many people want to come to how many you take?
David Eisenbud: So we have ten to one Post-Doc applications.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: Ten applications for every person who comes.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
David Eisenbud: And they're already preselected by field pretty much. So it really is quite a serious competition.
Brandy Haran: Hmm. Hmm.
David Eisenbud: Members… it's not as draconian as that, but there's still lots of very good mathematicians whom I would have loved to have who we just didn't have room for.
Brandy Haran: So how do you measure if the program successful? Have you ever come to the end of the six months and they say like, oh my goodness we've just… we've got a proof!
David Eisenbud: We've blew it! We blew it! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: We blew it or we did it? Like you know…
David Eisenbud: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: We've just solved the Riemann Hypothesis this is great, like, how do you… what is success?
David Eisenbud: So that's an interesting question and it's a subtle question to because success is almost never, we've solved the Riemann Hypothesis. There are lots of breakthroughs made. We have lists of them on the website, you can find them. But… we're really an incubator.
Brandy Haran: Mhm.
David Eisenbud: Mathematical theorems take a long time, somebody comes they, they had an idea, they wanna prove this, they have a reason why it's possible. They have seventeen conversations, it's advanced this way and that way. And then probably if it's gonna be proved by them they go home and prove it. Rather than on site… so it's a very complicated process and complicated to measure. I personally measure it by the sort of excitement in the field that's been generated by it. And there are programs where the senior people don't come in sufficient numbers and it's kind of quiet and at the end of the thing you feel it just wasn't as good.
It's a very robust form, I don't think it's ever really a disaster but certainly there are times when it's just everybody is ecstatic at the end program and other times well it's just sort of like… ah, time to go home.
Brandy Haran: Well I now know something new because of you as well, it's quite possible they are solving these things and just putting them in a drawer for later…
David Eisenbud: Yes, that's right. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: For later in their career. (laughs)
David Eisenbud: (laughs) that's right.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: You meet so many mathematicians and you know so many of them it seems… I feel like you must know every mathematician in the world sometimes. And you also know some of the really good ones, like superstars. What makes someone a really good mathematician as opposed to an everyday grinding one. You know those superstars, do they have anything in common?
David Eisenbud: Well they work really hard and they have tremendous passion.
Motivation counts for a lot in mathematics and people drift away from… research is hard, research is frustrating for pretty much everybody… and… the rewards are fairly rare. There are big rewards if you really get something you're excited about, that's super exciting.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: But, it can be rare and it can be frustrating and the really good mathematicians… maybe they have enough reward so that they keep on or maybe they keep on… and therefore have enough rewards. Talent certainly plays a role. People who say there's no such thing as talent… I think are talking nonsense. I do think everybody can learn mathematics and enjoy mathematics with good teaching. You know there's no such thing as not being able to understand fractions. But talent at the highest level you see and you just… it's jaw dropping.
Brandy Haran: But what does that look like? Or am I not capable of understanding that?
When you're a chalkboard with someone who's like one of these superstars and they're just showing you something, what are they doing that the other man or woman isn't doing?
David Eisenbud: It's hard to describe but well here's a personal experience. So I was a visitor at an institute in Paris when I was pretty young. So I was five years beyond my degree, I went to this Institute, I walk in, there's one of the most famous mathematicians in the world standing there, Pierre Deligne, and ah…
Pierre Deligne, oh my god, but he's very friendly. He takes me out on a bicycle in the French forest and we have… I'm still in awe. But if you ask Pierre a question, I've always felt and I found this over the years, you get back an answer which first of all is absolutely penetrating but it's at your level. So… he's seen through the problem, he's understood at a very deep level and so he can explain it… what you need to know. And he's not pretentious about it. He's willing to explain it to you.
Brandy Haran: But that makes him a great communicator…
David Eisenbud: But the depth of understanding that has to come first and this rapidity with which it happens is astonishing. Now… it has to be said that there are quick mathematicians and slow mathematicians and some of the best ones are not quick. So that kind of instant response and instant ability to solve any problem, some of the best ones have it and some of them don't.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
David Eisenbud: Von Neumann was very famous for speed, for rapidity. There's a sort of silly mathematical problem. Two trains start twenty miles apart facing each other on a track and they go towards each other at forty miles an hour, and a bee starts from the nose of one and flies to the nose of the other and flies back and flies back until finally the trains meet and something happens to the bee. How far did the bee fly? And there are two good ways of solving the problem. There's an infinite series there, you can sum the infinite series, it takes you a little while. Or you can notice that the trains took, if they started twenty miles apart, they each were traveling forty miles an hour, eighty miles of relative speed, it took them a fortieth of an hour or whatever it is to get, right?
Brandy Haran: Mhm.
David Eisenbud: The speed of the bee is known as well, I forgot to say.
Brandy Haran: Yep.
David Eisenbud: Okay, so the speed that's how far the bee flew.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: And the joke was that you could tell whether a person was a mathematician or a physicist by which of those two options they chose. The mathematicians would sum the infinite series, the physicist would see instantly that it was the length of time that the bee flew. So somebody von Neumann this question, he answered immediately and they said, oh! We thought you would have solved it as a mathematician and summing the infinite series. And von Neumann is reported as saying, is there any other way?
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: So, (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) He just did it quick.
David Eisenbud: Yeah, right.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: But he was legendary for that speed. And some mathematicians are like that, and some are just not. Some people are superstars in the Olympiad and some never like Olympiads. Don't like those problems, they're not very good at them, just don't feel like working on a problem that somebody else sets, or feel that they're inadequate at it or something but just don't get grabbed by it. So, there's a great range of style. Some people really genuinely slow seeming but boy do they get to the goal.
Brandy Haran: Mhm.
David Eisenbud: By… deep thought somehow.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
David Eisenbud: I've known some of those and I've known some of the very very fast people
Brandy Haran: Besides being slow or fast, in that respect, are there different styles of mathematician in the same way you can have like a different footballer? Like some footballers are good at catching and others are good at that…
David Eisenbud: Hmm. Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Are there genres of mathematician or is…?
David Eisenbud: Certainly there are. There are people who… who have… incredibly ability to work with complicated formulas and other people who just would never touch a formula and see a geometric picture. Thurston was incredibly geometric for example.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And just had that insight which was astounding to everybody around him. And there are people who work all their lives on one problem and go deeper and deeper and there are people who… fidget around and are interested in everything in the room and you know… you've happen in with your problem and they're just as likely to think about that as about their own.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Are you scarred of those people coming and stealing all your proofs? (laughs)
David Eisenbud: You know it's a craft thing. As with most really good craftsman you're glad when somebody else pitches in. You're glad to have them as a collaborator.
You're proud to be their collaborator then. Right?
Brandy Haran: But there must be jealousy and…
David Eisenbud: And there's also jealousy there and there are different styles of that.
There's a famous mathematician whom I won't name who tells his students they must not talk about their problem with anybody else.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
David Eisenbud: Until they've solved it.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: It's a secret and… I think that's very bad for students. My students work with each other all the time. So there are lot of personality things. There's a kind of intensity about mathematicians which is… not universal but very characteristic I think. Some people think that very good mathematicians are usually on the autism spectrum somewhere. I think that's over… drawn. But here's another story about how mathematicians are. You know I've studied voice for many years. I'm a singer. I once had a voice teacher… with whom I'd studied for a while and one day he said you know, I'm really sorry to tell you this but you'll never be able to be a professional singer. I didn't want to be a professional singer, I was already well along in my career in mathematics. So I said, you know, what makes you say that? And he said well you're hopelessly introverted. And… I had to tell him that for a mathematician I was wildly extroverted. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Yeah.
David Eisenbud: You know, those two spectra don't meet.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: The singer walks out on stage you can tell them instantly from the rest of the instrumentalists by just their bearing. And mathematicians are somewhere to the left of the instrumentalists in their typical introversion. So… there's that side of it too. But you can like collaboration. You can collaborate a lot. But you have to be willing to sit by yourself too.
(violin music plays)
Brandy Haran: Do you get excited by like new proofs coming out? Like do you follow like the literature and the news and is that like an exciting thing, like sports results for you or…?
David Eisenbud: Yeah, it is.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
David Eisenbud: I do it less than some people. Some people really keep track of who's scored and what, you know, more like score than like the result.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: I'm very interested in hearing what the latest result is.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: But not so interested in who did it or what the circumstances were. Some people really pay a lot of attention to who's gonna win the Fields Medal next, right?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: They have a list. I'm completely out of that.
Brandy Haran: But you've been involved with the Fields Medal haven't you?
David Eisenbud: I was on the committee, actually. Not this most recent one but the one before. I was… very pleased at the choice of Maryam Mirzakhani and I'm proud of having had a part in that. Not that it was a difficult thing.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: It was an exciting committee. We met in secret. It's gotten a little less secretive now but the tradition was that the committee is completely secret except for the… and that all communication in or out goes through the chair of the committee.
Brandy Haran: So you can't be lobbied or…?
David Eisenbud: So you can't be lobbied that's right. So… we were enjoined, we had meetings in New York once and in an European city once and we were enjoined not to give lectures at the nearby universities when were there because all these well known mathematicians suddenly showing up would be suspicious at that time of year. So it was all a big hush hush thing.
Brandy Haran: So what you couldn't tell your colleagues, you'd say oh I'm going to New
York or I'm going to Europe and you had to have a cover story?
David Eisenbud: That's right. That's right.
Brandy Haran: Cool!
David Eisenbud: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: That's the most cloak and dagger thing I've ever done.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: But it was pointless, of course, really. And I think now they've taken steps to make it a little less crazy. By statute there's no repeat of one Fields committee to the next one.
Brandy Haran: Right?
David Eisenbud: So there are records… but they're sealed and the idea is that they should be sealed for seventy years.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: When I was on the committee, seventy years from the first Fields Medal had just come. So I thought, oh goody, I'll look at the records from the first Fields Medal, so I wrote to the secretariat of the International Mathematical Union, saying seventy years has passed, it's my time, I wanna know. And they said we'll look for the records. And a month later they wrote back sadly they said the records have been lost. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Oh, how convenient.
David Eisenbud: So… (chuckles) the IMU kept its records in a shoebox until quite recently.
Brandy Haran: Oh okay (laughs) There are a few big like famous ones out there aren't there? The Riemann Hypothesis springs to mind.
David Eisenbud: Yes.
Brandy Haran: Fermat's Last Theorem was taken away from us.
David Eisenbud: ABC is the big…
Brandy Haran: Yes?
David Eisenbud: …heartthrob at the moment.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: Shall we talk about that controversy? Do you know about that?
Brandy Haran: Well I know a bit. I would love to talk about it, yeah. Go on then.
David Eisenbud: So… Mochizuki, who has done very good things, a very fine technician, claimed to have proved it. And he did some odd things. The proof is embedded in a very long series of papers, which don't seem to have much to do with the goal when you look at them.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
David Eisenbud: And people tried to wade through them, very few people got beyond a small piece or really figured out where the action was. There is one exception to that, which I'll come to. But so he had his coterie of supporters and a group of people who said we don't see the point, we don't see how he could have proved it. We don't see the new idea. He's not telling us the new idea. We're not so sure there is one.
Brandy Haran: Although he's published, he's just not saying what the part is you should look at?
David Eisenbud: Published is too strong a word. It's on the archive.
Brandy Haran: Right?
David Eisenbud: And it's out there but he refused to come and give talks about it. I put it out there, go read it. If you wanna know how it's done go read it.
Brandy Haran: Well, Perelman did the exact same thing, didn't he? With the…
David Eisenbud: No! Perelman came and gave lots of talks.
Brandy Haran: He did give talks on it, right.
David Eisenbud: And very good talks.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: And very… responsive talks.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: Very different. Actually.
Brandy Haran: Right, right.
David Eisenbud: Okay so there's Mochizuki sitting in Japan, surrounded by a group of his students who believe in him.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: And a few other people who have sort of taken up the cudgel. Maybe because it's related to their own work is the worm's eye view of that.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: Anyway, they believe. So there's this controversy, it's the most important problem in number theory maybe, baring the Riemann Hypothesis, and nobody knows whether it's been proven. It's terrible! And years go by, then the rumor comes out that it's gonna be published by the journal at the place where Mochizuki is.
Brandy Haran: So even though it's on the archive and publicly available, the fact it's being published gives it more of a veneer of respectability?
David Eisenbud: It's presumably refereed by somebody respectable.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: At a respectable journal. So when this news gets out… the person who is best placed to have understood it and who has understood it… comes forward and says I've read it and it's wrong. And here's where it's wrong.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And that's Peter Scholze who just won the Fields Medal. And Peter is an amazing person. He's one of those jaw dropping mathematicians.
Brandy Haran: But what he'd kept quiet as sort of what just out of respect because it wasn't published?
David Eisenbud: He was very young when he'd read it.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: He is still very young, from my point of view.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
David Eisenbud: (laughs) And he said well other people are gonna read, they're gonna find the mistake too, it's not my business to get in there.
Brandy Haran: Right. Yeah.
David Eisenbud: But somehow when it was announced that the journal where Mochizuki is was gonna publish it he felt that that was wrong.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: So he came forward and the journal immediately retracted this idea that it was gonna be published. Said no, we haven't actually accepted it.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: So maybe it was just a rumor.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: And other people began to look and so there's no a considerable body of opinion on the side of Scholze. Mochizuki has not retracted and says Scholze's just dead wrong.
Brandy Haran: But Scholze's case that he pointed at's pretty compelling is it like? He was like…
David Eisenbud: People say well, we gotta study for ourselves but he pointed… to the page and the lemma which he said is just not proven and was the key.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: And so even having that pinpoint statement and from a person of Scholze's standing is pretty scary for the proof. So I would bet considerably against it at this point though… you know, people do make mistakes on both sides, so who knows?
Brandy Haran: But these ABCs and Riemann Hypothesis sort of things…
David Eisenbud: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: They're like… they even excite you guys like they're not just like the ones for us outsiders.
David Eisenbud: Oh, yeah.
Brandy Haran: Like throw us a bone. These are the ones that get all you guys buzzing as well.
David Eisenbud: Yes. ABC trivially implies Fermat for example. And you know it's just a very central statement. Unlike Fermat it's hard to state for a layman, but, not impossible and I think you've done something about it haven't you?
Brandy Haran: We have video about it.
David Eisenbud: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: A while ago on Numberphile. Yeah.
David Eisenbud: But it is hard to get your mind around.
Brandy Haran: What would you most like to see happen in mathematics. Like what's the one? Is it… I guess it's gonna be Riemann Hypothesis? Or what's the one you'd love to see happen?
David Eisenbud: Riemann Hypothesis is certainly the most famous.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: The Clay Prizes are not bad. One that I would personally be very excited by is P not equal to NP. Call it computer science if you'd like but I call it mathematics.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: It's sort of the next natural step after Gödel.
Brandy Haran: Right?
David Eisenbud: And that's a very big one. There are some that are very central but I'm not personally so involved like the equations of motion of fluid mechanics and… knowing whether they could have good solutions and things. Somebody understanding turbulence would be a very big deal, in both in applied and pure mathematics. There are a number of good things out there and they do get solved sometimes. I've been very pleased, I mean some conjecture that I was involved in which seemed untouchable for many many years got proven pretty recently and by a really nice easy proof. I was just delighted.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: There's this great… cliche… that mathematicians are in their prime when they're young.
David Eisenbud: Mhm. Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Before they're forty and they do all their best work and after that…
David Eisenbud: Uh huh.
Brandy Haran: But you know I speak with you and I think you're past forty now…
David Eisenbud: (chuckles) I'll bet, yes.
Brandy Haran: But you know, you're super sharp and seem to know so much about mathematics and for a layman like me seem to know everything. Do you feel slower or less mathematically able than when you were like, you know… romping around in your prime?
David Eisenbud: Hmm. I notice a difference in how I approach things, yes.
Brandy Haran: A detrimental one?
David Eisenbud: There are pluses and minuses. I'm sure overall it would have to be a minus but not a fatal minus by any means.
Brandy Haran: What do you notice?
David Eisenbud: So… you know… people don't run four minute miles after they're a certain age.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: There's a kind of ability to sprint and to have absolutely no focus but some computation.
Brandy Haran: Right.
David Eisenbud: For an extended period. And that's not the way I work anymore. Could I do it? Well… hmm… maybe.
Brandy Haran: So is it like endurance and concentration?
David Eisenbud: There's a kind of endurance issue, I think, yes. And sprinting, right? Just the… speed of… the legs running. My twenty year old son could climb stairs a hell of a lot faster than I could and that was a while ago.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
David Eisenbud: It's just the engine doesn't produce the calories as fast.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
David Eisenbud: But on the other hand I know a lot more and I have a lot of associations that I didn't have when I was young. So I have some advantages too, but really I'm not in it for the great problems. I'm in it to have fun. That's the truth of the matter. Let me tell you an agist story.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: I got to Brandeis as a postdoc, a rather young postdoc. When I was twenty-three… I guess. So a year after I'm standing in the hall at MIT with Mike Artin. And Mike Artin is only a dozen years older than I am, but he was already a famous mathematician. He was tenured professor at MIT, he worked with Grothendieck. He was really the big stuff. He and I and another postdoc who was a good friend were standing together chatting and Mike is a very informal person. Always was. So… he said something about, you know, people our age. The three of us. And I thought, how could someone be so deluded as to think that I would see him as my age.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Right.
David Eisenbud: So he was half again as old as I was at that time.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
David Eisenbud: Now of course I understand this error completely. I look at a graduate student and they look to me like myself. But I'm sure they don't see me that way.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: So there's that.
Brandy Haran: What do you want your main legacy to be? Is it all the stuff you've done like at MSRI and the things you've helped create and things you've put in place there or is like, you know, your theorems and your proofs and your mathematical body of work? Which means more to you?
David Eisenbud: Hmm. That's an interesting question. (pause) They both mean a lot to me… honestly. I think that the fate of administrators is to be forgotten. I've done a lot for MSRI. I've built a wing on it, I've raised money. I don't think that will be well remembered. And that's okay. It's there. I think that some of my theorem's will be remember longer though. Whether they're remember a hundred and fifty years from now is… well… probably not. But maybe? They'll be part of the texture of mathematics then, but as an individual theorem I don't know. My book on commutative algebra is the best known thing I've done bar none I think, probably better known than my activity at MSRI right now, just in terms of number of people who've used it, or number of people who find it useful to themselves.
Brandy Haran: And your 17-gon video.
David Eisenbud: Oh and the 17-gon video. God help me. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Sorry about that.
David Eisenbud: If only I had paid more attention to those constructions. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) That will be your legacy.
David Eisenbud: Yeah, right.
Brandy Haran: They'll put that on the tombstone. (laughs)
David Eisenbud: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (giggles)
David Eisenbud: Yeah… so… you know some exposition, some administration, some theorems… I think it's a mix. Life is a whole. Students. I mean I've had a lot off students.
Brandy Haran: I saw on your Wikipedia page I think that you'd had thirty-one…
David Eisenbud: Something like that, yeah.
Brandy Haran: PhD students?
David Eisenbud: That's right.
Brandy Haran: I'm not gonna ask you to do it, but could you name them all when it gets to that number?
David Eisenbud: (laughs) Um… I could get a long way into it.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
David Eisenbud: Yeah…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
David Eisenbud: I'm sure I would miss a few. Some of them had left mathematics, some of them have died, some died very young. Some of them I'm very much in touch with and in contact with and take great delight in. It's an interesting thing when I work with a student or when I meet a student even whom... who I haven't seen for a while, we have an instant connection because we have a language in common. And… a whole set of associations, it's like children in a way but it's… for me it's been a very positive thing. I know people who aren't friendly with their students, who are often jealous of their students. But… not me. I'm very very pleased to have those students around.
(gentle violin music)
Brandy Haran: What happened to your father and like what did he see of your career and things like that because right at the start you were talking about how much that interaction with him…
David Eisenbud: Mhm. Was very important to me, yes.
Brandy Haran: Right, what happened later on?
David Eisenbud: So… he had a long career teaching at Stony Brook and was part of building up that department. He was I think unhappy about his research career and sort of went out of research. Began to teach courses on history of science and on anti-science and… but he taught a course on quantum mechanics over and over and he loved that subject very much, and wrote a book for relative beginners, called the Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Mechanics which was then republished by the American Math Society sometime after. And my wife and I also endowed a prize in his name for math and physics at there. But he lived to see me established at MSRI.
Brandy Haran: O, right?
David Eisenbud: I think was very pleased by that.
Brandy Haran: Did he follow your mathematics? Like would you send him your papers and your breakthroughs?
David Eisenbud: No. No.
Brandy Haran: Not for him?
David Eisenbud: I could tell him some things about it. But we didn't communicate on a technical level very much.
Brandy Haran: There was snobbery between the two of you mathematics versus physics, or?
David Eisenbud: No. no.
Brandy Haran: And your mother? Like did she get to read your books. She always wanted you to write.
David Eisenbud: Yes. She… well she read introductions. We shared a lot of poetry actually. And I know a lot of poems from that time. She really… got me into that. So that was a very rich stream for me. She would read introductions, she couldn't read the books themselves. But I think she was very proud of me.
Brandy Haran: And twelve year old and then maybe even university David who had dreamed of being a mathematician.
David Eisenbud: Yeah?
Brandy Haran: Do you think he would be… disappointed or pleased or surprised what it actually ended up being like?
David Eisenbud: Certainly surprised.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
David Eisenbud: He didn't know a thing about the… future really.
Brandy Haran: What would he be most surprised by?
David Eisenbud: Well… who knows? But maybe the most surprising aspect would be something that came up between me and Yuri Manin once. I was… immensely pleased to meet Manin at some meeting finally in Spain. He was just beginning to be able to travel and he was at some meeting where I was. And we fell in and got to be friends. And we traveled down to Toledo to see the artwork there. He was a immensely cultured person. I don't know if you've ever had contact with him or heard of him, even. But a great mathematician and immensely cultured.
Anyway we went together, his wife was along and my son was along. And we were sitting in the square in Toledo enjoying the sun and the food and the wine… and Yuri said to me who would have thought that being a mathematician would lead to seeing the world? So.. in a way that's a very surprising thing, how international it's been for me, and how nice that's been.
(gentle music fades in)
⁂
[ Champaign Mathematician ]
Summary: From Illinois to Cambridgeshire, Holly Krieger’s path to mathematics was an unusual one.
(gentle piano music)
Brady Haran: Today's guest is Holly Krieger. A lot of Numberphile viewers will know her from numerous popular videos on our Youtube channel.
Especially ones about her beloved Mandelbrot Set. (music continues) Holly's an American mathematician but she's now working at the University of Cambridge in the UK and her path to mathematics, well, it's not as direct as you might expect.
(music continues)
Holly Krieger: I was born in Champaign, Illinois.
(music fades)
Brandy Haran: Champagne?
(music fades out)
Holly Krieger: Yeah, spelled differently than the proper Champagne. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: How's it spelt?
Holly Krieger: C H A M P A I G N.
Brandy Haran: Do they have a special drink there that can only be made in the area, or…?
Holly Krieger: Heh, yeah but it's made in barns out of (laughs) leftover corn, I mean… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Holly Krieger: So, no, it's a university town, so there is so town there but it's pretty rural.
Brandy Haran: And what were you like as like a little girl?
Holly Krieger: Loud and obnoxious, is that what you're gonna… yeah, no, I think I was normal. I mean there's this phenomenon where the way you remember yourself has nothing to do with the way that other people remember you.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Holly Krieger: And so when I was small I mean I thought of myself as like, quite outgoing and you know, like to have fun, but in reality I think I was like a little nerd.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Holly Krieger: Who, kind of tagged along with adults when she wasn't wanted and… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Would I have guessed you were going to become mathematician?
Holly Krieger: Oh, I really… you've pinned me down by asking the question that way. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Right? (chuckles)
Holly Krieger: I was back visiting ten years after I graduated high school for a band reunion. So… that's already partially answering your question. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Right?
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Holly Krieger: And at the time I think I had just gotten like my first post PhD job, this like postdoc at MIT. And I went there and I was really expected everyone to be like shocked that in the end what I had done was go get a PhD in mathematics and like do this super nerdy academic mathematician thing. And then when I got there everyone was like, oh yeah… yeah we could tell when you were in school that was the kind of thing you would end up doing. And I had thought like, I would be, you know, a rock star or something. I dunno. (laugh)
Brandy Haran: Okay so you didn't…
Holly Krieger: Not really but you know.
Brandy Haran: So you didn't aspire to be a mathematician when you were…
Holly Krieger: No! Not at all. Quite the opposite. Like first of all I didn't know it was job until I was probably in graduate school I would say. Like I didn't understand what research mathematics was and what that meant and then the other thing is just it wasn't kind of the group that I identified with as a kid. I think I went to one meeting of math team, (laughs) when I was in my first year of high school. When you're a twelve year old girl and you're kind of nerdy, social acceptance is like a really high priority. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Right.
Holly Krieger: And so after my first meeting of math team I was like, well, I think like I don't really wanna belong to this group. I, you know, I wanna talk to different people and I want to sort of be more… be more sociable and be in… be in a different group. So it was a very sort of, first of all very judgmental (laughs) twelve year old girl which… is not super surprising I suppose, but really it was like a conscious decision on my part that even though science and math was stuff that I was good at and I found fun, that I didn't really want to direct as much energy that way as I could.
Brandy Haran: Do you think it held you back from being even better at it? At that young age? Like if you'd hung out with those kids and had you would have, you know, become even better at high school or did you… were you still pretty good at it despite shunning them?
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Shunning math team.
Holly Krieger: My judgmental anti-math position.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Holly Krieger: Umm… I'm sure I would have been better at it just from practicing and being surrounded at it. Surrounded by it rather. But I'm not sure that that's like… something that would have changed my life for the positive in anyway. I mean we put a lot of pressure on sort of performance in school and that kind of thing and it's a means to an end, not a thing in and of itself and so in fact I'm really happy with the way I sort of circuitously came around to becoming a mathematician.
Brandy Haran: So if I went back in time and asked little Holly… like what'd'you wanna be when you grow up? What kind of answers would I have got at different points.
Holly Krieger: (laughs) Oh that's a good question. Okay, let's see, so when I was young I… the two main things that I wanted to do, I think, when I was really young I wanted to be an astronaut which is, you know, sciencey but I was in it for like the see the Earth from the Moon type of adventure. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Cool. Yeah.
Holly Krieger: I still kind of wanna be an astronaut by the way. (laughs) But I think I'm aging out at some point.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Holly Krieger: So I wanted to be an astronaut, I wanted to be a singer, so I sang. My mom sings.
Brandy Haran: You've got a microphone in front of you, Holly. This is your chance.
Holly Krieger: I haven't sung for a very long time. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Alright. (laughs)
Holly Krieger: (laughs) The fear that any of my colleagues might hear such a thing… will definitely prevent it.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: So I was interested in like performance type things also in school and I did think about doing that. I played the trumpet quite seriously in school and I thought about going into that. My uncle is a professional trumpet player.
Brandy Haran: Do you still own a trumpet?
Holly Krieger: I do still own a trumpet, yeah. And I've picked it up a few times.
Brandy Haran: When was the last time you played the trumpet?
Holly Krieger: Umm… just a month ago, or so! I'm working on a piece because I might audition to join an orchestra.
Brandy Haran: Cool!
Holly Krieger: (laughs) I like it but the problem is, you know, trumpet in orchestra you play like once every ten minutes and (laugh)
Brandy Haran: Oh okay. Right.
Holly Krieger: So we'll see.
Brandy Haran: So at what point… did like… did it switch and you realized, oh I think I'm gonna end up doing mathematics at university, yeah?
Holly Krieger: Oh so it was like late in university when I switched into maths.
Brandy Haran: Oh, right?
Holly Krieger: So I had started in biology.
Brandy Haran: You said maths!
Holly Krieger: Well eventually.
Brandy Haran: No you said maths (hisses) with an S.
Holly Krieger: Oh! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: You've been…
Holly Krieger: I don't even notice anymore.
Brandy Haran: You've been anglicized.
Holly Krieger: Well, partially.
Brandy Haran: I'm the opposite. I'm the opposite.
Holly Krieger: You say math now?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: I think I switch. It's basically like the maximum confusion level. I switch flexibly between math and maths. And zee and zed. That's a big one for me.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: Because like I try to give my students a break… by learning to speak with zed instead of zee.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: Because I use it as a variable all the time when I teach.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: But it's not quite sunk in. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Do you give people your mobile number or your cell?
Holly Krieger: (sighs) That one… that one I use cell unless I'm consciously thinking about mobile.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: But mobile sounds weird to me because not only is it the different word for it but it's pronounced differently than in an American accent.
Brandy Haran: Ah mobile (mo-bull)
Holly Krieger: And so there's like the double hit of the change, so…
Brandy Haran: Yeah, mobile (mo-bull) mobile. (mo-bile)
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Anyway, you were saying, so you didn't go to university to do mathematics.
Holly Krieger: No, I went to do biology initially. I was interested in genetics and the problem was, so I was in biology for like, I think a year and the problem was that there was a chem lab eight AM on Fridays.
Brandy Haran: (winces)
Holly Krieger: And like… I got to university and I realized that there was, you know, a lot of interesting things to learn in biology and chemistry and also a lot of interesting bars to go to. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay. Right.
Holly Krieger: And those two goals were sort of incompatible. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: And so… no I mean I'm joking.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Holly Krieger: I just didn't like chemistry.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Holly Krieger: And I didn't like being in the lab and lab work in particular I was like not interested in.
Brandy Haran: Because you were good at it, didn't have an aptitude for it or you just… something you didn't like about it?
Holly Krieger: I don't know how to answer that question 'cause I think they're so closely related, right? Like there's kind of a feedback cycle of you're initially kind of not so good and then you lose interest and then it goes back and forth, you know it gets worse and worse.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: So hating lab work I switched my major into psychology and I tried that for like… one or two semesters. And the problem is, and I'm gonna get in trouble with a lot of people here, they just make all the stuff up. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Holly Krieger: (laughs) Right, like? (laughs) I was learning some like intro…
Brandy Haran: Send all your emails to Holly.
Holly Krieger: Yeah that's right, don't blame Brady. I was learning all this stuff in Psych 101 and Psych 201 and all of this neuropsychology stuff and I just didn't believe it. You know it wasn't convincing evidence to me and so it made me worry about sort of the value of what I would be doing if I pursued a degree in Psych.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Holly Krieger: So… then I switched to something more valuable, which was Italian.
Brandy Haran: Oh god.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: It would have been quicker to ask you the list… list the things you didn't do. (laughs)
Holly Krieger: Yeah it's true, it's true. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Italian? Alright.
Holly Krieger: Italian, yeah.
Brandy Haran: Why Italian?
Holly Krieger: Oh I really hate to tell you all of my justifications. This one is the worst. So I had to take some language requirement at my university and I wanted to take Portuguese, but the class was full so I took Italian instead. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: The professor was attractive so I took more Italian classes. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: How long did you do that for?
Holly Krieger: Only I think a semester.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: So then I decided no one's gonna ever pay me for my Italian degree so I want a job that pays something.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: So I switched into computer science.
Brandy Haran: Right. (chuckles)
Holly Krieger: (laughs) Okay this story's almost over.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Holly Krieger: So I'm in computer science and I have to take some Introduction to Proofs class in mathematics.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Holly Krieger: Because it's one of the requirements for CS. Again because of like scheduling randomness I ended up in the Honors section of the Intro to Proofs class.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: And it was really fantastic. And it was sort of like the first time when I had made… so this is a thing that I get to still experience and is a lot of the reason why I'm in this field still, which is I got to experience that transition from totally not understanding something, like being completely lost, someone explaining it to you, you know, possibly over and over again and still not having it get… into your brain. And then suddenly one moment… you just get it. It just clicks. And then forever after you are able to understand it. And so I had this phenomenon with a piece mathematics in that course.
Brandy Haran: Do you remember what it was?
Holly Krieger: Yeah, it was (laughs) it was the Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem. So it's this theorem that says if you take a collection of points, say… let's say real numbers between zero and one, okay? If you have infinitely many of them, then there must be some limit point that they… they accumulate to.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: So, I'm trying to think of a better way to describe that, it's essentially saying that, if you have infinitely many points in like a closed box (laughs) that there has to be some point which is well approximated by them. Anyways… it's just some like little…
Brandy Haran: Now where is that point between zero and one?
Holly Krieger: Well it depends on the infinite set of points you start with.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: So if you think about the set of points one and one half and one-third and one-quarter and one-fifth and la la la, that's an infinite set of point that are between zero and one.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: And they accumulate at the point zero. So the theorem itself is not telling you where the point is, it's just telling you that it exists.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: But for some examples you can figure out what it is.
Brandy Haran: So those other… I can't even remember them all now, those other subjects you did at university, none of them had that, gave you that…
Holly Krieger: No.
Brandy Haran: That thrill.
Holly Krieger: No I mean to be honest at the time… what I was looking for was like what's a degree that is sort of like minimal effort. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Right.
Holly Krieger: And maximal outcome…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: …and it was a very like, cost benefit analysis to look at university which I think is pretty common actually and not something that we talk about. We talk a lot at least on the faculty level. We talk a lot about like passion for subject and that kind of thing and that's not really how a lot of students make their decisions and I didn't either because I just hadn't experienced it for the first few years.
Brandy Haran: So when you have this moment, you're actually currently enrolled in computer science.
Holly Krieger: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: You then jump into mathematics for more?
Holly Krieger: Yeah. Yeah. So the next term instead of taking this like hodgepodge of coursework that I had been doing I took four advanced maths courses. Now I'm like self conscious about math versus maths. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) During this period where you are like, you know, keep changing horses…
Holly Krieger: (laughs )
Brandy Haran: …how were the people in your life reacting to that? I'm just curious, like your family and that…
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …were they like… were they worried about you or did they think this was really good that you were so like proactive in changing? What kind of advice and feedback and reaction where you getting from those around you?
Holly Krieger: That's a great question, so they were not like, congratulations on being proactive. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I was being nice. I didn't really think they would do that. (laughs)
Holly Krieger: (laughs) That's a very supportive family.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Holly Krieger: I think they were not that worried because like one feature of my personality that has been sort of constant since I was quite young is… a high level of independence.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Holly Krieger: And so I think, you know, they had some knowledge that whatever it ended up being I would come through with some level of competence and independence and…
Brandy Haran: And it wasn't like you were flunking out of these things, you were just… you were making…
Holly Krieger: Right, right.
Brandy Haran: …the decision to change.
Holly Krieger: Yeah exactly.
Brandy Haran: And then math was like, you found your home and you didn't feel like you wanted to move anymore.
Holly Krieger: No for the most part since then I've been happy.
Brandy Haran: Okay. (laughs) for the most part.
Holly Krieger: For the most part.
Brandy Haran: For the most part.
Holly Krieger: Well some of the decisions have still been accidental I think. For example deciding to apply to graduate school. It seemed easier than applying to other jobs.
Brandy Haran: Because I was going to say, you were saying you were looking for something that would not involve too much effort.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: But also give you like… an income at the end.
Holly Krieger: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Like, mathematics is not the obvious choice. Like is that when you abandoned that ethos and thought I'm gonna do something for the love of it, or did you see an income at the end?
Holly Krieger: I think that if at any point I had stopped seeing like a practical future for myself that I probably would have switched.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: Yeah so I did keep that practicalities in mind still because I think like this is a really big motivator for me is that I want to have a nice life outside of work which is funny given that you just asked me what I'm gonna do over the weekend and I said I'm gonna work.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: But… no in reality like the flexibility of the job and that kind of things I view as compensating for the fact that it's not, you know, going to write code for Google or something. It's not going to, you know, make a pile of money ever for me. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: So when you were doing mathematics at university, did you imagine… in the end oh I'm gonna end up working in Wall Street, or did you think I'm gonna end up being a researcher mathematician?
Holly Krieger: To the extent that I thought about it… it would be research mathematician.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Holly Krieger: Yeah, because I already knew that I was really interested in this feature of academia which is… like the level of independence that you have. Not having a boss telling you what to work on, I could already see was like a high priority for myself.
Brandy Haran: PhD was almost a given then… you were always thinking alright…
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …after I… when I graduate I'm gonna do a PhD.
Holly Krieger: I again think we're giving twenty year old Holly like a little too much credit for foresight. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Holly Krieger: Yeah when I thought about it, like when I had to make a decision about what do I do next then yes, I chose PhD. I didn't apply to any external jobs. I just applied to academic jobs. PhDs in particular.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: But I really would not say that like I sat down as an adult and thought it through well. There was a little bit of sort of careening about.
(gentle violin music)
Brandy Haran: What was the gender mix of your math class when you finally settled on mathematics?
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Was it like a good mix. Was it lots and lots of guys, or…?
Holly Krieger: Because I had done this honors Intro to Proofs class, they moved me to the honors section of the maths undergraduate cohort.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Holly Krieger: And that was pretty small. I think it was just two of us out of… sixteen or fifteen or something like that that were in the group of honors mathematicians.
Brandy Haran: That were women.
Holly Krieger: That were women, yeah.
Brandy Haran: Did that have any effect or impact of do you have any thoughts on it, doing like going through and doing a degree in such a male environment? Or did just… didn't make a difference? It just brushed over you?
Holly Krieger: At the time I don't think it had very much of an impact. I became good friends with the other woman in the program so there was some positive interaction.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: The only like sort of negative thing at that level for me was just that there was just some discomfort occasionally in the interaction, you know, I didn't get along that well with a lot of the other people in the program, not because I don't get along with guys (laughs) but because you know our common interests were just a lot less likely to overlap and… it wasn't so easy to talk them and stuff like that. So but no, I would say… like at the time I was really not very conscientious about being in the minority or anything like that and in particular like I was also quite keen to avoid being put into a box of you know minority mathematicians in that way, right, like… you know if they're taking some photos to be like oh here's the maths department and it's like somehow the women are always in the photo, you know? (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: That kind of thing I really fought against when I was an undergraduate because I wanted to be viewed for my mathematics and I didn't wanna prioritize having to think about this other thing.
Brandy Haran: At what point did you start gravitating towards a certain field or part of mathematics, like, you know a specialization?
Holly Krieger: So I did that pretty early, but I did change a little bit in that too, though I won't go into the full list for you. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Alright, I imagine… (laughs) imagine my shock.
Holly Krieger: Yeah I know. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Holly Krieger: So that is a little bit more like follow your heart, I think. (laughs) Which is that, you know, you're taking courses and you just identify… you just identify with ones you find fun and easy… not easy but… that make sense for you and that's just the track that I followed for the most part.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Holly Krieger: There was a little bit of active choice when I was in the middle of graduate school, about which subfield I wanted to be in. Which had a lot to do with sort of the people in the field and like who I wanted to spend the next 50 years interacting with and kind of the attitudes in the field that lead to me ending up to choose the field that I'm in.
Brandy Haran: That seems to be such a thing from a few of the people I've spoken to. Like, as much as having an affinity and a passion for the… the mathematics. It's like the people, like a few charismatic people or inspiring people or just a good group that you want to hang out with.
Holly Krieger: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Sometimes makes a big difference.
Holly Krieger: Yeah it does, and to be honest I think that's the way it should be, right? I think that someone who is sort of like at the professional level or PhD level or whatever, should be able to sort of move fluidly between areas of expertise given enough time. And so the more important thing is to choose people that you actually can imagine being around for the next (chuckles) fifty years and people who inspire you.
Brandy Haran: I wonder if there are certain areas of mathematics though that get neglected because of… a few… grumpy old mathematicians.
Holly Krieger: Absolutely.
Brandy Haran: There are? Can you name them?
Holly Krieger: Uhh. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Holly Krieger: I could. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) So and tell me about the area you did move to and you've… where you ended up.
Holly Krieger: Yeah so in the end I'm in a field called arithmetic dynamics. Which is basically those two pieces put together (chuckles) so it's arithmetic, number theory, so the study of prime numbers and integers and that kind of thing, and dynamics which is the study of iterating systems. So like for example thinking about like the solar system. We know where everything… let's leave the subtleties out of it… we know where everything is right now.
Brandy Haran: Right. yeah.
Holly Krieger: And so it's pretty easy to predict where everything'll be a minute from now.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: What if I just said, I've just said that it's easy to go from like time zero to time one minute, in terms of prediction, but then if we take the rule that takes us from time zero to time one and we apply it over and over and over again, if we iterate the system…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Holly Krieger: …then eventually it starts to become hard to understand and complex.
Brandy Haran: I can see what that happens with the solar system 'cause of…
Holly Krieger: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: …'cause there are so many moving parts and little things that can wobble and some rogue comet can come here and this and that and… but I would've thought the one place that wouldn't happen…
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …was mathematics. Because you've got a fixed point…
Holly Krieger: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: …where you start and nothing can move and nothing can change, 'cause it doesn't even exist, it's an abstraction so… so like what… how can there be anything that mathematics can't predict?
Holly Krieger: (laughs) That's a really good question. So this is like the heart of the kind of thing I study, which is about this notion of chaos.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Holly Krieger: So lemme explain a little bit about what I mean. I mean it's basically (chuckles) like, you know the description that Jurassic Park where he's kind of hitting on Laura Dern and he explains chaos by dropping water on her hand?
Brandy Haran: On her…
Holly Krieger: Do you?
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Holly Krieger: It's not a terrible description. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Right.
Holly Krieger: So like what is a chaotic point for a dynamical system? It's not one where you don't know what happens to the point. It's a point where you don't know what happens if you wiggle the point around a little bit. So if you think about…
Brandy Haran: Ohh.
Holly Krieger: …like what does it mean to be a chaotic point, I'm not saying, oh I never know what happens to this point. I'm saying that the kind of long term behavior can change depending on if I wiggle it a little bit to the right, a little bit to the left, a little bit up a little bit down.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: And so it's failure of… like… like…
Brandy Haran: How does…
Holly Krieger: …stable behavior nearby.
Brandy Haran: How does tweaking the initial parameters affect what happens next.
Holly Krieger: Exactly, exactly.
Brandy Haran: Where'd you do your PhD?
Holly Krieger: Illinois, but Chicago.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: And then like… and then what? What happens when you finish PhD. I've heard of this… what's it called? Postdoc trap or something? Where you just end up being a postdoc forever?
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Like…
Holly Krieger: That does happen.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: Fortunately not to me. I did do a postdoc.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Holly Krieger: So after my PhD I went to a postdoc at MIT. These are like these three year stints where it's meant to be like okay, in three furious years you're gonna prove to everyone that like you're a good investment for a permanent job. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: Alright, so you do as much research as possible. You meet as many people as possible, that kind of thing.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: And so you're right, that it's becoming more and more common to struggle to move directly from your first postdoc into a permanent faculty job but I was able to do that.
Brandy Haran: What are those three years like then, where you're kind of really having like… is that like you're putting yourself on the market it feels like? That must be really stressful.
Holly Krieger: It is. it is. And you sort of… even though there are other postdocs around, you don't have a community in the same way that graduate students have a community and faculty have a community because everyone knows that… you're leaving soon. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: And also there you're rivals.
Holly Krieger: And… yeah they are your rival… I guess I didn't really think of it that way. I mean… of course you're right (laughs) but there's not a lot of like mathematical sabotage going on. As far as I'm aware, I mean. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay. Right.
Holly Krieger: And so… it's a little bit less direct rivals than… than some other fields where you're sort of like rushing to publish all the time.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: It's a little bit lonely. (laughs) I think, that's the first thing. You feel really isolated. It's hard personally, right? Like, you know you're moving and so you've just moved and you know you're moving again it's hard to sort of settle and you know, if you have a partner or kids or whatever, it's even harder.
Brandy Haran: Isn't there a chance you'll end up getting a permanent job where you postdoc, though? Like isn't that almost like wouldn't that be like your goal like 'cause they're the people who know you best and see you all the time so if you're impressive it feels like that would be one of the more likely places to employ you?
Holly Krieger: So it happens, but it's not as frequent as you might think. So one of the issues is that there's more postdocs than permanent positions and so there's sort of like a filtering effect as you go along, right?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: Just like there's more graduate student places than postdoctoral places and so the type of institution where you're like to be employed changes through the course of your career.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: And then the other thing is that there's some sort of specific reasons why that might not happen.
Brandy Haran: So where… what did happen when you finished your postdoc at MIT?
Holly Krieger: So what happened when I finished my postdoc at MIT is I got this job (laughs) in Cambridge.
Brandy Haran: Alright, and what is your current job then? 'Cause we are sitting in your office.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Your… pretty nice office by the way.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I've met a lot of mathematicians who I think are more senior than you that don't have offices this nice.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: So… you've done really well. Lovely corner, windows everywhere.
Holly Krieger: I do like my office, it's true. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah? What is your job here?
Holly Krieger: So I'm a lecturer here, so the American equivalent would be like an Assistant Professor, which is the first level of professor essentially. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: So it's a permanent job but, you know, I still have steps to go here. So here they're called, you know, reader is the second position and then professor is the final title.
Brandy Haran: Okay. And what… so what are your responsibilities? You obviously have to teach.
Holly Krieger: I do.
Brandy Haran: But you still research as well?
Holly Krieger: Yeah. Yeah.
Brandy Haran: So how does that… what's the mixture of that and how does all that work?
Holly Krieger: So it's a little Cambridge specific, our terms are short here and so the teaching is like very intensive (chuckles), so for the most part what I do is I don't usually get much done research-wise when we're actually in term with the students around.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: But because they're shorter that means that I do have other times of the year when I can focus on research.
Brandy Haran: Are we in a teaching or a research period at the moment?
Holly Krieger: We just transitioned from research to teaching.
Brandy Haran: Oh no.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Do you have to be in class soon? Am I keeping you?
Holly Krieger: I do… no not yet today. It's gonna start on Thursday.
Brandy Haran: Oh dear.
Holly Krieger: So… which I had to ask my colleagues… classes in Cambridge start on Thursday and I always forget so. But no that's why you see these piles of papers.
These are all projects. (laughs) Each pile is a project that I've worked in recent months that I swore to myself I would finish by this time that I have not finished by this time.
Brandy Haran: So these shelves I'm looking at are your research shelves?
Holly Krieger: You are.
Brandy Haran: Tell me what research looks like. So if you said, oh this is brilliant I've got all day today to do research…
Holly Krieger: Mhm?
Brandy Haran: …what do you do? Like, do you just sit at a table? Do you go for a swim? Like…
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Like, how do you… 'cause presumably when you research the whole point is to have like a new idea and a new way to do something.
Holly Krieger: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: How does one have an idea? What does this look like?
Holly Krieger: Oh man… I don't know. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) If I say, Holly you can have all day to do research.
Holly Krieger: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: Tell me what happens from when you wake up.
Holly Krieger: Okay so… if I have all day to do research, what happens when I wake is the same as other days which is that I read my phone in bed for like an hour. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Holly Krieger: And answer some emails, you know, boring stuff.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Holly Krieger: But once I get here and I start thinking, usually it's not the idea phase that I would work on by myself in my office. So, maybe maybe like some really specific piece of a proof I'm working on that needs some new idea or some new input. But for me research is very writing intensive, so I'm kind of trying different things and doing computations and trying examples and seeing if I can extract sort of what's really going on (laughs) in the thing that I'm trying to prove, and on a good a day it works and on a bad day it doesn't work and on a really bad day it works until like nine PM and then I realize that I made a mistake. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Are you using paper and a pencil?
Holly Krieger: Yeah, yeah.
Brandy Haran: Are you on a computer or…?
Holly Krieger: Paper and pen.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Holly Krieger: Yeah, like gigantic mountains of paper (chuckles) and pen.
Brandy Haran: Right, and just like are you like throwing things all over the floor…
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …is it like… are you writing on windows and…?
Holly Krieger: I have not yet done either of those things but now it sounds kinda fun so maybe I'll try it. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Okay. You said that's not the idea phase. What's the idea phase?
Holly Krieger: Yeah, so the idea phase for me at least… it does happen sort of thinking in solitude occasionally, that sort of put some pieces together that I didn't realize were connected before but that is what I consider an idea mathematically by the way is like combining things that you already know reasonably well in a new or interesting way. So to me like that's the innovative part. But where that usually happens for me is often where I'm introduced to something new which would be like at a conference or a colleagues talk or something like that and I see something that I recognize, right? Like they're speaking about something that I don't know anything about and I'm trying to learn but some piece of it rings a bell with something else that I know and I then try to think about like… hmm, well what if we… took this question and changed it just a little bit in a way that I might be able to say something? And so that's the most common form that like a literally new idea takes is I'm introduced to some new technique or some new proof or something like that and I see how it relates to some other piece of mathematics and try and extract value from that.
Brandy Haran: What do you do when that happens? Like what's your first course of action? Do you… do you rush up and see that person after the lecture, do you keep it to yourself in case your wrong…
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …and go and have a play on your own and have a look through it, or… what do you do when this possibility suddenly presents itself?
Holly Krieger: It actually depends a lot on the person. So we were talking earlier about like personality matters and this is one of the ways. If it's someone that I trust and someone that I know isn't gonna be like, wow, that's a really stupid idea, if I have made some mistake…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: Then yeah I just rush up and tell them like, have you thought about like this direction of it and whaddya think about this and would this work and do you see any reason why it wouldn't? That kind of thing and it's quite exciting and fun and of course it's better in terms of the speed of progress is much higher when you're working with someone else and have someone else to bounce ideas off of. But it certainly has happened that I've been in this situation and maybe not had such a good impression of how that would go, in conversation with the person and then I keep it to myself and I think it really through carefully and I sort of complete the argument myself and know that it's solid before I get in touch with anyone else about it.
Brandy Haran: In your field at the moment, is there like… a big white whale? What's the big… what are the big things in your, you know… what would win the big prize in your field at the moment? Is it something I will have heard of?
Holly Krieger: So one of the big things in my specific field that is still open that people are really interested in is called the Uniform Boundedness Conjecture.
Brandy Haran: Oh, which we just made a video about.
Holly Krieger: Which we just made a video about. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Half an hour ago.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah. I know all about that!
Holly Krieger: Yeah, and so now you know about it so you can start working on solving it. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I think I've already forgotten. (laughs)
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: We're well beyond my event horizon of remembering.
Holly Krieger: (laughs) Anyway, so just… it's an example of a broader class of mathematical problems that ask about how arithmetic, like prime numbers, interact with dynamics. And trying to understand and connect it to all these questions of like geometry and all these different fields of mathematics of what can we say if we have a mathematical object that we can look at from two different angles. Say like a dynamical angle and a arithmetic angle, how do the two perspectives connect to each other?
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Holly Krieger: And so that's just like sort of a vague description but even thought it's vague this description has led to a lot of questions in mathematics that… that are really interesting and those types of things are the kinds of things that I think are most interesting to my field right now.
Brandy Haran: Does every mathematician hope that that'll be the person that does it? Like do you hope you'll be the person that does it or is that now how mathematicians think or…?
Holly Krieger: That's how some mathematicians think. And I think that those are the people who usually do end up doing those kinds of (chuckles), right, like if you make it a really high priority, like, I have a white whale, I have a problem I'm gonna thinking about everyday for the next ten years.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: I think you're likely to make some progress on it, right?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: Personally, you know… I don't really care that much (laughs)
Brandy Haran: What…
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I was gonna ask though, I mean you especially… well you were at MIT and now you're at Cambridge so you spend a lot of time surrounded by like superstars of mathematics, right?
Holly Krieger: Yeah, yeah.
Brandy Haran: You know, Fields Medalists and all sorts of people. What do you want? Do you want like… what would you consider to be success in your career? Like it must be… 'cause it must change the way you look at the world when you're always surrounded by these people at the very very top?
Holly Krieger: That's exactly… true. (laughs) So… what I consider success not that. And I kind of fight everyday to avoid it becoming that. So what I consider success in mathematics is to have a career that like I enjoy and provides a lot of satisfaction and that I'm achieving well at, you know, well considered and have a good reputation, I guess.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Holly Krieger: As a serious person in it, but I don't want to make the life decisions I would have to make to achieve the… if it were even possible, I mean I'm not trying to be arrogant here.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: To achieve the big prizes or the big open questions. I mean really those things are about like significant time commitment and choosing work over other things. And choosing where you wanna direct your attention and time and I don't wanna do that but at the same time, you're right, when you're surrounded by people … or not completely surrounded but many people here do that and then of course they get fancy prizes and big grants and you think, like, oh maybe it would be like really cool to get this. But I know that in the end like the thing that is more important to me is my personal satisfaction.
Brandy Haran: But I imagine work-wise… I dunno, I'm presuming this maybe it's not true. I would imagine work-wise the biggest thrill you get is like… a new finding and a really good paper being published and like a breakthrough.
Holly Krieger: Yeah, that's true.
Brandy Haran: So the… you know but you don't want the steroids version of that?
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: The Riemann Hypothesis, Fermat's Last Theorem version of that? You're happy with the other version, the kind of just the solid medium breakthroughs? (chuckles)
Holly Krieger: Well putting it that way now I'm feeling a little like…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Holly Krieger: …uncertain about my choices.
Brandy Haran: I don't know what's on this shelf.
Holly Krieger: No…
Brandy Haran: The big one could be right here next to me.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: Of course I do choose problems that I think are interesting and serious and that other people will care about so there is some thought, there is some strategy in that direction of like, I don't wanna just do mathematics that is medium. What did you call it? (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah, medium, I think I said medium, yeah.
Holly Krieger: I wanna do mathematics that is important to the field and useful.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: But… that has… that influences more how I choose the problems that I work on.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Holly Krieger: And less how I choose how to spend my time. So I have like sort of an amount of time that I want to spend on work (laughs) and then that's it. And so I achieve what I can within those limits and… try to be satisfied.
Brandy Haran: So you do switch off? You're not that person that sits in bed all night not being able to sleep because they're thinking about the problem they were doing that day?
Holly Krieger: Umm… almost never. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Almost never. (chuckles) Sometimes.
Holly Krieger: Almost never.
Brandy Haran: What about teaching? How important is… teach… I mean obviously you can't say there and say I don't care about teaching but like…
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …most mathematicians I speak to seem to treasure their research time more than their teaching time.
Holly Krieger: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: How do you feel about the teaching side of your job?
Holly Krieger: I definitely empathize with like the treasuring the research time thing because when you're wrapped up in a problem it is so hard to step away from it.
(chuckles) and frustrating and you know you feel like it's just there and… yeah. But… I do really like… I mean teaching is the only way in which I feel like I'm actually contributing to society. (laughs) Right, like I'm not a medical researcher. I'm not… researching cancer cures… I'm not… it's not so obvious why anyone cares about what happens to the Mandelbrot Set, right? Like… and so it's one of the few things that I get a lot of personal satisfaction in my job from like actually having a positive influence on other people. So I like that aspect of it, the other thing I like about it is like the performance aspect… which is definitely not universal among mathematicians but like… constructing a good lecture I find to be like a satisfying experience.
Brandy Haran: So how do you feel when you're lecturing? Is that like that's quite a thrill is it? You feel like you're… like performing for an audience or…?
Holly Krieger: To an extent. I… thrill is probably not quite the… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: But yeah, no, I do feel like it's a performance in some ways.
Brandy Haran: Speaking of performance… you do like public lectures and things like that…
Holly Krieger: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: You do Numberphile videos, of course.
Holly Krieger: I do.
Brandy Haran: How have you found that aspect of your job like… why do you do that?
Holly Krieger: It has been a surprising pleasure, actually. I didn't think that I would like to do it. But then I started doing it and I don't think that it's understandable. When you work in a field you don't understand how valuable it is to people outside of that field for your to share your expertise, right? Like I would kill for the chance to spend an afternoon, let's go back to astronauts, I would kill (chuckles) for the chance to spend an afternoon with an astronaut and have them tell me about how everything works and like what the interesting parts of their job are and like all the little details and the fun stories. I would love that. But of course as a mathematician I think like, why would anybody wanna hear that stuff from a mathematician. Nobody cares. And what I've found is that like I am so wrong. (chuckles) And people do care and people do want the expertise shared and so… now that I have some feeling that that might be true, I mean I still find it kind of hard to believe sometimes. (laughs) But now that I know that it seems to be true I actually find it very fun. I mean that's just the main thing is that it's just fun to talk to people who are learning new things from you, and… so that aspect of it I've been like really pleasantly surprised by.
Brandy Haran: Does that mean you read Youtube comments or…?
Holly Krieger: I try not to read Youtube comments. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Holly Krieger: The more important thing is I always tell my family members not to read Youtube comments. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) No! Do they read? What do they do? Do they email you and say...?
Holly Krieger: They did on the first video. And then they promptly stopped. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Holly Krieger: So they learned… you know it's like the hot stove lesson, they learned pretty quickly. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay. Cool. Very nice.
Holly Krieger: How do you find hanging out with mathematicians all the time?
Brandy Haran: I like it. I like it.
Holly Krieger: Yeah?
Brandy Haran: But that's because I find… I find mathematics really interesting like… I get… I like… I dunno there's something magical about like just the things we were talking about today in the video. There's something magical about all these… I don't know what it is like it like I get chills sometimes when I see something that should just be like… you know… when you say look at this property and then you'll like pull a rabbit out of the hat and say but then when you get to nine, this happens.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Or it doesn't work for ten.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: And (chuckles) why does it not work for ten? And that like freaks me out.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I'm like, oh that's amazing! I feel like it's like… I feel like it comes from somewhere else, mathematics. So I feel like…
Holly Krieger: Hmm. Yeah, yeah.
Brandy Haran: I feel like, unlike psychology being made up…
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I feel like this is come from another… it's come from you know something… it's like the language of the universe isn't it?
Holly Krieger: Like that it's really out there.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: And it's more, it feels like discovery.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: Yeah. I totally agree… it feels like that to me too. I mean people argue about whether it is or not.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: But that is certainly what it feels like and yeah it's really satisfying to… to learn about these things. Or it's surprising… right… to look at these surprises and to say like can I figure out like what the universe is actually like constructed from? (laughs) Like that's kind of the way I feel about the whole numbers. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Why do you think that it's important that… we spend all this money doing it? You know why is it important that mathematics is done? I'm happy for you like…
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Lucky you! You get to do it everyday, like I'm really envious but why should… why should all the people who may or may not be funding it indirectly or, you know, why do you think it's important to have mathematicians spending an entire career trying to learn new things about the Mandelbrot Set?
Holly Krieger: So in terms of things that like don't have an obvious application like the Mandelbrot Set for example.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Holly Krieger: I think there's two ways to look at it. I mean one is that just the basics of like enriching the human experience (chuckles), right? Like why do people paint, why do people write novels?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: That I view as like the same thing.
Brandy Haran: But I feel like to take the other… crazy me taking the other side…
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: 'Cause you know where I stand on this, but to take the other side for a moment. Anyone can look at a painting. They may or may not like it, but anyone can look at a painting. Anyone can read a book.
Holly Krieger: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: And things like that. Anyone can watch a movie. But like… you're doing things, most of the things you do professionally, all the people who are alive will never understand it in their lifetime. They can't be enriched by what you're doing.
Holly Krieger: But I think that that is true actually with paintings and novels and stuff like that, right? Like when I go look at, you know, I dunno… Warhol Campbell Cans… do I really… gain anything from it? I don't understand the context, I don't… have any knowledge of why it's a significant piece of work. I don't have any aesthetic appreciation of it. And so I would actually argue that it's the same for other forms of… of art. I think, you know, I'm being a little dodgy. I think you can actually make the argument that it's harder. Right, like there… like I can at least literally look at (laughs) a painting, right?
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Yeah.
Holly Krieger: But… on the other hand I think that what you're describing is more of a factor of the way that our society works and not like an intrinsic thing about mathematics. I think that people can understand like some of the basic beautiful things about mathematics, I mean, which is something that you are obviously (laughs) pretty well invested in.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: How did you find the cultural change coming from the United States to the UK? But… I'm not talking about like… in normal society, like, you know, the different biscuits you have to eat.
Holly Krieger: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: But mathematically and like academically, what was the culture change like?
Holly Krieger: So it was not very significant. I would say because like it's a big international group of people in most maths departments. The only thing that I notice is that… I do sort of stand out with my Americanness. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Right?
Holly Krieger: In terms of… the way that I interact with my colleagues is like a lot more… let me think about what I wanna say here. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) American.
Holly Krieger: A lot more American, yeah, exactly.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Holly Krieger: No… it wasn't a significant thing but definitely I do detect sometimes that people find me quite abrasive or… a little too… emotional or expressive or some… I'm not quite sure what the right way to say it is but like the cultural difference just in the way that we communicate like in everyday things.
Brandy Haran: Outgoing and…
Holly Krieger: Also… (laughs) well, yeah. (laughs) Also sort of changes going from the US to the UK.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Holly Krieger: Like for example I was talking to some colleague of mine and like… in the US in school you give like an infinite number of presentations. Like you research some little thing… you know, you learn about a country and everyone gives their presentation on the country or something like that. You do a lot of public speaking as a kid in the US.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Holly Krieger: And I have been told at least, I don't know if it's true, that that's not so much the experience here. And so it's true that I wouldn't say more outgoing necessarily but much more comfortable in… like that type of position is something that I noticed. But… but other than that I have to say I really… it's not a significant change because of sort of the university culture dominating (laughs) both American and English culture.
Brandy Haran: And what's next? what's the next big thing? What's the next big thing you're doing? In two years if we do another podcast what… what will be different?
Holly Krieger: I don't know I mean… I will presumably still be here. Will presumably still do this podcast in this office. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Good, yeah.
(gentle music fades in)
Holly Krieger: As far as mathematics like what's gonna be the big new progress in mathematics? (music fades up) I have no idea. And I'm kind of happy that I don't, actually, I think that… (music continues)… yeah learning about what my colleagues have done is one of my favorite pieces of the job.
(gentle piano music continues)
⁂
[ Beauty in the Messiness ]
Summary: Experimental physicist Phil Moriarty works with temperamental microscopes and individual atoms. Today's topics include Ireland, mathematics, failing at university, microscopy, academic gripes... and music.
(Gentle piano music)
Brady Haran: Today's guest is experimental physicist Philip Moriarty. Phil's based at the University of Nottingham and works at the smallest of scientific coalfaces, manipulating individual atoms in microscopes that, well, they're probably unlike any microscope you've ever seen. Now I've been making videos with Phil for something like ten years mainly on my physics channel Sixty Symbols but Phil has contributed to a smattering of Numberphile videos, perhaps most memorably a heavy metal song about the Golden Ratio.  (Mastodon-esque heavy metal music fades in) Irrational! Real but uncountable! Non-transcendental!
(music fades out)
Brandy Haran: Anyone who's seen Phil's videos will know he's got a strong Irish accent. So I started by asking him, well, a little bit a bout that.
(gentle piano music)
Philip Moriarty: I was born in London… in 1968 in Ealing and moved to Ireland, my parents moved to Ireland (chuckles) when I was four.
Brandy Haran: Were your parents Irish?
Philip Moriarty: My mother is Irish, my dad is a Geordie.
Brandy Haran: Oh, right.
Philip Moriarty: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: So that's someone from New Castle for the people who don't know what a Geordie is.
Philip Moriarty: Yeah, yeah. And he maintained that accent the whole time he was in Ireland to the point where I had friends if they were there they'd say, don't leave me alone in a room with him, I can't understand a word he says.
Brandy Haran: It's interesting 'cause I've always thought of you as this like super super
Irish guy, like, you know…
Philip Moriarty: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Cut you and you'd bleed green.
Philip Moriarty: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: But you're not! You're not Irish to the core.
Philip Moriarty: I'm not and I actually a grew up right at the border during the Eighties, late Seventies, Eighties. You know… very strongly nationalistic fervor, very close to a place called Crossmaglen that got bombed every ten days or so. And that pushed me really back against you know, sort of nationalism and patriotism et cetera. So do I feel Irish? Well, I've got this accent, you know, it's part of my culture but so too is, you know, favorite writer is Douglas Adams, British.
Favorite band is Rush, Canadian. Do I feel, you know, incredibly connected to Irish culture? You know, I love Thin Lizzy, an Irish band. I hate Uillean pipes and I hate Gaelic football and Gaelic sports (chuckles), so… yeah… it's… I've never felt particularly patriotic, I've got to admit.
Brandy Haran: D'you know in all of the years I've known you, and all the conversations we've had, I guess we've never talked about this 'cause I always thought of you as a guy who was really like Irish and like, you know, felt like an Irishman in England and Up the English and stuff but you're like, no.
Philip Moriarty: Well, you know, there is that. You know, there is some aspect of that. I do remember some feedback from students, (laughs) one particular comment in the first set of lectures I gave and the module questionnaire had come back, how would you improve this lecture? How would you improve this lecture module?
Make the lecturer less Irish. So (laughs) and also as we were just discussing before you started recording, Brady, the three thing. I got hit by that, the dirty three and a third* thing over and over again (chuckles). So the accent is part of me but, you know, do I feel very very Irish? (sighs) I feel more Irish than British certainly but… you know… I'm not particularly nationalistic or patriotic.
Brandy Haran: What were you like as a kid? Were you nerdy, were you into maths and physics and…?
Philip Moriarty: Very nerdy. Hugely into science fiction, Star Trek, Star Wars, favorite comic was something called 2000 AD, which I hope some people still remember. Home of Judge Dredd. Uh… into astronomy, into NASA, I remember… I think I've told you this story before, Brady, but writing off to NASA round about the time the Voyager probes, when I was ten, in a ten year old's scrawl, and it's not much better now my writing, which was, Dear Sirs, I really enjoy the Voyager probe, could you please send me some photos. And sent it off and forgot all about it and then three months later in the heart of rural Ireland this big envelope full of... stuffed full of photos with a letter, to Mr. Moriarty, arrived and I said, oh wow! (chuckles) and so that was amazing, so thank you, Nasa. That was a big influence. In the end I didn't go down the sort of astronomy route. I went down the… got a microscope for Christmas at one point and that pushed me in the other direction. So smaller things rather than bigger things.
Brandy Haran: So If I've gone to you as a little kid and said, Phillip, what do you want to be when you grow up? What would the answer have been?
Philip Moriarty: So it depends sort of what age but at age eight or nine, probably an astronaut. At anywhere from about eleven, ten or eleven onwards, probably a scientist. And even though I didn't really have a good conception of what that actually meant, scientist. Then further on when I found guitar, rock star, well that didn't work out (chuckles) and then back to being a scientist again (laughs), yeah.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) What were you like at mathematics? This is Numberphile so I always like to ask people about their relationship with mathematics.
Philip Moriarty: Okay, for a physicist this is a very guilty confession. I'm a really poor mathematician. I did not well in maths courses. I have to think really really hard. So I banged on in so many Sixty Symbols videos about my favorite aspect of maths which is Fourier Analysis and transforms and I love maths but I… it… in so far as anything comes naturally… it certainly doesn't come naturally to me. What does… what did come a lot more naturally was coding. And I spent a lot of time during my degree, my mantra was, can I code this? Because if I can't code this, in other words if I can't see an algorithm to translate the maths into something I put on a computer, I don't understand the maths, so that really really helped, so…
Brandy Haran: Keeping you as a kid though, 'cause I wanna…
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: I wanna deal with you as a child first. I'm assuming 'cause your even a little… you're slightly older than me. I'm assuming there wasn't loads of coding at school for you?
Philip Moriarty: Yeah, so the very first computer I got was a ZX-81 in 1981. A Sinclair ZX-81. And that was one K of RAM and you talk about nerdy kid, so another really influential event was when I wrote some code for the ZX-81 and sent it off to a computing magazine and they published it and I got, I dunno, thirty… it was actually quite a lot of money for… I'm probably… it was probably two quid or something (laughs) but I remember it as thirty quid, like a big sum of money. When I was…
Brandy Haran: What did you code? What was it then?
Philip Moriarty: So it was like a couple of games. A few games and it was a listing, so you'd type these in… into and it was… I just sent a listing and so it was like… a space game where basically you had a V. Like literally the character V.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Philip Moriarty: And moving through a field of asteroids and the asteroids were asterisks and you had to dodge back and forth with the keys and just get through to the sort of boss thing at the end.
Brandy Haran: Awesome.
Philip Moriarty: Which on one K was… now that was a challenge. A real challenge, coding anything in one K but it was so much fun. Yeah and that's really so that's… it was the combination of as we've discussed before in one of the Sixty Symbols videos, the whole radio thing and my uncle's a radio amateur and he and I played around with a lot of circuits and built crystal radios and stuff.
Coupled with a couple of years later on… so '81, I was thirteen, and so yeah, so it was the combination of the always an in interests in circuits and electricity and then when computing came in I just got absolutely hooked on computing. Wrote the world's… no on the ZX-81, but on a ZX-Spectrum. Wrote the world's stupidest Pac-Man gave with the stupidest ghosts that just basically went to a corner and stopped.
Brandy Haran: Was Pac-Man a V as well or…?
Philip Moriarty: No Pac-Man… this was a ZX-Spectrum so we actually had, I can't remember, sixteen colors or something, at that point two hundred and fifty-six colors possibly. No, it was… it was a little bit better than that, it was still pretty awful.
Brandy Haran: We have to find that space game and resurrect it for Computerphile.
Philip Moriarty: That's a good idea, if we can find… I have no idea how to go about it. I can't even remember… I'll talk to my mum. She might well have kept it somewhere. Yeah she might have.
Brandy Haran: (sighs) That would be amazing. Another story from your younger days that I always love hearing, I don't know… if we've told it on a podcast or in a video but about the… you and the communion wafer. This is shows that you were destined to be a scientist to me.
Philip Moriarty: (laughs) Yes. So I was brought up in an intensely Catholic environment. Mass many times a week, Catholic primary school, didn't see the outside of the church all of Easter. Just spend the time in there. And one of the classes we were discussing the wonderful aspect of Catholic doctrine known as transubstantiation, which is where the host in the communion, the piece of bread is meant to actually become the body of Christ. So I had… this was just after I'd got that microscope for Christmas, I dunno it was nine or ten, I can't quite remember. And I got very excited. Stuck my hand up in class said, oh, oh, oh! We can do this really great experiment. We can look at the host beforehand with the microscope, I've got a microscope! And then we can look at it after we do all the eucharist and the holy communion thing and then we can see the difference and we can see it converted from the bread into the body of Christ. And I got sent out of the class and I (chuckles) got sent to the priest for added instruction and got told those were not the type of questions you should ask. So me and religion started to part ways around about that point and time.
Brandy Haran: I hope you remember that feeling next time I ask you a question during an interview and you say…
Philip Moriarty: (laughs) No, not goin' there! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I don't… (laughs)
Philip Moriarty: That's purely from ignorance, yes. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: So as you got to the end of high school, you obviously had made firm decisions about what you wanna do at university. What did you choose to do at university?
Philip Moriarty: So physics, and I actually did an applied physics degree. I went to Dublin City University. I was not a great student, which possibly we can get to, but did applied physics and the reason I went there rather than other universities is that the open day was phenomenal and they had lots of, you know, fiber optics stuff and robotics and I was just in my element, loved it. And went there did reasonably well in first year, not so first in second year because the music thing was startin' to interfere with studies, and completely failed my third year.
Brandy Haran: Completely failed?
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: So what did you do?
Philip Moriarty: Right, so I repeated my third year and I tell that story to tutees now, particularly tutees who've done poorly in exams and they feel that it's the end of the world. And I felt it was the end of the world at that point, but I know for a fact if I hadn't've failed those exams, I would not be here now. I would not be doing this job, because I was drifting really badly. If I'd managed to squeeze through third year without failing I'd have drifted through fourth year. There's no way I'd have got the marks I needed to do a PhD.
Brandy Haran: What did you do wrong? Were you just going out and drinking and playing in bands?
Philip Moriarty: So I don't drink alcohol. (laughs) So it wasn't that. It was the band thing. So the night that I remember vividly right before the maths exam, we played a gig in Donegal, and got back into the house… round about three o'clock in the morning, then got up to get a bus to Dublin at six o'clock in the morning, had three hours sleep. Didn't do so well in that exam. And that's… it was really that I was distracted with other things. Plus the fact I'm not a particularly good mathematician either, so.
Brandy Haran: How important was mathematics through that University period? You were there to do physics… and you said maths, you know, wasn't your passion, what was that relationship like?
Philip Moriarty: Maths is the language of physics. So I just had to knuckle down and get there and first year I did a reasonably good job, and as I said it sort of faded off over the next few years. Fourth year I had to put an awful lot of effort in, but… it's a question of practice, it's like anything… if you know, I don't want bring up the tired musical instrument example that I use all the time but if you want to learn something you practice it and you practice it and you practice it up to the point where you know pain almost. And that's what it was like with maths. The way to learn maths, and the way to get any type of mild proficiency even with maths is to just keep doing problems.
Brandy Haran: I talk to mathematicians more than physicists on this podcast, and you know, I'll hear them talk about they got to university and for the first time they understood the beauty of a proof and they saw maths in a new light and all these beauty. Do you have that kind of appreciation for mathematics or for you as a physicist is it just like a tool? Like a screwdriver?
Philip Moriarty: So for me the real beauty, I do have that appreciation. The things like, you know, the Mandelbrot Set for example, which is just amazing. This whole mathematical universe. But where I really get excited is where you have the mathematical framework connecting different aspects of the universe around us. It's been described as the unreasonable effectiveness of maths in terms of describing the universe and that's where it really really hits me. Not so much in proof. There are no proofs in science. So we don't… and things that, you know, when we talk about D X DT, in terms of maths, when we talk about calculus. There are Ds in the real world. Everything's a delta. And so too often think that distinction between physics and mathematics is lost, you know, and sometimes you can get carried away with the beauty and the elegance of the maths, and sometimes that leads you in the right direction and sometimes it doesn't lead you in the right direction at all.
Brandy Haran: Do you ever look at mathematics as a discipline, have an envy for that? Do you look at it and think oh that's beautiful and different and it hasn't got that kind of messiness and uncertainty that my experiment physics has? Or do you look at it with disdain and think…?
Philip Moriarty: No, there's beauty in the messiness. I'm an experimentalist. I am a dyed in the wool experimental physicist. And, you know, we collaborate with theorists, we even in dabble a little bit in theory ourselves, but there is nothing like, you know, when you get a new experimental result, something that possibly nobody else in the world or possibly nothing else in the universe has ever seen before. That's what really sort of gets me out of bed in the morning. And if that connects with theory and you can explain it, wonderful, but it's the discovery aspect, I guess. You know, the explanatory beauty of the mathematics is great, but again, you know, sometimes you can get caught up and you think, well this theory's got to be right because it's so elegant and so beautiful and I've… you know, I've been… disappointed so many times when you think, we've got it! We've got it! and then an extra piece of data comes in and… something that looked so seamless and so beautiful just comes crumbling down.
Brandy Haran: But of course mathematics does have discovery and breakthroughs and you know… and frontiers.
Philip Moriarty: It does, of course it does, and… you know proofs are important (chuckles), I'm not saying proofs aren't important. You know, anti-matter for example and positrons just popped out effectively of solutions of the equations and you know mathematics makes predictions and physical theory's based on that mathematics predictions but they are predictions and they remain predictions until we can actually get the experimental evidence to support them. And increasingly, in some aspects of physics that will remain nameless, that link between experiment and theory, it sometimes felt that well, you know, as long as the maths is self consistent and as long as the maths is elegant then that's all we need and as experimentalist no… I can't take that. (laughs)
(gentle chimes)
Brandy Haran: Just a quick interlude to thank today's episode sponsor G-Research. This is a world leading quantitive finance research firm based in Europe. G-Research is always looking to hire the brightest people to tackle the big questions in finance and applying all the latest in machine learning and big data, all that cutting edge stuff. If you're good with numbers or mathematics or computers, well, this could be your big chance. G-Research is really focused on creating a great work culture and nurturing future talent. If you'd like to find out more about them and the opportunities there, go to gresearch.co.uk/numerphile. That's G-Research, create today, predict tomorrow.
(gentle chimes)
Brandy Haran: Going back to university then, after you kinda righted the ship and redid your third year and…
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: And got through it, at what point did you start seeing a specialization and where your career was gonna go?
Philip Moriarty: So actually, I was planning on going into sound engineering at the end of my fourth year, as you might have guessed. That's really where I've… I've always been interested in music and I'm interested in you know signal analysis and waveforms and hence Fourier Analysis et cetera. What made the difference is that along with the graduation letter there was a letter sent out round about June advertising a PhD, now somebody had been identified for that PhD but they dropped out at the last minute and they were contacting all the final year students, and it was on STM, scanning tunneling microscopy. And I was aware of work that had been published very very recently, it was the first time atoms had been moved around and to spell out a word, IBM. When I got this letter and I knew it was about STM, I got back in touch very very quickly and said what was the possibility of actually getting involved with that project and didn't look back. Within six months of starting that I… sort of knew that I wanted to be an academic.
Brandy Haran: So this sounds quite serendipitous, like you just kind of almost like… convenient. Did you just do it out of convenience, 'cause you wanted a job and an option or did you see something in STM that made you think, I love it! This is where I want to be.
Philip Moriarty: Oh! It was the latter. It was the latter, definitely. It was wow, I hadn't even really considered doing a PhD, it was the subject matter and the fact that… didn't start off like this but ultimately it was about using an STM to manipulate atoms which, you know, given all the way back to when I got that microscope as a kid that was perfect for me.
Brandy Haran: Can you tell us what scanning tunneling microscoping all about? What's goin on here?
Philip Moriarty: Yeah! I can. It's a microscope like no other. There are no optics, there are no lenses, there are no mirrors. And conceptually it's actually easier, I think, than… easier to understand than a traditional microscope. It's basically a record player. It's like an old style record player. You've got a stylus, except in this case that stylus is atomically sharp, and you move it back and forth across a surface and you use that to map out the features of the surface. That's it in a nutshell.
Now the tunneling bit comes from quantum tunneling. The tip isn't actually in contact, though we can do that as well, with a surface and there's a current that flows which is due to quantum mechanics and you measure and map that and use that to map out the surface right down to the atomic level.
Brandy Haran: So that's sort of almost like having your eyes closed and just rubbing your figures over something…
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: …to feel what's there.
Philip Moriarty: That's exactly it. And in fact there's scanning tunneling microscopy but there's also it's counterpart which we do more of now, I would say, which is atomic force microscopy which is exactly that. You're mapping out the forces.
Brandy Haran: What's the advantage of this kind of microscopy over… optical stuff and electron microscopes and things we will have been more familiar with?
Philip Moriarty: The great advantage of the scan tunneling microscope is the resolution. The resolution is right down to the single atom level. Now you can achieve that with electron microscopes. What you can't do easily with electron microscopes is actually push those atoms around. So the scanning tunneling microscope… atomic force microscope, they're called scanning probe microscopes as a family of techniques. You can… manipulate individual atoms and actually this state of the art isn't even atomic resolution, it's down at the single chemical bond resolution. In terms of an optical microscope you just can't get down to that type of resolution because the wavelength of light is too large.
Brandy Haran: Why do you wanna be moving things around?
Philip Moriarty: Oh, so it the way I sometimes in inverted commas sell this, is wouldn't it be neat to do 3D printing with atoms? Wouldn't it be neat to have like a Star Trek replicator? Where you could dial in a blueprint to make something and then have it constructed from the very atoms sort of all the way up? And we're a long long long way from that but it is ultimately the… the ultimate limit of 3D printing is the individual atoms.
Brandy Haran: So it's called microscopy and I always associate that with looking at things but this field isn't just about looking at stuff, it's about like building then?
Philip Moriarty: Precisely, yeah. So you can just use it to look at stuff, but you can also use it as a tool and in fact the great thing is all you need to do to switch between those two modes, it's the same instrument, is move the tip a little bit closer. So when you're imaging you pull the tip back a little bit further from the surface, so you don't disturb the surface. If you want to move atoms around, push them, pull them, pick them up, put them down, poke them, then you just move the tip in.
Brandy Haran: I've seen some of the machinery in your lab and I've also heard you tell stories and (chuckles) seen you curse and swear at the difficulties that you might have, it's a fiddly thing isn't it? Like it's a bit of an art-form?
Philip Moriarty: So I've just spent the last… that's a very timely question, Brady.
(chuckles) I've spent the last two weeks on my back underneath what's called an ion pump, one of my colleagues said, it sounds like something Han Solo would say, I only wish it was as exciting as the Millennium Falcon. So… trying to fix things, getting ultrahigh vacuum can be a real challenge, so, I haven't even explained why we need ultrahigh vacuum. So we're looking at surfaces, we're manipulating atoms, what we don't want is a lot of contamination. And atmosphere is a big contaminant. So we have our microscope in what's called an ultrahigh vacuum chamber. Pressure in there on a good day is comparable to that you get on the surface of the moon in terms of the level of contaminants and… getting that vacuum and keeping that vacuum (sighs) can be frustrating.
Brandy Haran: But also the tips themselve, I imagine they're… are they fragile things these little pointy tips that are scrapping over the surface?
Philip Moriarty: That's a very good point as well. Yeah the tips are… difficult to create sometimes and difficult to maintain. In fact a major program of work we have at the moment is using machine learning to try and train the instrument to keep the tip in the best possible state. So at the moment the way it works is. You take a piece of wire, you etch that wire, you put it inside, you scan, most of the time you're not gonna see atoms, 'cause just the tips too… it's not in a good state. So what do you do then? Well, you sort of tickle the tip with little voltage pulses. You increase the current. You push it into the surface a little bit. You push it into the surface even more. You wiggle it round. Anything to get atomic resolution.
Brandy Haran: So you're just trying to mash it into a lucky shape?
Philip Moriarty: Basically you're mashing the rocks together, yeah. And hoping that in the end you're gonna get out atomic resolution. Now once you've got that atomic resolution you can do very sophisticated things like pick up molecules and use those to control the tip. But again that molecule can drop off and, you know, the tip can change spontaneously or not so spontaneously and so at the moment what happens is somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of a researcher's job is getting that tip in a good state. So, there's no reason why a researcher should be doing that, hence machine learning.
Brandy Haran: In your research and your experimental work, rather than your teaching. What mathematics do you use, on a day to day basis? What do you need to do?
Philip Moriarty: Oh, okay, so… that's a… very good question. So we… so as I said we're experimentalists so we take that data off, we are fitting that data and we're comparing it largely to something called density functional theory. But that's very computational. In terms of pen and paper maths… in terms of research… I don't do that. It's not something I do. So there are, you know, we may tweak codes, we'll, you know, Markov chains and Monte Carlo methods, we'll use those but not in terms of pen and paper maths. It's all… it's actually all computing based.
Brandy Haran: You never sit down and have to use calculus.
Philip Moriarty: Uh… in my teaching yes.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Philip Moriarty: And now isn't that interesting? That there's a rather big divide between what I actually do on a day to day basis and what actually we teach. And for me, I will say it again and… I did have a quantum course just last semester… for me computing is at least as important as mathematics, if it were up to me, I would have computing dominating over the maths, in physics courses. I know… I can hear my theorists friends screaming in anguish, not to do that, but… for me, I think that the one issue with purely analytical maths is that we lose that messiness, which is a feature of the world around us, so knowing that we have noise. Knowing that we don't have infinite resolution, we have deltas rather than Ds, is very very important, and we lose that sometimes.
Brandy Haran: So until quite recently, I know you were the admissions tutor here at the University of Nottingham. (laughs)
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: I wish you could see the look on Phil's face then, it obviously wasn't the easiest job he's ever done. If someone's listening to this an thinking, oh, Phil Moriarty, he's got a cool job, that's a cool life, I'd like to do that, and they're still say at school.
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: What would you say to them? How can they get into this kind of world?
Philip Moriarty: So… the route, the traditional route and well I'll tell you my route, and my route in was I was not a very good student, that's the first thing. I failed those exams and I'm not suggesting that failing exams (chuckles) is a good life choice. But then I did a PhD, in my case the PhD took a little over three years. Duration of PhDs can be anywhere from, at least in the UK, from about three to five years. In the US and elsewhere, in Europe, it can be a lot longer than that, so it depends. Then I did a period of Postdoctoral research, which is after PhD, which in my case was three years and then I got a lectureship, so that's the traditional route in. It doesn't always have to be like that but the traditional route is, high school, physics, maths, et cetera, undergraduate degree, PhD, some people then do a Masters between the undergraduate degree and the PhD, and then periods of Post Doctoral research.
Brandy Haran: What kind of decisions can they be making now, though, to ease the path?
Philip Moriarty: So if they want, if they're interest in doing physics or I guess for to Numberphile audience in terms of doing maths, they really… and if, well depending on what level they are it's a question of GCSE and A level choices. They need to be doing the right subjects to ensure… now it's not the end of the world if, you know, they've… they don't do the right subjects and then say five or six years down the lines they decide they want to go into maths. There are foundation years, there are, for example, Open University, there are other ways back in but in terms of the traditional route, make good decision. Talk to universities about… and talk to admission tutors. Come to… I know we can't have Open Days right at the moment but hopefully they'll come soon. Talk to the admission tutors and get good advice about what subjects they should be doing.
(chimes ring)
Brandy Haran: A lot of the people listening to this will know you because you've appeared in Numberphile videos, you've also appeared in lots and lots of the Sixty Symbols videos about physics that I've made with you. Even Computerphile, I know you're in loads of those videos, so what's it like being a popularizer of science on the internet?
Philip Moriarty: (laughs) It has it's good sides and it has it's downsides. No, it's amazing, so I've had… I think I've forwarded that email and I told him so that… that guy that got in touch who as an undergraduate actually just starting his first year and in high school got in touch… N years ago, something like eight, maybe nine years ago. Got in touch, said that Sixty Symbols, you know, had inspired him and he wasn't thinking about doing physics and then he ended up doing physics and I've been in… I've kept in contact with him and he sent me an email just a few weeks ago and now he's done a PhD and he's thinking about goin' on to do Postdoctoral stuff. It's just amazing to think that you have that type of influence and I'm not talking about me personally, I'm talking about the entire channel. That's an amazing part of it. The other side of it is… those random emails you get from people who've decided they… they and they alone know the secrets of the universe and they're gonna tell you about them at interminable length (laughs). But I think we both experience that. But it's… it's fun I enjoy the teaching side of things, as much as the research and I've said this to you before, Brady. You have completely changed the way I teach. The way you ask questions, the way you keep me on my toes, (chuckles) the way you have changed… just the way I explain things through this. So this Sixty Symbols has fed directly into my teachin' and of course into the research as well in terms of when I now go and do presentations, keeping in mind your journalistic approach to thing, I think is… sometimes creates tension between us but that tension's a good tension.
Brandy Haran: Aww, you often say… like Phil and I before we do any recording have some very passionate discussions. Not arguing but just like really passionate.
Philip Moriarty: Sometimes arguing. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Sometimes arguing. But as friends. But many times Phil says, you should be recording this! This is great! But I'm not sure people are ready for that.
Philip Moriarty: (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: But that does lead me to say, you know, you are so passionate and you're like, you know… uh… in a good way quite a volatile personality.
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: How as that tied in with things like social media and comment sections on videos and that? That's not always been a made match in heaven, has it?
Philip Moriarty: No it hasn't and I've… for example you warned me, don't go anywhere Twitter, Phil. Don't do Twitter. Don't do Twitter. And then I did Twitter and then I came off Twitter about eighteen months later, bad idea. I do not have the temperament, (chuckles) I'm rather too argumentative for that. The comment sections are (sighs) interesting, you know, the conventional advice is and… colleagues and… students in the group and researchers in the group will say that, you know, comment section of Youtube is just basically the entire condensed collective stupidity of humanity in one easy to locate place (sighs) and sometimes that's the case but on the other hand some of those comments have actually again fed into research and teaching, and… they can be frustrating and they can be a good thing. You know, we did this video on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, I was at pains to say, oh it's not a measurement problem and the first bloody comment that ends up with six hundred upvotes or something is, well this is this! And you realize that actually it's… it's not just a question of putting out the right information. It's a question of, you know, people have biases, people have ideologies, you know you can have water tight arguments in terms of the science and you've seen this in terms of disinformation and misinformation right across the web, countering that is not just a question of the science… it's a question of how you couch it. You say, no who have they gone to listen? Who is somebody who doesn't, you know, doesn't take the evidence for Climate Change seriously? Are they gonna believe me a lefty academic? You have to find someway to nudge them in the right direction and me shouting at them or others like me shouting at them is not gonna do it. So… social media I had my fill of, I got to admit, and I pulled back from social media a number of years ago and I don't regret coming off Twitter one little bit.
Brandy Haran: Let me give you a few free swings at some popular issues, that I know over the… some of them I think you may have opinions of, some you may not, I don't know but… but let me hear what you've got to say about them. Funding of blue-sky type science, versus practical science that's gonna make better iPhones, 'cause this was something when I first met you, you always seemed to be banging the drum about and arguing with people and putting your foot in it and I don't hear you talk about it, maybe 'cause your off social media, but like, how are you feeling about how that's going these days?
Philip Moriarty: There is a part in terms of social media. It's… yeah, there's again it's there was an article in the Guardian just a couple of days ago about this issue in terms of blue-skies research and funding for research. It's a perennial issue. You know the division between what we call blue-skies research, which means funding for research that doesn't have a tangible near term benefit versus stuff that will generate a product, stuff that will generate, you know a device or an impact, a real world impact. The true answer is somewhere between those two extremes. Actually for mathematicians it's even more important because, you know, mathematicians, an awful lot of their work is very very fundamental, you know, with like complex numbers… quantum mechanics… you know, it's absolutely key, nobody knew in terms of hundreds of years ago and how important complex numbers were gonna be for quantum mechanics and quantum cryptography, et cetera. And there are countless examples, the laser's another one that's brought up with great regularity in that the guy who… Townes, the guy that developed the laser, his head of department start playing with this, it's only every gonna be a physicist toy and look where lasers are now, so… you can't predict but on the other hand, it's taxpayers money and it's… it's not sometimes the most powerful argument, well just give us two hundred years and something may eventually come out of this. And there's a question of how do you divide that money and how do you put it into the work that is gonna have both an academic impact, push the field forward, and impact that has some return for the taxpayer. For me? I would say that the govern… you know, it's a fairly simple argument. I would say if it's close to market, let the market fund it, you know, if it's… governments should not be in the business of, you know, doing Toshiba's funding… academics to do Toshiba's work for them, effectively. If it's close to market, let the market fund it. The universities should really be about, you know, the more fundamental side of that equation.
Brandy Haran: You're reasonable well funded, (chuckles) I mean…
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: You're managing to keep your group going and your quite blue-sky, so you know…
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: Um.
Philip Moriarty: No that's right, no that's an important point, Brady. You know, I've criticized the research councils quite a bit over the years but you're absolutely right, the stuff that we do is pretty blue-skies… and…
Brandy Haran: Do you think they've got the balance right at the moment or is the balance tilted to far to industry?
Philip Moriarty: We're in a bit of a state of flux, not least in terms of Brexit and stuff and it's not just the research councils in the UK, it's the broader picture including things like the European Research Council that need to be taken into account. But… (sighs) it's the… I think the balance is about… I hesitate to say this… compared to where we were ten years ago when I was mouthin' off all the time, the thing that really frustrated me back then was there was a very strong push in terms of commercialization and making sure that your work had commercial impact. And everything, all the messages were coming out about real world impact but real world impact not in terms of what you do… in terms of Sixty Symbols which is real world impact as well and… Numberphile, et cetera. And public engagement. But very much pushing towards the commercialization side of things. That's been rolled back over the years. So I'm… I'm a little less grumpy. I'm also ten years old so that probably… (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Another thing that academics often get grumpy about is the way that publication works in science.
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: And… or the way the money works and you have to pay to get things published.
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: And then pay for access to journals and that… is that… are you relaxed about that these days?
Philip Moriarty: I'm not. I'm… less relaxed about that. The real… they're a so many issues about that and we could have a whole series of bloody podcasts about that, Brady, but, one of the issues… I'll give you an example. I work in nanotechnology, so we have a wonderful journal called the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology, which does everything we could ever expect to hope of… a journal in that its entirely free to publish and it's entirely free to read. The Beilstein Foundation in Germany has immensely deep pockets that allow this to happen. Why don't we publish all our work there? The reason we don't publish all our work there is that the entire scientific reward system in terms of careers is effectively based on the brandname of the journals in which we publish. In that if you publish in the Beilstein Journal versus if you publish in Nature or Science, you're gonna… make it… you're career's gonna be a hell of a lot easier to develop than for the Beilstein Journal. I am a hypocrite, in that I think we should be published in the Beilstein but if I did that and I said, right, we're only ever gonna publish in the Beilstein Journal, if I said that to the researchers in the group I might as well say, you're not gonna have a career. So we have to go for those brandname journals as well.
Brandy Haran: Is that… is it exactly quantified. Is it like eight points for a article in Nature and two points for an article in Bilestein or is it more… kind of subtle and reputational than that.
Philip Moriarty: It's more subtle and reputation… in fact there's something called DORA which is… oh I've forgotten what it stands for, Declaration of Research something, I can't remember what the A stands for. But it's something that an awful lot of universities and publishers have signed up to, which is where you don't use something called the Impact Factor, which is based on the number of citations the average paper gets in a certain number of years for a journal. And you shouldn't be using things like Impact Factors, there's also something called H-Index, which relates to the number of citations given. And it's more about looking at the overall quality of the work. But that's very subtle and I've been… in many situations where… the CVs for researchers, postdoctoral researchers or even a lecturer level and people around the table are looking at these and one person will say well Candidate A has got better publications than Candidate B, and this is the key point, Brady, without ever reading those publications.
Brandy Haran: Ah.
Philip Moriarty: The decision is made in basis of the brandname.
Brandy Haran: Let me poke you with one more stick.
Philip Moriarty: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: League tables.
Philip Moriarty: Ah hah hah! (laughs) Okay.
Brandy Haran: Tell people what a league table is.
Philip Moriarty: Oh, okay. So league tables are… in a range of different… in particular with regard to, you said Brady, I was an admission tutor. So there are university league tables, and those universities league tables are published by newspapers and by magazines like the Times Higher Education and they have a dramatic influence on the applications for universities. And the problem with them is that they are pseudo-statistical at best and complete and utter… nonsense. (laughs) I'm not allowed to swear, Brady, am I? Nonsense at worst. I was struggling to…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Philip Moriarty: …restrain a word beginning with B there. And… the problem is that they are… utter nonsense so I used to try and get this message across all the time to applicants and their parents for… when they came for open days to… or courses. And parents would say, well you know you've slipped so far in the league table. It's nonsense, we went from eighteen one year… in one particular league table to five. What did we do different? We did absolutely nothing different. They changed the… sort of metrics by which they set the league table up. Moreover, you know, departments rise and fall on a year by year basis and it sells papers. It sells magazines. But they are nonsense. If you asked have I sort of mellowed on certain things? I've not mellowed on that. I will never mellow on that. And what really irritates me is when physicists who should know better and mathematicians who should know better take those bloody league tables seriously.
Brandy Haran: So they're put to… you think you would argue they're put together quite arbitrarily using… unfair metrics?
Philip Moriarty: The… those who put them together would argue otherwise. I would say that the metrics it's… how does the quote go? Many things that count cannot be counted. The question is, it's very difficult to quantify so any aspects of a department and then to crystalize that down into a single number? It's ridiculous. We're not football teams. (stutters) A physics department, a maths department is not a football team and which rises in the table depending on… you know… performance. Doesn't go like that.
Brandy Haran: Alright. Can I ask you a question that's gonna make you hate me even more than all of this stuff?
(pause)
Brandy Haran: Are you ready?
Philip Moriarty: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: Deserted island discs. What five albums will you take with you to an island?
Philip Moriarty: (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: And you have to answer now without thinking time.
Philip Moriarty: Oh my god.
Brandy Haran: Five albums.
Philip Moriarty: Five albums. Okay. Rush's Moving Pictures. That's absolutely top. Jellyfish's Bellybutton. King's X's Out of the Silent Planet. Metallica's Master of Puppets. Uh (hesitates for time) and probably a Kybosh album… um… maybe… um… so many others that's really tricky. Maybe an Opeth album. Okay I'll go for Opeth's Ghost Reveries which is about as far removed from Kybosh as you can get. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Would you…
Philip Moriarty: Damn you, Brady.
Brandy Haran: Would you give up your physics career, expunge every paper you've ever written from the records and go back in time if it meant you could be… a music star?
Philip Moriarty: Oh, what a… feckin' question. Wow. (pause) No. I don't think I would.
(pause) I don't think I would, 'cause that means givin' up sort of my life to this point. (pause) Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Philip Moriarty: No. No. There are many other aspects, you know I enjoy this job, et cetera, but there are many other aspects of my life to this point, you know, I'm not saying I don't have regrets, of course I have regrets, but you know, (gentle music fades in) there are many good things that I would not want to lose.
(piano music gets louder)
⁂
[ Crystal Balls and Coronavirus ]
Summary: Dr Hannah Fry made a film two years ago which predicted the coronavirus pandemic with chilling accuracy.
(gentle synthesizer music)
Brady Haran: I expect a lot you will know Dr. Hannah Fry. She's always a popular figure in Numberphile videos and she's also been here on the podcast before talking about her life and research, but what you might not know, is that in 2018 she hosted a special program on the BBC all about pandemics. (music continues) The show told us of a looming crisis, it even foretold a spiky looking flu-virus that would mutate, start in Southeast Asia and spread through the world with astonishing speed and devastating effect. It would take lives and alter our way of life. (music continues) It wasn't a matter of if, but when. Two years later and unfortunately the BBC and Hannah have been making, well, a sequel of sort and this time, it's for real. (music continues) Today's Hannah's sharing some of her thoughts about the current pandemic and why innocent mathematicians will probably end up getting some of the blame.
(music fades up and out)
Brandy Haran: Hannah, last week I had hoped to be in London filming a Numberphile with you.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: And instead I'm stuck at home and I believe you're sitting in a car?
Hannah Fry: (laughs) This is what our lives have become. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Tell me why you're in a car?
Hannah Fry: Well, (laughs) because my children are… well, they're making my life extremely difficult.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: I mean they're very lovely and I think in a lot of ways very lucky that… lockdown is made easier by their joyful laughter.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Unfortunately it's simultaneously made much more difficult by their unjoyful screaming. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: They don't appreciate studio discipline?
Hannah Fry: They just don't… they don't have any respect.
Brandy Haran: No. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: They don't have any respect for this kind of… this kind of output, Brady, and, you know.
Brandy Haran: So the car has become like your home office has it?
Hannah Fry: Yeah, I know it's so… (laughs) it's so pathetic, but every morning I'm like packing my rucksack, putting in my little pack lunch, putting in my little drink…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: Gettin' my coffee in the takeaway cup and off I go to the car.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: So… thus far I've been doing sort of four to six hour shifts but now it's getting quite warm and (laughs) the car's really hot. So…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I think I need a different solution.
Brandy Haran: I can hear loads of birds in the background too, it sounds quite lovely in someways.
Hannah Fry: I know, you know, I am actually in London so… I think…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: …just they're normally drowned out by the sound of traffic. It's alright, I'm definitely in a lot better position than a lot of people I think, during lockdown, so I'm feeling quite fortunate and grateful to even have a car to be able to go and sit in.
(pause)
Brandy Haran: So Hannah, a few weeks ago, before things got really serious here in the UK, I watched the Hollywood movie Contagion.
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: A lot of people have been watching that. And there's a… and a lot of people are watching it thinking, oh this is so prescient, there's so much sort of I Told You So about it.
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: Well, about an hour and a half ago…
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …I watched another film called Contagion that was made by BBC Four, a great team of people…
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: …you are the presenter of it.
Hannah Fry: I certainly am.
Brandy Haran: It was broadcast in 2018 and that is crazy prescient, like it's almost like a joke…
Hannah Fry: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: …how much everything in that documentary and all the things you talked about, have kind of… are being exactly duplicated now.
Hannah Fry: It's quite spooky, isn't it?
Brandy Haran: Before we talk about it, for people who haven't seen 2018 film that you guys made on BBC Four, can you give like an executive summary of it so people can sort of get an idea of what we're talking about.
Hannah Fry: So yeah, yeah. So, okay the thing is the thing is that everyone knew that something like this was coming. Everyone knew that something like this wasn't just… it was inevitable essentially.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: And we knew that when it finally came we need to be as prepared as possible. You only get one shot at this. You don't get to rerun it and try and do a better job the second time. You only get one shot at it. So we needed to be prepared as possible, and part of being prepared is having mathematical models that will accurately tell you what will change if you apply some kind of intervention like shutting down the schools or telling people to stay at home, that kind of thing.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: The problem is, is that those mathematical models, they're completely based on our understanding of how people move around, how people come into contact with one another, how often people come into contact with one another, and the best possible data that we had at that point in time, in 2017, 2018 when we did this program, the best data we had for how people move around in the country was a paper survey that was conducted in 2006…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: …where they asked a thousand people, oh, how many people do you reckon you've been in contact with recently? Which is just given that everyone's carrying mobile phones is like… the maddest maddest gap in our understanding of people. So the whole idea behind this program was that we asked the public to take part in this citizen science experiment where they download an app on the phones, they'd let us track them for twenty-four hours and we'd run a simulation essentially of what would happen if a flu like virus hit the UK and what that would mean and how fast it would spend and how many people would end up being sick because of it, and… yeah… I mean I didn't really expect it to be two years later, but here we are.
Brandy Haran: I might even sneakily play a few clips from it.
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: Just to give people an indication of how like, all these things you're saying about, you know, obviously it's, you know, it's not a matter of if but when and… it's… you know… they're even saying, it's gonna come from Southeast Asia.
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: This is what's gonna happen. This is what's gonna look like. This is what people are gonna have to do and it's like… part of me thought, did they recut this or reedit this like…?
Hannah Fry: No, no. I think the only thing about it though. We're quite jolly about the whole thing (laughs) during the program. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yes. Yeah…
Hannah Fry: Like, it's quite playful so I remember doing, you know, at the time when we get people to download the app, I got loads of like messages from people who were sort of playing along and it was like this big game.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I got this one message from someone who was like, oh just downloaded the app, and like went and infected half of Sheffield Shopping Center, lol.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I think that you really, yeah, when you… if you do watch it back there's that innocent tone of it, that it is all this big game…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And it really isn't.
(gentle violin music)
(clip from BBC Pandemic playing, various speakers and background music): With the help of thousand of volunteers we are about to simulate the outbreak of a fatale contagion throughout the UK. (street noise) That might seem like a funny thing to want to do, but if I can succeed, this will save lives when not if, a real pandemic hits. (clip switches speaker) The UK government puts pandemic flu at the top of this risk register, the reason for that is it will happen. There will be another pandemic.
(clip ends)
(gentle violin music)
Brandy Haran: When you were like… reading some of those script lines or delivering some of those script lines like… did you seriously think it was a serious as what you were saying? 'Cause it's almost like… you know… like you said like two years later it's all happening for real.
Hannah Fry: Yeah. I think the big surprise about this one, is not like these haven't happened before, you know, this… when we filmed it two years ago, SARS and MERS were in recent memory, Swine Flu of course as well, very recent…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: You know Ebola too. It's not like there weren't recent examples of this, this exact thing happening. I think the thing that's been surprising about this one isn't so much that the virus jumped from… you know… jumped from a different species into humans. That step was… is almost, you know, it's inevitable really, it's a random act of nature but it will happen… it will happen again, this is not the last time it's gonna happen. I think what's been surprising about this one is that it sort of somewhere in the middle. So SARS and MERS were very very deadly. But they also were… everyone who got sick got symptoms, and so actually it was comparatively quite easy to contain, you could spot where people were sick, you could isolate them, you could do contact tracing…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: You could draw a ring around it, essentially, and lock it down. And then at the other end of the spectrum you have something like flu, which is, you know, I mean you can't really stop flu at all. I think the thing about this virus is that… in a lot of ways it's just on that cusp of being able to stop of it, you're… you're… (stutters) it just about has about enough, you know, symptomatic cases that you can feel like you can stop it, but I think, you know, actually it's proving to really slip… I think you cannot treat this in the same way as you can with sort of SARS, MERS and Ebola. I think it's just… yeah… it's frustratingly in the middle, really where it feels like you can just about contain it but perhaps it's always gonna slip through your fingers.
Brandy Haran: Do you think that's why one thing that's seems to be kind of missing from your 2018 film is the incredible importance that seems to have arisen now of testing to get the data? 'Cause you said like, with those other ones you almost didn't need to test. If the person was really really sick, you knew they had it, and if they weren't sick, well they probably didn't.
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: Whereas because we're in this gray area with the coronavirus, testing has become this thing that everybody wants. And you never really talked about testing in the 2018 special, like it was sort of…
Hannah Fry: No, we didn't, you're right. We didn't. I think yeah, there is this pressure on testing at the moment. I mean I kind of think I'm sort of… I want to be very optimistic because a lot of people are looking at testing as this sort of green shoots of hope for all of this, for how to get us out of lockdown.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: But if you can have tests across the country, wherever can test themselves on a regular basis, can work out whether they have immunity or, you know, have had the virus or are currently sick with the virus and then you can allow people who are okay to go out and so on and so on and so on. I think you know, that's one of the things that people are really looking forward to. I'm just a bit concerned… about that as an approach. Not only for the biological reasons and the practical reasons of getting those tests manufactured and out, you know, as quickly as you can. Much more for a mathematical reason. Which is that…
(sighs) this is really where false negatives become a massive problem, right?
Brandy Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: So one of the tests that I've been looking at recently for another program with the BBC is a home test that's ninety percent accurate. And that sounds like it's really positive. That sounds pretty positive. Ninety percent accurate sounds amazing.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: Problem with that, it's like the classic story about picking up on… on breast cancer diagnosis which is that if you have a test that's ninety percent accurate and the test says that you do not have the virus… the chances that you do not have the virus are not ninety percent. Like that's the wrong way to interpret those numbers. We did this actually… Matt Parker and I did this during the Christmas Lectures…
Brandy Haran: Mhm.
Hannah Fry: Just to illustrate this really counter-intuitive nature of false positives and false negatives, when all you have to go on is accuracy rates and just it all depends on how common it is in the population, just the numbers… the numbers don't make good intuitive sense. But the thing is, is that if you are missing… if you… there's this strange asymmetry with this virus, right?
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: Which is that if you even have one person in your… in the country who is wandering around with the virus and doesn't know that they have it, we effectively have to treat everyone in the country as though they are infected.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: And so unless you have a test that is one hundred percent accurate you will still have this virus that's circulating.
Brandy Haran: And everyone's taking the test. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: And everyone's taking the test.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Hannah Fry: I mean also, not being funny, right, this test, the one that's ninety percent accurate, requires a nasal swab, right? I don't know if you've ever had a nasal swab.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: It is not a pleasant experience.
Brandy Haran: I read about it, it looks like you gotta stick the thing right back into your brain.
Hannah Fry: Yep, like… I mean pretty much, right. And with… there is some instances in hospitals where nurses, you know, perfectly well trained nurses are taking nasal swabs and their getting forty percent false negatives because they're not just managing to get enough the correct… molecules and particles and whatever, that you need for these tests.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: And then you're expecting people to do this to themselves at home? I mean… there's no way that you're not gonna get cases slip through the net.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And I think that that's okay. I mean I still think that there's value in all of this stuff, in slowing down the spread. I just right now, I can't see that we can… we can crush this thing. I think we can slow it down certainly but I think that unless we get very good at something or unless a vaccine comes along very very quickly… I think that all of the really positive things on the horizon will only take us so far in slowing it down.
Brandy Haran: Hannah another thing about the 2018 special, I'm not gonna sit here and pick holes in it…
Hannah Fry: (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: …because as I said it was amazingly predictive.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: But…
Hannah Fry: You can, Brady, it's okay, you can.
Brandy Haran: (chuckles) Throughout the special one of the things that is portrayed as that possible silver bullet is vaccines. There's almost a very hopeful tone about vaccines. It is tempered by the timeframes involved but you're always talking about if we vaccinate these people everything'll be alright or if we develop this vaccine in four months, this'll be alright. But it seems like now that the reality has happened, vaccine seems a long way off and seems not a big part of the discussion at the moment.
Hannah Fry: (sighs) Yeah. I mean I think that it's… some people have latched onto this idea of a twelve month time scale. I just… I don't know. Ebola took five years, right? (sighs) (laughs) I don't know. I just don't… I just don't know. Maybe I'm just being… (laughs) maybe you've caught me on a particularly (laughs) depressive day.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But I… just don't know if… I… don't know if it's likely for us to think that it's gonna come in and save us.
Brandy Haran: Even with like all the world's sort of resources?
Hannah Fry: Yeah I mean… and that's a really good point. That is a really good point.
It's not just like you've got one research lab in, you know, in somewhere in Britain looking into this, you have… a huge monumental effort from all of the world's scientists and I think that actually… the pace of scientific change that we've seen in even the last two months is something that… I mean I've never…
I've never witnessed it before. You know people publishing preprint papers on archives, you know, online, and then getting comments from all people all around the world and then incorporating those comments into their papers, you know, before it even goes through this… normally snail's pace peer review process, I think has been really really exciting. So okay, maybe I'm… maybe I'm being a bit too pessimistic. I think it's also worth adding though that, you know, Western countries don't get to jump the queue in this and even if a vaccine pops up in an extremely optimistic way, even if a vaccine pops up, you still got to manufacture enough of it, I mean there are… what seven billion in the world? And I don't think that we get to just jump the queue.
Brandy Haran: In a very morbid way, this feels like a little… golden era for mathematicians?
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Like, it's strange isn't it? Suddenly like mathematicians are like in a practical way being treated really important and being… being listened to.
Hannah Fry: (laughs) Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Is that a fair comment? (laughs)
Hannah Fry: It's true, well no I think it is. Having mathematicians on the front page of the newspapers regularly is pretty extraordinary, isn't it?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I did think that actually. Like… the Today program asked me to go on a couple of weeks ago. I was… I dunno, the Today program could be bit of a stressful thing…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: …for various reasons it can be quite a stressful thing and I was like tempted to say no, and then I was talking to my husband about it and he was like, you spend your entire life going on how important maths is and how fundamental it is to the way that we make decisions and our understanding of the world and here is the number one example of all time ever of how important maths is, if you don't go on and talk about it then like, you can't really, you know, it sort of goes against everything you stand for which I think is true.
Which I think is true. So I went on, anyway.
Brandy Haran: Alright. How did it go? Alright?
Hannah Fry: It was very stressful. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) So we hear about this SIR model and seems to have these three things as I understand it. I've made a couple of videos about it already.
Hannah Fry: Mhm, yeah I've seen them, they're amazing.
Brandy Haran: Who's got it, who hasn't got it…
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: …and who's already had it.
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: Obviously there's a lot more subtlety to these models and complications and watching your special I see them putting some fancy equations on the screen as eye candy that I don't really understand.
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: Can you somehow give me an idea… as to what levers and buttons are going into these models that aren't talked about when we do these basic things like who's got it, who hasn't got it, can we get this R zero number down? What's some of the more, for lack of a better word to use a favorite word of yours, what's some of the more delicious mathematics that's going into it?
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Like what are these things I'm not seeing? Can you give me just like a taste of that?
Hannah Fry: Yeah, totally. Okay so, on the standard SIR model, you're assuming that the population is well mixed.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: And then there are other versions, like the Washington Post had a really nice example of where you essentially have, it's like particles in a box bumping into each other.
Brandy Haran: Yes, yes.
Hannah Fry: Which is also really nice, but in reality people don't… people are not uniformly mixed… you know, it's… and we're not particles in a box bumping around into each other. So…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: So one of the things that goes into these models is this… is social mixing. So it's how we're coming into contact with other people and you can go into a lot of detail about that, you can take age categories and what age groups are mixing with what age groups and then there's, you know, geographical… population densities and so on. All of that stuff can come into it.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: But I think for me the key thing, especially at the point we're at right now, Adam Kucharski's got this really nice way of summarizing it, and he calls it the DOTS. It all comes down to these are the levels that you have to change the trajectory of a disease, of an outbreak, so D is the duration, so that is essentially how long you are infectious for. So, O is opportunity, so that's how many people you come into contact with. T is the transmission probability, so when you're in contact with somebody what are the chances if you are infected that you pass it on. And then S is the susceptibility, so how susceptible the population is. So the big ones at the moment, you can't change duration, you can't change how long people are infectious for, and there's very little to do with, you know, without a vaccine there's very little we can do apart from, you know, just letting everyone get it, which is, I think, not an ideal solution. I mean you can't do anything about the susceptible… how susceptible the population is.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: But opportunity and transmission probability are the two things that you can change. These are things that you could… that are then quantified and can be put into the models (voice in the background). But… so opportunity really is how many people you come into contact with.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: That's essentially why we're in lockdown. And then the transmission probability, that's where things like staying two meters away from someone…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: Washing down your shopping as it comes in and… you know wearing masks, all of that kind of stuff comes in. But these things are then translated into a mathematical description and put into these models.
Brandy Haran: So when the mathematicians play with these models and simulate things and come up with what they think's going on, how much subtlety can they then use in the… the tools that they give to government, like it seems very blunt instrument at the moment? It seems like, alright, now everyone's locked away, now everyone can come out. Or now we're closing the schools, or now we can't, or this is how many hospital beds we need. Is there anymore subtle advice that they can give to the government to sort of slightly tweak things or is it always this sort of black or white? Okay, lock everyone up.
Hannah Fry: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Okay, now they can come out in June or July or whatever.
Hannah Fry: Yeah, I mean I think you've hit the nail on the head really which is that this all comes down to the R naught, which Ben Sparks did a brilliant explanation of in your Numberphile video. But essentially the number of people one person goes on to infect. If it's above one, the outbreak is growing and if it's below one, it's declining.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And exactly as you said, if we were full lockdown, so the moment the current situation with the UK, the best estimate that I've seen for the current R naught is naught point six two, which means that the outbreak is declining.
We're not seeing that in the data yet, because, there's an inevitable lag in the numbers, and if you don't do anything. If you don't have any social distancing, if you don't do anything at all, it looks like the R naught of coronavirus is around two point five. So…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: But between naught point six two, lockdown, no one's allowed out of their houses apart from once a day, and two point five, there's quite a lot of room in terms of the numbers. And what you really want to do is you want to find something which allows people to have some sense of normality but without letting this thing go out of control, really. I think there is still some people who want to stay in lockdown long enough until the disease goes away and personally I think that that is… just… going to be difficult. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: I think it's gonna be difficult in terms of, I don't think you can make this thing go away, even on lockdown there are enough people out, you know, key workers and people flouting the rules too, let's be honest, where I don't think you're gonna get it to go away completely for a very very long time.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And I think secondly there are two ways that people can die here, I think people can die from the virus, and I also think that people die from the lockdown, you know? There are cancer patients who've had their chemotherapy postponed. There was… during Ebola, in Sierra Leone, there was a massive spike in the number of maternal deaths, just because women were not accessing hospitals in the same way. And for every maternal death, there are numerous infant deaths that just won't be recorded in the same way. And I think that we… if we try and stamp this thing out completely completely completely, then I think that, you know, you can end up causing deaths in another way unintentionally.
Lockdown itself is sort of deeply problematic. But I think the ideal, what you want to do… (sighs) is you want to slowly, you know, release the lockdown bit by bit by bit, so you are never going up to that R naught of two point five but you're hopefully finding a kind of… a middle ground. And that's essentially what they're trying to do in Sweden, right? So Sweden and Norway, I don't know if you've been following this story but, you know, two countries right next to each other, they've got very different approaches. Norway's going for the shut it down, suppress it as much as you possibly can, and Sweden's going much for the, let's definitely take steps, they've closed universities, they've banned gatherings of over fifty people, so it's not like they're not doing anything…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: But they are trying to maintain as much of a sense of normality as they can while keeping the virus under… you know without letting it have completely uncontrolled spread.
Brandy Haran: Does that mean they're going down this herd immunity route or is it more just they don't want people going out of their minds?
Hannah Fry: You know, I just have a slightly have a problem with the herd immunity as though that characterization as though that's the objective.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: I think that it's a consequence rather than the… hmm… the objective. Oh… gosh. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I'll come back to herd immunity in a moment.
Hannah Fry: Okay, okay.
Brandy Haran: 'Cause… I have got… I do wanna ask you about that. A question just popped into my head actually. You were talking about these kind of this other problem, these other deaths that can happen. These other consequences…
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: …as a result of lockdown. Are mathematicians modeling that too?
Hannah Fry: I think that people are starting to look into, yeah, the consequences of lockdown.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: It's really hard to do though because…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: …a death from coronavirus, well actually there is uncertainty around the deaths too, but you are more able to point at a death from coronavirus and say, that the virus is what caused this death.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Whereas the consequences of lockdown, you know, I think Austerity for example, there's lots and lots of evidence that says that Austerity was the direct cause… or indirect I suppose, cause of a huge number of deaths within the UK and…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But you can't really… it's really hard to point at something and say, poverty is the reason why this person died. Despite the fact that poverty actually is a cause of huge number of deaths worldwide every single year, you know, if there's someone who right now has got, you know, a lump perhaps, that they're a bit… they've noticed but they're like, oh I'll just wait until after the lockdown.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Before going to see the doctor, because it's going to be very difficult to get a doctor's appointment, I don't really wanna go and, you know, visit a hospital et cetera at the moment.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And if they put that off, by the time they get it seen to actually it's too late, you know that's definitely a consequence of lockdown, but it's really hard to point at it later down the line and say that's what caused it.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Do you see what I mean?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: So these things are really difficult to quantify, but I think that there are really serious consequences of this and think that's even in a country like Britain who is very wealthy, comparatively to certain parts of the world, very well able to handle this stuff. I think when you think about places like South Africa, you know, locking down in South Africa where it's just… there's really very… I mean so they've actually canceled the vaccination program of measles, rubella, I think they've started canceling polio as well, in certain parts of Africa, in response to try and to lockdown for this virus.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: And it's just like there are consequences to this stuff, it's not, you know this isn't just a… this isn't a choice of, as some people are characterizing it, lives versus money, it's really not like that, it's lives versus lives.
(gentle violin music)
Brandy Haran: So Hannah has now retired inside, she's left the home office because of heat and battery issues so, wish us luck. So I feel like, like a lot of people at the moment have some degree of fear. People are a bit scared, which is completely understandable.
Hannah Fry: Mhm
Brandy Haran: Do you feel like, mathematicians, people who understand this at a different level, are more scared or less scared? Do you think you're more or less scared than…
Hannah Fry: Ooh.
Brandy Haran: …someone who has no real mathematical comprehension of how pandemics work?
Hannah Fry: I think I was definitely more scared earlier.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: I think that the, yeah, I think that the mathematical modelers and the immunologists and the virologists, I think that they had that period of like, oh holy hell…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: …in like, January, February. But I also think that actually, broadly speaking I think it's a bit easier to rationalize it and to be honest I certainly think for myself, I'm not concerned. I'm not really that concerned. David Spiegelhalter did a really brilliant piece of analysis where he looked at your risk of dying from the coronavirus…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: …and essentially calculated that it was equivalent to your risk of dying over the next year. So it's like you have one year's worth of risk in one go.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: In a couple of weeks, or, you know, across the course of two or three weeks. So that means if you're very young, you know, if you would not be concerned about dying over the course of the next year then you don't particularly need to be concerned about dying over the course of… of the virus if you get it.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: Of course inevitably as you go older that that risk increases, but I think that even not even there the numbers are actually… are perhaps less frightening I think than sometimes they come across in the media, because, you know, for instance, if you're over eighty and therefore the highest risk group of this particular virus, your chances of survival are still eighty-five percent.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: Which actually, I mean, it's not great, I mean you wouldn't choose it but eighty-five percent is still good solid odds.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: You know, at sort of beating it.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: So I think that… I mean that doesn't… it'd probably be a horrible experience and I'm sure that for every person who very sadly dies from this thing there are numerous other people who have a very very horrible time of it.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But… I think that having those sort of mathematical skills enables you to put those numbers into slightly more context.
Brandy Haran: Well you lead nicely into my next question then. Because…
Hannah Fry: You're welcome.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I often hear mathematicians bemoan the lack of mathematical literacy in society.
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: And even during this pandemic you've heard it, oh if only people understood exponentials better and things like that they'd really how serious this is and what not and I wonder whether or not you think if society was more mathematically literal that would necessarily be a really good thing at the moment? Because, I wonder if they could gauge the risks and understood the numbers better they might be a bit more cavalier with their social distancing and their lockdowns and their quarantines because they would see things differently, it would be a more considered risk. Whereas at the moment…
Hannah Fry: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: …if you're living in this like irrational fear, at least you're gonna stay inside and help the cause.
Hannah Fry: Yeah, I mean that's true in some ways… the fear is useful in that it makes people pay attention to the rules, but then I also think that actually that fear has a real downside as well. I don't know if you've been following this sort of 5G stuff.
Brandy Haran: Oh yeah.
Hannah Fry: So, there's someone who I know very well and very close to who… has bought into the 5G stuff.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: To my endless frustration.
Brandy Haran: For people who don't know, this is this weird conspiracy theory that…
Hannah Fry: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: 5G networks are somehow contributing to… the problem or causing the problem or…
Hannah Fry: Yeah. It's like a government conspiracy. I mean I don't totally understand all of it.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But I think it's something to do with fascism and something to do with David Icke… not sure.
Brandy Haran: Right. (laughs)
Hannah Fry: (laughs) Bit sick of him.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But I think, gosh, I just think in a way, I think I understand why people are turning to that in so… in such numbers because I think that the real truth of this is really scary, right? This is a random act of nature that no one can do anything about and I think to think in a conspiracy theory gives you someone to blame. It gives you a person that you can point to and it lets you believe that humans are still in charge. That we're not just part of this, you know, this natural world and the consequences of which we have to sort of… stomach at some point or another. And I think… so in a way I think that, although I take your point about if people had more mathematical literacy maybe they would be so scared but then I think if people weren't so scared they wouldn't also believe…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: …in this really dangerous stuff. That actually has the same consequence, right? That people are breaking the lockdown as a result of it to go and burn 5G towers. So, I dunno. I've also actually I've gotta be honest with you, I've been super impressed with the public. I mean on Twitter, and Instagram and stuff, everyday you've got people arguing about the difference between linear and log graphs… like log axes.
Brandy Haran: Oh.
Hannah Fry: I just think that's… I really like that.
Brandy Haran: Don't start me on that.
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: By the way, just for the sake of clarity as the maker of Numberphile, I'm not advocating like… mathematical ignorance in society as a useful tool. I just…
Hannah Fry: No. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) I…
Hannah Fry: You've sort of done more…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: …to go against mathematical ignorance in society than pretty much anyone on earth, Brady. So I think it would be a strange position for you to take. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Alright, seeing you brought it up. I think these graphs with log scales on the Y axis are bad.
Hannah Fry: Oh! Okay. Go on.
Brandy Haran: I think they lull people into a false sense of security when they see a nice gentle slope not realizing what they're actually looking at is this god awful exponential curve that's shooting up into the sky like the red arrows.
Hannah Fry: Oh that's interesting.
Brandy Haran: Mhm.
Hannah Fry: So you… oh okay… that's interesting. But the… okay… the thing is, is that you can't really tell what's going on, on a linear…
Brandy Haran: I know!
Hannah Fry: …graph, right?
Brandy Haran: I know! And I know that's why you do it.
Hannah Fry: I mean you can't really tell what's going on.
Brandy Haran: And I know that's why you do it and I know that's a useful tool for mathematicians and people who can look at that and in a second, you know transfer it in their head.
Hannah Fry: Get it.
Brandy Haran: But I think when you're printing them in newspapers and websites and people seeing Italy and America and the UK and they've all got these very similar just slightly differing diagonal slopes people are thinking, oh it's all the same everywhere and it's all quite gentle when in fact what they're looking at is something that should be scaring the bejesus out of them.
Hannah Fry: But they're still seeing the numbers, though.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: I think if somebody…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: …if somebody struggled to read a graph or let me rephrase that. I think if somebody took a gentle slope on a log axis as though it was like, oh it's nice and gentle, surely they would also see the number a thousand a day, which is where we are, you know…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: …right now recording this. I'm sure it'll be a different number by the time anyone listens to this, but surely they'll see that number and realize that, oh no this is really is like very scary.
Brandy Haran: Yeah? Okay.
Hannah Fry: I dunno. I guess that's… well you know what we need to do? We need to do a study.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: We need to ask people. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I think there are higher priorities right now than a… but… but…
Hannah Fry: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Let's save that one for later. Let me ask you about something else that I know you have some interest in. Data and privacy. My…
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: My sister lives in Singapore and she was telling me about what happens there…
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: …when someone, when they have problems. And what they can do there quite easily is if someone tests positive they can look at what taxis they've caught, who was sitting in that same taxi in the last two or three hours…
Hannah Fry: (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: …they can contact those people and warn them and isolate those people and having access to all this data lets them put out the fires very quickly. Obviously…
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: …this rings massive alarm bells in everyone's heads, including mine, who are used to sort of this…
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: …you know, data privacy issues. But it does seem like having more access data does let you deal with pandemics better. You're 2018 film demonstrated that brilliantly although you anonymized everything and made a big point of saying you had.
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: It did show that if you have this information you can do all sorts of things. You can figure who's spreading what, you can vaccinate those people, control those people, you have a lot more weaponry to save lives. Where do you come down on this? What do you feel about this?
Hannah Fry: You do have a lot more weaponry. I think you just have to decide what kind of society you wanna live in, really. Because I mean you're absolutely right that China, and… South Korea and Singapore, in terms of the way that they've managed to deal with this virus, let me just put a little asterisk by deal with and come back to that in a moment.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: But it's completely different to what's happened in Europe, right? Like the, you know, the particular Singapore and South Korea have managed to slow the rate of infection much quicker than we have within Europe.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And all of the sort of technological reasons that you mention are a really important part of that. I just think that we have to be careful when you make decisions that you are not making them in a quick response to an emergency… a decision that you will later regret.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: In this particular culture, I mean I'm not one way or the other, right? Like, I can definitely definitely see the real benefit of a centralized system right now where you know where people are and you know who's sick and those pieces of information are joined up. And the way that things are in Britain at the moment is that it's very difficult to connect those dots, because no one really wants the government to tell a company like, you know, Google or Facebook or whoever, who's sick. No one is really like up for that data be passed in that direction. And simultaneously all the companies who have the data of where we are, I don't think people particularly want the government where we are all are at any point in time, either.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: So it's like in both directions no one really wants that flow of information.
Which is why the apps that are being explored now work on bluetooth rather than on GPS. They work on your proximity to other devices, rather than necessarily exactly where you are, just to try and help get around a few of those privacy issues.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But the thing is, is that… I think in this urgency to try and save people's lives, because that's ultimately what we're talking about here, I can just see that slight knee-jerk reactions which we come to regret later and I think that we just need to be careful about that. I mean I think we've seen that in Hungary a bit actually, in a more political way, of people using the situation to make sensible decision for the situation but actually we'll be difficult to be reversed later. But I also actually wanna go back to that sort of the fact that Singapore and South Korea have been able to deal with this virus.
Brandy Haran: Hmm?
Hannah Fry: You know Singapore have lockdown again, right? So…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Ultimately what all of this technology has enabled them to do is to elongate the gap between their lockdowns. It hasn't got rid of the virus all together, and they've done all kinds of incredible things, you know, including quarantining anyone who comes into the country for two weeks, you know, mass testing, all sorts of stuff, all sorts of really clever stuff, and they still haven't been able to fight the tide of this thing coming in. And I think that that really is a… there's a difficult lesson in there
Brandy Haran: Hannah talking to you about your research, you know, a few times over the years, 'cause even your normal research often deals with taking humans and groups and society and attaching numbers and graphs to thing…
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: …and then analyzing it and obviously we've seen a lot of that happening over the last few weeks with the pandemic.
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: I always wonder how dehumanizing people and turning them into numbers and graphs, is that really good way to be making decision because it takes like… it makes your decisions more rational and less emotional, or is that a really bad way to make decisions because it takes away that constant thought that these are humans with lives and loved ones and families? We saw this obviously when the whole herd immunity thing came up.
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: You know just treating people like, okay, if we let this percentage of people get it this could be good. Forgetting that you're kind of give… (chuckles) people will be sick and dying as a result of it.
Hannah Fry: Yeah that's peoples mums and dads and daughters and brothers and sisters that are dying. Yeah, yeah I agree.
Brandy Haran: How do you reconcile this? Because part of you has to make decision for the good of the many and treat it mathematical but part of you has to be like you know a compassionate human.
Hannah Fry: (sighs) You know I mean in a way you are… (laughs) you're like describing one of the sort deep philosophical arguments, right? There's sort of like Bentham's, like, utilitarianism and all of that, that's essentially what you're describing in a way. I mean I think that actually… I think it's not one or the other, it can be both a good thing and a bad thing to think of people as numbers on a page. I think that you in some ways actually being able to be removed in a kind of and look at things statistically, I think that does allow you to see the… to see the rationale of different decisions in a clearer light. I think that's one thing. I think if you, yeah being in that, being unemotional I think allows you to compare different interventions in a better way, or in a clearer way. But I also think that if you totally and completely rely on the numbers, then you're forgetting that we are human, which, you know, has been one of my big arguments for the last… sort of that's, you know, my last book was essentially all about that. Like you cannot throw away the fact that we are human when you think of us in a mathematical way.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: But I also think that it what it does do, is it puts too much faith in the mathematical models because these things they're not crystal balls, right? They're not… they're not telling us what the future is going to look like, there is all kinds of uncertainty wrapped around them, and I think that you have to be careful when you are creating mathematical models, not dismiss them as junk, but also not to think that they are these magical things that allow you to peer into the future. You have to… they have to be part of a suite of evidence that allows you to get you… towards the best decision possible.
Brandy Haran: Hannah throughout your contagion special on BBC back in 2018 there was this number emblazoned on the screen several times. It was like this magic number, of the number of people that would die in the UK, if we had a really bad pandemic.
Hannah Fry: Mhm. Hmm.
Brandy Haran: This was two years ago.
Hannah Fry: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: It was based on the modeling you'd all done, it was 886,877.
Hannah Fry: (sighs)
Brandy Haran: I wrote it down 'cause it was on the screen so many times.
Hannah Fry: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: What do you think about that number now?
Hannah Fry: I really… don't know. I mean I think that the number is gonna be smaller, right? It will definitely be smaller than that.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Hannah Fry: So this, I think is a perfect illustration of what I mean about the uncertainty around the numbers.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Around like the mathematical… what the maths say. Because… the estimates for the fatality rate of this virus, they vary wildly.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And it depends on the situation which you look at. So if you look at the cruise ship for example, where I think the fatality rate there was about one percent or so.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: You could take that as though it was a fact and in many ways actually the numbers that have been thrown around in the paper… the papers are sort of based on around that idea, that a certain percentage of the British population will get it and around one percent of those will die, so if we did… if we did nothing, five hundred thousand is the number that has been…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: …that has been calculated and quoted widely.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: But the thing is, is that the cruise ship actually had a population that skewed much older and we already know that older people tend to be more at risk than others. There's also you know… so evidence from other places are that perhaps this number can be a bit lower but until we have the testing, until we know what the real denominator is, until we know how many people have this virus and aren't symptomatic, how many people have had this virus and didn't even know they had the virus, we really don't know what that real number is. We really don't know what the real fatality rate is. Which is why testing is so incredibly important. But I think that… (sighs) I don't know… I mean that I think that I really really hope that we get better at something, slow this down enough that a vaccine comes along or that something else comes in and yeah helps us to minimize the number of deaths as far as possible.
Brandy Haran: I know you've just recently recorded sort of another… another thing with the BBC. I dunno if it's a sequel or a follow up.
Hannah Fry: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: Making this… sequel… about two years later, almost exactly two years later actually now that I think about it.
Hannah Fry: Yeah. Yeah it is.
Brandy Haran: Just over. What's different? What did you learn or how is your thinking change from when you were doing it as a, this is gonna happen one day, slightly jolly special to kind of making something in the middle of it? Like what's different, beyond the obvious?
Hannah Fry: Yeah. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Well okay when I filmed that first one, I became certainly for a period of time… I became very cautious about germs. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Right?
Hannah Fry: So there was one occasion where my mum and dad had flu and I had a big project coming up and I really did not want to get sick and I also had a baby in the house, so I… yeah my mum and dad wanted to come to my house. They were like driving past and they wanted to come to my house and drop off something.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: And I made them (laughs)… I made them post it through the letter box and I wouldn't let them in my house. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: And this was two years ago?
Hannah Fry: This is two years ago form the upstairs window, like I opened the upstairs window and was like, Hi! Like… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Yeah, yeah.
Hannah Fry: Thanks for dropping off the letter! Go away now! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I mean that's just standard procedure now.
Hannah Fry: Exactly, that is standard procedure now. That is standard procedure.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Hannah Fry: So in a lot of ways I think that like I… not that much has changed. So yeah I think that the first program had a similar effect on me.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Hannah Fry: But I just… yeah perhaps didn't realize it would come this quickly.
Brandy Haran: From talking to you, you know obviously this is all anyone talks about, I've spoken to you today and spoke to you the other day just on the phone. I get this feeling that you have this… respect and awe for this virus and for pandemics that not everyone quite has. You feel like… despite the fact it's all pervading, and it's changed the world so much, you feel like people still aren't quite getting it.
They don't get it.
Hannah Fry: Hmm. (sighs) (laughs) I don't wanna depress any one. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Okay.
Hannah Fry: I don't wanna depress any one, but I think that for a while now I have thought that this virus will become just another one of the coronaviruses that regular circulates, the seasonal virus, you know like…
Brandy Haran: Right?
Hannah Fry: …the cold and flu.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Which essentially means that everyone will get it at some point and I haven't changed my mind on that. But that means that this is not something that's going away in the next three weeks.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: Or four weeks. Or two months.
Brandy Haran: Will there be a mathematical legacy to all of this?
Hannah Fry: I don't know. Maybe we'll just fade back into obscurity. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: But I think, you know, a lot of ways actually I think that mathematicians are probably gonna come into a lot of blame for all of this. I think we're sort of in a position where we can't really win because I think that it's the mathematical models that are driving the decision as to when we lockdown and when we don't lockdown.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Hannah Fry: And if everything goes well, if the lockdowns go well and we save a lot of lives then I think that people will start to wonder whether the mathematical models were right and whether we needed to lockdown in the first place.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Hannah Fry: And then if the lockdowns don't work (laughs) then I think people will accuse the mathematical models of being wrong and that we needed to do more.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Hannah Fry: And I don't know if at the end of this anyone's going to step back and say, wow, thank goodness we had those mathematical models, even though I really really am grateful we've got those mathematical models.
(gentle music fades in slowly)
Brandy Haran: I will. I'll thank you.
Hannah Fry: You will? Thank you, Brady.
(music fades up)
⁂
[ Club Automatic ]
(gentle piano music)
Brady Haran: Today's guest is Alex Bellos. Alex is an author, journalist, and something of a puzzle guru. (music continues) He's also been a regular on Numberphile videos over the years, featuring in some of our most popular posts. You may well have seen him cutting cakes, counting cows, and playing pool on an elliptical pool table. (music fades out) We'll get to the books and the puzzles later, but first, so Alex… where were you born?
Alex Bellos: Oxford.
Brandy Haran: Oxford?
Alex Bellos: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Oh so you're like, all posh person are you?
Alex Bellos: Does that make me posh? I don't know, so I was born in Oxford from a Hungarian naturalized French mother and a father who was still a student there whose grandparents were poor immigrants from Ukraine so, did it alright and I guess now I'm posh in the sense that I then studied at Oxford and I write books but I don't think then you'd've called them posh. You'd've called them kind of hard working immigrants.
Brandy Haran: What occupations do they do, your parents?
Alex Bellos: So my dad has been an academic all his life, about twenty years ago got a job at Princeton where he's head of the Department of Comparative Literature, which is basically Modern Languages, his specialty is French and now has become translation. So he runs, I think, the Center for Translation Studies, or something like that, at Princeton. He is a translator himself but also the kind of the science, I suppose, of translation and there are certain French authors who is experts on, one being Victor Hugo, the other one being Georges Perec, who writes actually quite kind of mathematical books and Balzac, so when I was a born, I think he was doing is PhD on Balzac. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Oh right? What… and did your mother…?
Alex Bellos: So my mum was born in Hungary, at the final months of the Second World War and being of a Jewish family was one of the only ones to survive so I managed to get out and got to France and then she studied Russian at university and my dad who studied French and Russia at Oxford at that time in the Cold War if you studied Russian at any Western European university when you went to Russia you had to go and stay in one hotel in St. Petersburg so it was kind you could have made a great sort of American teen movie 'cause it was full of like loads and loads of students all studying Russian from all around Western Europe and on one corridor, my mum and my dad, my dad or my mum asked the other one for a bar of soap for the shower and the rest is history, so then my mum, you know, very romantic story meeting in St. Petersburg, and then my mum sort of came back, they dated and then they married and then my mum moved to Oxford, she had me and my two sisters and she's done lots of different things. She's worked… in computers (in a Scottish accent) we lived in Scotland for a bit and that was at the birth of computing. She worked a bit in computing and the she became a teacher and now she runs a film festival in Scotland.
Brandy Haran: Right. Nice.
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I'm imagining you had quite a bookish upbringing then. Like you were surrounded by books and art?
Alex Bellos: Yeah lots of books. Yeah, yeah, my dad… I think my dad was young when he had me and he was still right at the beginning of his career and at time, well I think for all academics, when you're an academic starting out, you need to spend a lot of time writing your articles, getting in the journals, writing the books, so it's definitely the case that in my dad's twenties, when I was young, he was most of the time in his study reading and writing, so as a role model he wasn't particularly present I didn't feel in terms of the raising of me but he was an amazing role model in terms of, he's the guy surrounded by books and whose writing books and writing and learning that's really important so I definitely feel that the house was one devoted to learning and that was what's important, the only way to get my dad's attention was to like do well at school, basically.
Brandy Haran: Did the fact that he was like that make you resistant to that kind of life?
Alex Bellos: I think that… (sighs) I never (sighs) wanted to become an academic. Part of that might've been insecurity that I didn't think that I was good enough but also for all the amount that I respected my dad for his academic career I thought there's gotta be more out there and I was, you know, couldn't wait to get out into the real world. I think my dad was probably slightly disappointed about why I didn't go into academia, so I think there is maybe a bit of a tension there and now (laughs) when, you know, I'm sort of insecure, freelance writer, I think, oh wouldn't it be nice to have (laughs) job and an institution that's been around for a thousand years. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) What did you wanna be when you were a boy then? So if I met you like, you know, in your early teens and that, what were you into and what would you have said I wanna be when I grow up sort of thing.
Alex Bellos: In my early teens… I think I… that's really… that's a really good question. I think I didn't want to be anything because I liked the idea that I didn't have to make my mind up. I kind of rebelled against this idea that, oh, that, you know, Jimmy wants to become an architect, Tommy wants to become a doctor, and I just wanted to get out there and see what there was. I was always really interested in journalism and I think that's because I'm a gossip. I always wanted to know what was going on. I always like loved talking about what people were up to and I founded the school magazine and went to Sixth Form and worked for the Sixth Form magazine and I went to university and I worked for the newspaper, so I've always been attracted to writing and finding out about the world and describing the world. It's always what I've wanted to do. I never would have that I could've actually done that professionally because I didn't really, you know, I didn't know anyone who did that. But… so I probably would've said… I don't know what I want to do but did you hear about Mrs. Jones? (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Right. What were you into? Like were you into sport or music or dancing or… you know… what?
Alex Bellos: Yeah I was totally into music. So I was a… heavy metal, was what I was really into. Age twelve I had a denim jacket with studs and like I knew how to write Led Zeppelin and the ZoFo or whatever it is… ZoSo (laughs).
Brandy Haran: Right (chuckles)
Alex Bellos: So I was totally into that and then I had this amazing change when I was about sixteen, I began to like Soul and I used to like the Northern Soul and so I would like wear kind of jean dungarees and (laughs) the kind of big beret type thing and maybe sometimes I kind of, baseball jacket, the kind… Americana, you know, Motown, Funk, I got into that. Yeah. I like music. I played electric guitar. So that's what I liked to do.
Brandy Haran: Were you good at school?
Alex Bellos: Yeah so I was lucky that… I was good at maths and the thing about good at maths is that if you can do it you can just do it. So you can do it and you don't really need to do very much work, so I always knew I was gonna have loads of free time because the maths didn't take me anytime at all whereas other people were struggling and I always knew that I was gonna be near the top of class because just the grades of your maths, if you do the maths, the physics and the chemistry is not that like difficult, also 'cause my mum was French, I spoke fluent French, so yeah I was always quite good at school and I kind of enjoyed it, you know, I had a dad who was by that time a university lecturer and I think what I remember about my school days is that I was always really small. I was always a really short kid. Also I moved up like a year or maybe even two years so even in my own age range I was short, but I was with kids who were one or two years older than me, so I always had this kind of size, I guess, insecurity, so I became, I dunno… like the nice guy. The friendly guy, you know, I think what I spent a lot of my time socializing and trying to be liked.
Brandy Haran: That would inoculate you from being bullied a bit because you were small or…?
Alex Bellos: Yeah 'cause I think just sort of always felt… made me feel like a bit of an outsider so I was really keen to be like an insider and someone who people would sort of embrace and also so I grew up… well I was born in Oxford, then when I was two I moved to Edinburgh for ten years, and I just got this thick Scottish accent and then at age twelve I moved down south to live in Southampton which where I went to secondary school and then Sixth Form and I could remember the first day that I wet to my new school in England, I don't know what I was thinking, I wore a full Scotland National Football kit tracksuit. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Oh, no.
Alex Bellos: It's so like terrible, obviously my identity has been sort of this Scottish kid. So I was the Scot who was in England. I was the kind of short guy with all these tall people. And also because I was good at maths but I realized quite early on that back then this is the late Seventies, early Eighties, maths… there was no geek cool, there was no nerd cool. If you were the good… the nerdy people, it was uncool, it was, you know, I was also interested in girls so if you wanted to be part of the gang that hung out with the people who liked music and there were girls in that gang, you had to make a real effort to do other things than just the maths. So, I was always quite nerdy but I always made an effort to be the person who was, you know, listening to the right music and going to the right… hanging out with the cool kids basically.
Brandy Haran: As you came towards the end of high school then, what happened? What are the decisions being made? 'Cause obviously eventually you gotta make decisions don't you?
Alex Bellos: Um… I think that… so I went to this secondary school in Southampton, and you're still young, maybe you need to make a decision when you got to Sixth Form, 'cause the Sixth Form, the way it was done then it was completely different to the school…
Brandy Haran: So for Americans, what do we mean by Sixth Form?
Alex Bellos: So it's the last two years of compulsory education which is age 17 and 18.
Brandy Haran: Hm.
Alex Bellos: So this an institution, like the college, that only has those two years, and it was much more like a university than it was like a school, and they didn't force you to go to lessons. If you didn't want to go to lessons you didn't have to. You could smoke if you wanted to. There was no uniform or anything. So already going to Sixth Form takes kids from a much wider area, you're meeting people who are a bit more like you and I had a good gang. One of them had a car, we would like go to nightclubs and experiment… I really enjoyed my childhood in Southampton. So Southampton, you know, for the Americans, it is a city of maybe… half a million people? Three hundred thousand people. It's far enough from London for it to have it's own energy, but it's quite kind of square… but has… it has good cinemas and it's got a theater and it's got a university, so it's safe enough to experiment in loads of things and for it not to be particularly dangerous. And it's also… 'cause it's a port city, it's very diverse culturally. That when I went to university, when I went to Oxford, all the kids who had grown up in London, were just bored. They're like London's much more interesting than this, where as I was kind of, really excited because it was like going somewhere that was new and a bit different.
Brandy Haran: What did you go and do at Oxford? And I mean getting into Oxford's kind of a big deal isn't it?
Alex Bellos: Like, yeah, I mean I went to a state school. So, I didn't go to private… it was paid by the government, a free school and… one other person from my school may have been two from the college, went there? So it was yeah, it was really unusual and it was tough. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: What did you do… well first of all you were obviously were getting good marks at school then?
Alex Bellos: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: You talk about going out with your friends with the car and experimenting.
Alex Bellos: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: But you're obviously hitting your grades?
Alex Bellos: With math, if you get it, you just get it, so I worked quite hard but I also spent a lot of time socializing and the only thing that I could get in to a good university was maths, because that was what I was good at and I must have had quite a good intuitive sense of maths because to get into Oxford you had to do an exam and I did the exam and, I dunno, two hundred, three hundred people? No must be several thousand people do it, because I think they accept two hundred people and most of the people who go to private schools have special teachers that teach you to try and get at this exam. Sounds like kind of, humble brag I believe is the term, but I was like something like thirtieth or something. So I did really well on the exam, that's basically the best I've ever done in an exam ever in my life.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: But because of that Oxford were gonna take me.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: No matter what happened in any of my other subjects.
Brandy Haran: That's not a humble brag by the way, that's just a brag.
Alex Bellos: What it's a brag? (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Alex Bellos: The difference between a humble brag…
Brandy Haran: It has…
Alex Bellos: I would have to sort just drop it in the conversation without talking about it?
Brandy Haran: You would have to…
Alex Bellos: Like be humble like?
Brandy Haran: No you would have to be more self deprecating so it would be something like…
Alex Bellos: Okay.
Brandy Haran: Oh, I'm, you know, oh I'm such a nerd I'm so embarrassed…
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: You'd say I was the thirtieth biggest nerd in the whole country.
Alex Bellos: Right. Okay. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Do you wanna be a mathematician at this point?
Alex Bellos: So no, I don't wanna be a mathematician. I wanna go study maths and philosophy and the reason why I'm attracted to maths and philosophy is that I'm beginning to be interested in, you know, philosophy, the ideas of where are we going in the world and also reading Bertrand Russel and getting books on philosophy. I think…
Brandy Haran: So it sounds like you're interested in philosophy but you're having to use maths as your way to get to the philosophy 'cause you're so good at maths?
Alex Bellos: Yeah, kind of.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Alex Bellos: Kind of. I mean, I was interested in maths. So it wasn't but it… it was just one thing I was interested and there were other things that I was maybe more interested in.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Okay, so you're at Oxford doing maths and philosophy.
Alex Bellos: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: And then how does that unfold? What is unlocked here? What interests, you know, where does it lead?
Alex Bellos: So lots of people want to go to Oxford because it's a brilliant university. I actually think my maths education was shockingly bad, and I would never recommend anyone going to Oxford… the college that I went to study maths, and I slightly regret the college that I went to, and that's because I got into this Corpus Christi College, it's a very small college, there was only one or two other people doing maths, and it meant there are only one or two tutors, so you had to do that tutor and maths all of sudden it gets really difficult, and to understand it you need to have a tutor who is like good at teaching and you also need to have lots of other people who are studying who are also struggling and I didn't have anyone to talk to about it and also I was interested in the philosophical side and the specialisms of my two tutors was not in that way at all.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: One of them was actually like kind of a graduate student who had no training in or interest in being a teacher at all and I was just baffled so I was kind of down a bit depressed about it because there were lots of the interesting things that I want to find out about but I was finding it a bit too difficult. And I loved the philosophy and I ended up specializing in the philosophy of maths and also I was having like a lot of amazing time socially. I… joined the local paper, the university paper and I edited, it's called Cherwell, I edited the university paper. I also, so this was, I was seventeen when I went to Oxford, so that was in 1988 or '87. Once I'd edited the paper and began my second year, it was the Summer of Love. It was 1988, it was acid house, so I started a nightclub (laughs) so for my next couple of years I was running this nightclub.
Brandy Haran: It was your nightclub?
Alex Bellos: It was my nightclub, Club Automatic, yeah!
Brandy Haran: Club Automatic. Oh my…
Alex Bellos: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: You are definitely the first nightclub owner…
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …that has been on the Numberphile podcast.
Alex Bellos: Well. I didn't own the venue.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Alex Bellos: But we put it on at several different venues. It was me and two friends and I was the… one of the guys was the DJ, one of the guys was like did the posters and one of the guys did like the money and like dealing with these guys…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Alex Bellos: And that was me.
Brandy Haran: Club Automatic. You were the money man!
Alex Bellos: Yeah I was. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Wheeler and dealer!
Alex Bellos: Yeah. I mean it was… yeah.
Brandy Haran: What was that like? Is it good or was it like fun or did it become stressful? We you like, oh every night's a party or was it like oh what have I done, this is so hard.
Alex Bellos: It was amazingly fun, but the great thing about university is you get to sort of make all those mistakes early. I mean it's kind of… (sighs) the first night we did, 'cause… you know…
Brandy Haran: Club Automatic opening night.
Alex Bellos: (laughs) What we did, it was called Bliss, was the opening night, Club Bliss, and we had these passports which we made and distributed them around the university and you had to bring your passport and we say oh here's a stamp for each different night that you would stamp in your passport so you could see…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: …which one you'd been too. And like far too many people showed up and so we got to the limit, already, and I was out by the door and then there was the guy who actually owned the place who had kind of like tattoos and this kind of guy and he was like look we got to the limit but if you give me some extra money, I'll let you put more people in.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Alex Bellos: And at that time I'm like, yeah Brit, sounds great!
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Alex Bellos: Sounds great!
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Alex Bellos: I mean just… but it wasn't a particularly good night because when I tried to get downstairs actually I couldn't go downstairs because there was just like far too many people.
Brandy Haran: It was packed. Alright.
Alex Bellos: It was far too packed. So you learn pretty, you know, you wouldn't do that.
Brandy Haran: So if a fire broke out that night we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. (laughs)
Alex Bellos: (laughs) No for I would be in jail. Yeah or…
Brandy Haran: Gosh.
Alex Bellos: …kind of trampled on and stoned by my peers. But the great thing about that was that I don't come from a… rich family but I managed to fund everything from the nightclub.
Brandy Haran: From club…
Alex Bellos: From Club Automatic.
Brandy Haran: Club Automatic, you realize, is the podcast title now. I hope you realize that. (laughs)
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) You have no choice in this.
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Alright, so after being a nightclub owner and…
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Nightclub owner by night, philosopher of mathematics expert by day, did you do well at university? Did you come out with a good degree?
Alex Bellos: Hmm. (stutters) Not particularly.
Brandy Haran: No?
Alex Bellos: I got two one.
Brandy Haran: Yeah? That's good. That's just…
Alex Bellos: Which is okay, I mean…
Brandy Haran: Standard. Solid.
Alex Bellos: I'd always wanted to be what they call the Alpha Gamma Candidate. So the Alpha Gamma Candidate is the person who gets alphas, which is like the best, and gammas which is like kind of the worst. So someone who, that's interesting, sometimes you're brilliant and sometimes you're terrible. 'Cause it's the idea that maybe even when you're terrible you're actually kind of brilliant.
Brandy Haran: And unrecognized genius.
Alex Bellos: Exactly! What you don't want to be is the slightly boring humdrum betas all the way.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Alex Bellos: And essentially all through university I was just like betas all the way. And worked really hard just so I can get a beta like wouldn't do much work and still get a beta, I was just like kind of regular and boring and then come my finals I kind of flunked some of the exams and got gammas but the essay or… what to call it the thesis that I wrote on the philosophy of maths I got an alpha, so that kind of balanced so I don't think is that a humble brag or not? But (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) That's closer! Yeah.
Alex Bellos: (laughs) Is it?
Brandy Haran: That's closer. Yeah, you're getting there. (laughs)
Alex Bellos: But I love that. And actually I wrote a letter to my… the head of the philosophy of maths saying, I'm kind of surprised by, well this is how I remember it, having got done so well at this but I really enjoyed doing it and if it's really good, is there maybe a future for me carrying on in academia and being doing the philosophy of maths. (sighs) I never heard back.
Brandy Haran: What!
Alex Bellos: So it may of…
Brandy Haran: Didn't even get a reply?
Alex Bellos: No he might not have got it. There were no emails in those days so maybe…
Brandy Haran: Couldn't you knock on the door?
Alex Bellos: (sighs) Yeah but, you only hear the results and you know you're off.
Brandy Haran: You go on.
Alex Bellos: You know, you go on, you're out of college.
Brandy Haran: By this part you must be thinking about like money and stuff so like what are you thinking about a job?
Alex Bellos: I'd realized at that time that…
Brandy Haran: Is Club Automatic still running?
Alex Bellos: (sighs) No, it's not.
Brandy Haran: No okay.
Alex Bellos: I still got the posters at home though.
Brandy Haran: Okay. (laughs)
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Alright there's no Club Automatic income so you need another income.
Alex Bellos: (laughs) Umm. I'd begun to realize how the English establishment network works so, I was in the group of people who did journalism, did newspapers, and I knew at the time that, you know, the person who's the editor of the Guardian then had edited Cherwell. So I had been the editor of Cherwell.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: And I could just tell that if you're part of this group, you know the people who are like one year older than you, and they know the people who are one year older than them.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Hmm.
Alex Bellos: And it's just it's part of a gang and I realized without knowing it or consciously joining this gang, I was like totally in this Oxford journalism gang.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: And one day in my final term, one… Alan Rusbridger, who became the editor of Guardian, at that time he was Features Editor, I think, of the Guardian, was invited to Oxford to give a talk and I was the person who, oh you Alex, you're editor of Cherwell, you go and you meet him at the station. So I met Alan, who was… journalist at the time, not particularly well known, walked him to my college, gave the talk, walked him back and kept in touch with him and then, you know, a few weeks after I graduated I just called him and said, do you have any work experience, so he was like yeah sure, so within a few weeks of university I was doing work experience at the Guardian which was the only paper that I would have wanted to work for and I've been linked to the Guardian ever since, last thirty years.
Brandy Haran: So you started on a path of journalism and writing now, obviously.
Alex Bellos: It's not just you go from Oxford to the Guardian, I can remember I was asking Alan, I said, well what should I do if I want to become a journalist and he said you need to go to work on a local paper, so I applied to dozens and dozens of local papers and the paper that accepted me was the Brighton Evening Argus, so I left London, I moved to Brighton. Well, first they sent me to Hastings where they had a training course, so I lived in Hastings for six months learning shorthand and local government and libel law and then I moved to Brighton where I worked for the Evening Argus for a couple of years. You know, it's an evening paper, it's really exciting, Brighton, this fantastic place, also great nightclubs…
Brandy Haran: You weren't tempted to start one yourself?
Alex Bellos: The competition was too fierce.
Brandy Haran: Right. (laughs)
Alex Bellos: But I definitely frequented many of them.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Alex Bellos: I was always jealous when I was at Oxford 'cause I had a friend at Sussex University and he had a much, you know, he was a much… it was always great fun coming to Briton to visit him. Then after a couple of years at the Evening Argus, I moved to London, freelanced for a bit, and finally got a job at the Guardian. Yeah, but by that time, you know, I always had an identity as a maths person like, I'd never met anyone else in journalism, none of my friends in journalism, none of my friends who were in university journalism, or were national journalism, had science degrees. Definitely not a maths degree, so I always felt it's kind of a bit weird, you know, I was this sort of fish out of water. The mathematician, and I wasn't researching maths or studying maths, but I definitely had a super mathematical way of understanding the world and you could tell so clearly that people just didn't understand basic statistics, like how percentages worked, how probabilities worked, you know you would go to a demonstration and people'd be like, Alex, how many people are here? I'm like well, what you do is that you, you know, (laughs), count the number of people on the horizontal, up this way, and the number of people that way, and then you multiply them together and then that gives you the estimate. People just don't understand this is like basic maths. So I used to always think that the fact that I understood maths really gave me an advantage in a lot of simple news journalism. And also when it came to writing stories I was never particularly good at writing but when you come to write news reports, they have a structure and it's like learning how to write a proof. You've got to have one thing that follows on from the next thing that follows from the next thing and you've got to have a kind of a beginning and the conclusion and you've got to summarize it in the most efficient concise way, so I quite enjoyed the fact that I had this mathematical brain amongst people who used words. And… it meant that I wasn't as fancy a writer. I was never gonna be a kind of a columnist of political opinions or anything like that. But also, I had certain things that I could do that no one else could do.
Brandy Haran: Did your mathematical inclinations affect what you were writing about editorial at this stage? Like would you be pitching your editor on, d'y'know what, there's been a really big discovery at the Large Hadron Collider or there's been this proof in mathematics or were you doing regular news coverage?
Alex Bellos: So at the local paper I was doing totally regular news coverage but then I had my own interests. So I can remember once the Polgár Sisters, I dunno if you kind of remember them, they were the first great female chess players. They were sisters from Hungarian, and they were making an appearance somewhere in the Brighton area. And I was like, I want to interview them! I'm like totally totally excited by speaking to a female chess player and I went and I spoke to them and that was great whereas no one else in the paper could have cared less. So I had that sort of interest. And when I went to the Guardian I can remember that this was right at the beginning of the internet. Right at the beginning of emails and I used to often be given those stories that required some kind of knowledge of how a computer might work, I mean, I can't code, we'd called it programming back then, but I couldn't do that, but I understood the language of it and also I think that what having training as a mathematician or a scientist means is that you can call up people and you speak their language so you can ask them in language that they understand and they can tell it back to you in their own language and then you can translate that language clearly. So…
Brandy Haran: Translation after all the…
Alex Bellos: It is translating.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Alex Bellos: I'm translating kind of geekery into simple English and I think that… often people say, isn't writing really difficult (sighs) well it sort of is but actually writing's about things making things simple and if you can't write a simple sentence, you can't communicate.
(Gentle chimes)
Brandy Haran: Okay, so we've placed you at the Guardian at this stage. Give us the short… a bit more short history before we get to some books like, you end up in Brazil at some point, don't you?
Alex Bellos: Because I was at university at age seventeen and then I started work within days of graduating, I always made a promise to myself when I'm twenty-eight, in the distant future! (laughs) When I am twenty-eight.
Brandy Haran: Why twenty-eight?
Alex Bellos: I don't know I just… that was the day, when I'm twenty-eight…
Brandy Haran: Hmm
Alex Bellos: …I'm gonna stop everything and take a year out. So I'd got myself this great job with the Guardian and I was like in the news pool but also writing features (sighs) and I was the youngest reporter for a while on the Guardian which meant that this was when the Spice Girls and Oasis so I was kind of writing about all this great kind of culture and it was really… it felt that I was kind of part of it because I was writing about it for the paper that has the greatest amount of youth readers and I was like my god it's six months to the date that I've promised self to stop everything… and I thought it's a brave thing to do, don't give something up while it's going badly, give something up when it's going well, that gives you… it feels that it's incredibly empowering because things are going well, you feel you're in control of your life, then to really take control of your life and so I went to the editor and said, I want to take a year off, can you give me a years sabbatical, it was Alan Rusbridger at the time. And he said that sounds like a great idea but I can't give you a year off so you'd have to lose your job and like you might get it again but who knows, and I was like that's not a very good vote of confidence (laughs) in me.
Brandy Haran: I…
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I had that exact same conversation when I left my newspaper.
Alex Bellos: Really!
Brandy Haran: Can I have a year off? No, but good luck it's a good thing to do.
Alex Bellos: Yeah. Yeah. And it was kind of the best thing I ever did.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: So I said, well I'm gonna resign and then I thought I wanna go and live abroad and I wanted to live somewhere where, alright so this is number one, I can learn the language to a fluent level in a year, so that eliminated languages with different alphabets or scripts. I didn't want to go to Japan or China because I thought I wouldn't be able to learn that language properly in a year. I already spoke French and I'd done A level German, so I spoke German okay, and so I thought, Spanish, Portuguese, South America sounds really interesting and a friend of mine had just come back from like a week in Rio and he was like, oh my god, it's amazing! So I said okay I'm going to go to Brazil and I don't think I realized was that I didn't have much money. I had enough money… probably to live like really skint for a year, but not to live particularly well, so I thought, let's go somewhere and try to live cheaply but if I need to earn money, I need to be able to, what can I do? I'm a journalist. I need to be able to write stories, so where is a place in the world that has the most amount of stories for the smallest amount of journalists who were there and at that time, so this was in 1998, there were handful of journalists in Brazil, almost no journalist in Brazil, and then reason why, Brazil had until a few years before that been a dictatorship and so the only stories that you ever heard about Brazil were, deforestation of the Amazon, the workers' movement, massacre of street children, it was very much this kind of anti-dictatorship human rights issues which very important but tended to attract a kind of campaigning sort of journalist writing about inequalities which you want to hear about them but gives you such a one note idea about what the country is like. There was no one writing about Brazilian music, or Brazilian architecture or even the Brazilian economy, it was all these quite depressing social issues. So I thought, well there are obviously these great stories out there but no one's writing them, and Brazil has the other problem that where do you base yourself as journalist? Sao Paolo, Rio, or Brasilia? So they're all sort of kind spread… umm… anyway so I made the decision to go to Rio just because I thought big country, not many journalists there, and my mate had just come from spending a week in Rio and it was fantastic. I was there for five years.
Brandy Haran: Five years?
Alex Bellos: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: And what kind of journalist where you in that time? Were you writing about Brazilian architecture and…?
Alex Bellos: Yeah, I was. Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Alex Bellos: I met Brazilian architects. I met Oscar Niemeyer who's the guy who, he's dead now but he… built or designed Brasilia. It's an amazing kind of modernist city, kind of concrete with all the kind of curves made out of concrete. I know Brazil probably better than any country in the world, I mean, it's massive, it's almost as big as the continental United States. Umm… it goes from… different climates and ecosystems vary hugely. I would spend every month in Rio, I would spend a week somewhere else, so I traveled really really widely.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: And I wrote everything. You know I was actually the South America correspondent, or I became the South America correspondent of the Guardian because when I got there I started writing stories and they're like, okay Alex, you win. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Alex Bellos: You know, we'll take you back.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Alex Bellos: And so yeah I went to Chile to do stuff on Pinochet, I went to Argentina to do stuff on the Falklands, I went to Venezuela to do stuff on Chavez, I went down the Amazon in a small boat to meet uncontacted Indians. I did all this like amazing amazing stuff and two years into that a publisher approached me and said, do you wanna write a book on Brazilian Football? And like I like football but I'm not a sports journalist and my initial response was… no not really. Like football… ask a sports journalist. 'Cause I thought what they were asking was a book that tells you, you know, the size of Pelé's shoe.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: You know, and stuff like that, but they said no, no, no we don't want a sports journalist to do it, we want something more kind about the culture of Brazilian football and then I thought, do you know what, all the things that interest me in Brazil and a lot of it was, you know, I'd gone to Brazil, I didn't know anyone there, I had to discover who I was essentially. It's about me searching for my own identity and Brazil's such a young country that it's still searching for its identity, so I guess I was really interested in like identity and culture and like who you are and I realize that football which like me had come from Europe to Brazil and totally changed, I mean I didn't change Brazil but football changed Brazil, so much so that football is the greatest symbol of Brazilianness, what a great way to tell the story of Brazil, through football.
Brandy Haran: Hmm
Alex Bellos: So my book on Brazilian football, which I then accepted to write, is essentially about the anthropology and history and architecture and music about all these things just kind of telling stories that through the lens of football you tell the story of a nation.
Brandy Haran: Had you ever written a book at that point?
Alex Bellos: No.
Brandy Haran: That was your first book?
Alex Bellos: It was my first book and… I was on my own and I vowed never to write a book after that because it took about eighteen months and I worked on it everyday and writing books… it's hard even if you can do it and I think at that time I had… you don't know whether you can do it. Brazil is such a big country that there's always more you can do and there's where do you stop.
Brandy Haran: Why did you leave after five years?
Alex Bellos: I needed know whether I was gonna be in Brazil forever or whether it was a temporary thing and I thought if it's gonna be a temporary thing, five years is enough, and also I started to dislike the people who live in Rio. The Cariocas. I wouldn't say all Brazilians. Rio was a very difficult place to live as a foreigner if you're going to… unless you totally become Carioca. It's a place where… there's not… no great intellectual culture, people don't really read the newspapers, they're not really bothered about the rest of the world, they're obsessed about body image and how Rio is brilliant and amazing and… I realized that all the friends that I was making there weren't from Rio, they were Brazilians but not from Rio. I just started to get really frustrated with the way… just the way life was. Okay, I mean it's beautiful and climate is amazing and the food is amazing and… it's kind of paradise but I was just becoming grouchy and grumpy and I just thought, you know what? It's time to go.
Brandy Haran: If I'm going to be grouchy and grumpy...
Alex Bellos: I'm coming back, I can do that at home.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) I'm gonna do that in England!
Alex Bellos: Yeah, and I think that it was part of going away and it's good to go and sort of you know sow your wild oats sort of explore the world but then you sort of thing, it's time to come home.
Brandy Haran: Alright then, so let's talk about how you've become who you are now. So you've come home, what now, does the Guardian take you back?
Alex Bellos: No, so I came back hoping that they might and there was nothing there for me but also before I went to Brazil I was writing about, you know, parochial British matters and I went to Brazil and I was writing about big important matters that affected a whole continent, I came back and I just didn't want to do… I could've really campaigned to have my old job back but I sort of didn't really want it. 'Cause I had sort of done it, I wanted to move on to do something else. And I still, I'd left Brazil but a lot of me was still, a lot of my friends, and a lot of my heart was still in Brazil. So for the next few years I tried to write about Brazil, one time I tried to… so I could've maybe been a millionaire.
Brandy Haran: Hmm?
Alex Bellos: I came back saying, guys, there's this amazing fruit that is really big in Brazil that you can't get anywhere outside of Brazil. It's called açaí. How about I start importing açaí?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: I found one guy, Ronan, his company is called Sublime Açaí, Sublime Foods.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Alex Bellos: And I met him when he was just starting it because he'd had a family member who'd went to Brazil, told him about it, and he was like a few months, maybe a year, ahead of me, he was doing it. And I was just thinking, yeah maybe I could do this and then I never did and now açaí is just like mega.
Brandy Haran: Everywhere.
Alex Bellos: It's just absolutely everywhere.
Brandy Haran: Ah.
Alex Bellos: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: I don't know if I've had it. I can't think what it is but…
Alex Bellos: Oh it's lovely. Oh I love it.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Alex Bellos: I still order it from Ronan, I've always got it in my freezer.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Alex Bellos: You mix it in with banana and pulp. Oh it's delicious.
Brandy Haran: Nice.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: Tell me how you become a book writer, 'cause that's what you are now.
Alex Bellos: Yeah, so, what happened. I was completely failing to do anything, getting bored of writing about Brazil not being in Brazil, failing to do import açaí and then someone came to me, in fact a friend who's an agent, who then became my agent, said, Alex, you are a writer, your book on Brazil did really well, but you understand about maths, that's what you need to be doing. And I was like, yeah! (sighs) Maths I gave that up like a decade ago. And she's like, no, no, think about it. Go write a proposal, because the way things work in terms of writing a book for kind of professionals who have already written a book is that you get yourself an agent, and with an agent you work on a proposal about what that book's going to be and maybe the proposal is just a sheet of paper. Normally it would be about four or five sheets of paper. If you've never written before you might need to have write a chapter or two, so that's like thirty, forty sheets of paper.
Brandy Haran: Just to prove you've got a bit of stick-ability and you can write.
Alex Bellos: Yeah it's just to prove that you can write so…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: What I wrote is like an outline and saying look at my previous work, you can see I can write, whereas if you hadn't you'd have to give… no one would take a chance on you if they didn't see any of your writing, and then you give it to a publisher and the publisher decides whether they want it or not. And then they will give you a contract and the contract will be for a certain amount of money and you get normally a quarter of that money on signing of the contract, the next quarter when you've finished the manuscript, the next quarter when the hardback comes out and the next quarter when the paperback comes out.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Alex Bellos: That's roughly how it works. So this is my friend, she said, I know there's an interest in maths books… people who can write to write about maths. I just know this, so write me a proposal for a maths book.
Brandy Haran: She felt the time was write was this, did she or…?
Alex Bellos: Yeah and she'd had a conversation with someone who was an editor and the editor was moaning, oh I've got my five year old kids just started school and I can't even do their maths homework and so my agent friend was like, uh huh, this is a woman who I need to pitch.
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Alex Bellos: This is the book that's gonna explain maths to parents. In fact, the book that Rob Eastaway wrote, Maths for Mums and Dads, was ultimately the book that this editor person did publish.
Brandy Haran: Okay (laughs)
Alex Bellos: So (laughs) it's kind of a small world.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: I went back and I thought, okay, I'll try and write a proposal, so I went and read loads of sort of maths books. Popular maths books and I can remember being so bored reading them and just often lying on my sofa and falling asleep in the afternoon reading them.
Brandy Haran: What do you think their weakness was?
Alex Bellos: Bad writing.
Brandy Haran: Bad writing.
Alex Bellos: Bad writing. Maybe I was not the audience for it, maybe… yeah a lot of them were just boring. Just boring. And I can remember thinking you could do a really good movie shot of me depressed walking down thinking, it's just boring, it's all rubbish, it's all boring and then thinking (gasps) wow! This is the breakthrough. Maths is not boring, so the fact that the books that I've read are a bit boring means that there's room for a not boring one.
Brandy Haran: Right. (chuckles)
Alex Bellos: So I was like, brilliant and I got really excited and I was like this is the book that is gonna make math exciting and interesting and so I wrote the proposal and it was originally gonna be called the Book of Numbers and…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Alex Bellos: …it ultimately turned into Alex's Adventures in Numberland. And what I tried to do there is to make maths as fun and exciting and as interesting as I could for the non-maths audience.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: I realized that the Brazilian book that I wrote was the best possible training to write Alex's Adventures in Numberland. Point of Brazilian book is I spent a year going all around Brazil, interviewing people in Portuguese, synthesizing it in my head, and writing a book for people who've never been Brazil about what Brazil is like. I'm doing exactly the same thing for Numberland. I was like the foreign correspondent in the world of numbers. I went around the world, so I went to India, I went to Japan, I went all across America, I went to Europe, interviewing people whose lives connected to maths in some way, kind of mathsy people and I came back home, synthesized everything and wrote it in information that someone who doesn't like maths would be interested in. So when I'm writing I always have imagine me sitting at a bar talking to my friend, usually it's my friend Bridget, who's not interested in maths, and it's me just saying a sentence or a fact and I imagine how she would respond to that fact. So I was always thinking about the non-mathematician so I wrote this book thinking this is a book that's gonna open up the wonders of maths to non-maths audience. So I wrote it, inevitably the first people who get sent a book on maths are not the non-maths audience, it goes to all the maths writers.
Brandy Haran: Didn't got to Bridget? (laughs)
Alex Bellos: Didn't go to Bridget, although she bought has several copies.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Alex Bellos: And the reviews started coming in of like, you know, positive reviews and even, and I realized that actually the people who are reading, 'cause they're kind of the maths audience, because the maths audience were also really happy to read about maths things that were written in a…
Brandy Haran: Yeah!
Alex Bellos: …slightly different… in a journalistic way. You know, I'm not reinventing the wheel. The material in my books is very similar material you'll find in loads and loads of other books, but I think I'm the only person writing maths, you know, who's done time as a foreign correspondent and as a… local cub reporter on an evening paper. So I know how to… I know how to hook you in.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: I know how to tell a story. I know about structure and I've got an eye for a good story and I think that, you might have aced your probability paper at GCSE or A level or even at university, but even so you're gonna be interested in the life of the man who lives in Reno, Nevada, who sets the odds to more than half of the world's slot machines
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: The probability involved is not complicated but you get to see it through this man's life, how it applies in the world… through a personal story. I think the trick in maths writing is to appeal to the Bridgets of the world but also to the people who know the maths and the way that you do that is that you've got to take the maths slow enough so that the Bridgets understand. So you've got to provide more than the maths so the people who understand the maths are gonna stick with you and not just think this is boring, and the way you do that is that you bring interesting people in it. 'Cause it's always interesting learning about people.
Brandy Haran: Were there ever any times during your travels around India and Japan and all the places you went where you began to doubt, like you began to think, is this good enough? Is this actually gonna make a book? Or was it the opposite, was it, oh my goodness I can't believe how much stuff is here? This is gonna be the greatest book ever written.
Alex Bellos: Well I never thought it would be the greatest book ever written, which obviously it is.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Alex Bellos: Thank you. Thank you for putting that out there. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) You can't use that!
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: You can't use that on the cover of your book!
Alex Bellos: Oh yeah? (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I didn't say it in that context. (laughs)
Alex Bellos: No, I… before you write a book you have absolutely no idea how people are going to respond to it. Absolutely no idea, and it's kind of terrifying because by writing a book… I mean it's kind of not for the faint hearted and like I do even now like lose sleep about how a book is gonna be received. You put all your emotion, all your energy, you really believe in something and once it's out there, people can criticize it as much as they like and they often do and you've gotta have quite a thick skin not to be… not to be hurt by that. And also I think often readers think just by the fact that he's come out with a book, he deserves that criticism. Often we're like weird like talk about celebrities on the telly we just kind of criticize them, actually I'm a writer writing a book, you know, (laughs) I get a bit of need to be philosophical about it, you just gotta take it, people are gonna, you know…
Brandy Haran: Is there one that sticks in your head? Is there a review or something once said that like still punches in the gut to this day?
Alex Bellos: Umm… there are a few things that people have said that it's a bit… it's a bit too arcane to mention the actual lines that I've been like, ooh you don't understand, the power you have in that review, you know, I've spent couple of years wiring a book, it's three hundred pages long, there's one line that you've chosen to base your review on, which is something that you don't believe yourself but actually if you bothered to look in the notes at the back, that I kind of, you know, argue against that position and so what you're saying isn't there is actually there, that makes me kind of angry and I think that often young… oh for god of… I was young once. I think that sometimes the mark of a bad reviewer and often happen maybe the first couple of time you review a book, you're desperate to just kind of criticize it to show that you're kind of…
Brandy Haran: You're clever.
Alex Bellos: Yeah... umm… exactly and sometimes I think that if you don't like a book, don't review you. That's my… thing. Unless someone… it's so kind of outrageous and someone's trying to be someone that they're not but most books people put such a lot of effort and such a lot of love and such a lot of passion into it, and if it's not your thing, then it's not your thing, it might be someone else's thing.
Brandy Haran: But can't reviewers sometimes warn people off a book that might be a waste of their time? Like isn't that kind of one of the services of a review as well?
Alex Bellos: Yeah, probably the best thing to do is just not to review it. I think.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Alex Bellos: Yeah. I… especially now where it's so difficult for writers to make a living.
Brandy Haran: Writing a book about mathematics…
Alex Bellos: Yeah?
Brandy Haran: Like, you know, I feel like I have the luxury of making videos about mathematics where we can get out a piece of brown paper and pen or we can draw a diagram…
Alex Bellos: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: …and I can use animations. I mean I know you do use pictures and diagrams in your books but do you think writing about mathematics presents extra challenges, because of the lack of visuals or the lack of being able to see things unfold on the page?
Alex Bellos: Yeah, writing about abstract things is very difficult, but there's other things that make maths very difficult to write about, one is the idea of how fast do you go through the maths, 'cause you don't wanna lose the people who are slower than the people who get it but you don't want to lose the people who get it really fast will think this is really boring so judging that is difficult. The other thing is often in maths you'd be incredibly clear what you're talking about, you know, you could be like I get this all the time when I'm writing puzzles, that you… you want the puzzle to be nice and short, like one line, such and such is happening, what's the solution? And inevitably you get people that say, oh but what about zero people and then you're like it's obvious, it's self evident, I could have done like I could have done a whole page of clarifications saying, okay it's not zero people, the people aren't aliens, the people are just like normal people by which we understand… you know?
Brandy Haran: Oh yeah. I can imagine… 'cause I mean we probably won't talk as much as I'd like to about your puzzle writing.
Alex Bellos: Yeah?
Brandy Haran: But writing a puzzle, I think must be a nightmare for that because one thing I've learned on the internet is if there is a way for something to be misunderstood, it will be misunderstood.
Alex Bellos: It's totally, so you need to have the confidence of… you need to write incredibly clearly but totally unambiguously and that's actually quite difficult because if you were to say it totally unambiguously you would have a five pages for each sentence, so you need to…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: …work out what you don't include.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Alex Bellos: And it's true that often people who like puzzle books or like puzzles or like maths are, you know, I count myself maybe among them (chuckles) are super pedantic people.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: You know…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: That's just the sort of person.
Brandy Haran: Yeah if you write a puzzle about people eating bananas, there'll always be people going what if I don't like bananas, or something. (groans) (laughs)
Alex Bellos: Exactly. So I've got this puzzle column in the Guardian and I… find the puzzles, write the puzzles, do the headlines and no one really checks it. For a while I was trying to ask other mathematicians to check it but then it's just too time consuming and also, who checks the checkers, et cetera.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: And what I've realized that there are lots of people who every week say, not another badly phrased problem by Alex Bellos.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Alex Bellos: You know, the problem with Alex Bellos is some of them are nice puzzles but he just phrases them really badly. To write a good puzzle, it's like you need to stress test it with fifty thousand people reading it because there's always going to be a few people who spot something that no one else has spotted.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: And sometimes the only way you get that is by putting it in a column.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: And by these people, so what I slightly resent, there's a kind of negatively of (groans) but what about, you know, people don't like bananas. It's actually kind of quite good because it means that, wow now I know the perfect way to phrase that puzzle.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Can we skip a few of your books? Alright?
Alex Bellos: Let's do.
Brandy Haran: Because we are running out of time. In the notes for this I'm gonna have a like so you can go and look at all of Alex's books, and there's loads of them and they're all fantastics but I wanna talk about your most recent book because if I don't…
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: You'll be really upset.
Alex Bellos: (laughs) Yeah I will!
Brandy Haran: And angry at me. (laughs)
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: But also I think it's good because I feel like your latest book kind of really does bring the wheel full circle, because we talked at the start of the podcast about how your parents are both, you know, in language and translation and things like that.
Alex Bellos: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: And your latest book seems to merge all together really nicely, so go on then.
Alex Bellos: Yeah, it totally does. So I come from a family where… we speak several different languages. My mum speaks Hungarian and French and Russian and my dad speaks Russian and French and German, English and I studied well I could speak French, well I can speak Portuguese from being in Brazil, which sort of spoke a bit of German, and so I've written a book called the Language Lover's Puzzle Book which is a book of puzzles about language and languages. So in that sense it does bring me back to a house full of languages, but don't be deceived by the title, this is actually a book for mathsy people.
Brandy Haran: Right?
Alex Bellos: It's almost all the puzzles are codebreaking puzzles. It's just that rather than that code being something invented by a computer or something invented to show some mathematical idea, the code is a language. So lot of the puzzles are, I give a few words or maybe a piece of text in one language and maybe the translation and then you've got a few other words and then you have to deduce what that might me. I've got puzzles say on Egyptian hieroglyphics, so probably the greatest decipherment in history was the decipherment of hieroglyphics by Champollion in the 19th century and he that by using the Rosetta Stone and then the Philae Obelisk. Both of them are bilingual Ancient Greek, hieroglyphics. When he knew that he'd made that decipherment it was because he could use the information in one to deduce something about what the other one said. So I have puzzle which shows you something from the Rosetta Stone and I say this is what means Rosetta Stone and you need to use that, then I show you something from the Philae Obelisk and you need to work out what that one is. So you're actually replicating the original decipherment of Champollion, and that is… it's language because it's hieroglyphics, you know, ancient languages it's just so kind of romantic this idea of trying to do that, but it's purely mathematical puzzles. You need to look at the patterns and it's pattern recognition and then a bit of insight and then working out how you can apply that knowledge.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: And I talk about ancient languages, modern languages, I talk about invented languages, I talk about scientific languages.
Brandy Haran: You talk about numbers in other languages too.
Alex Bellos: I talk about, there are some languages that have brilliant words for numbers. Chinese, Japanese. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten one, ten two, ten three, then four, to two ten, two ten one… it's really really simple.
Brandy Haran: So systematic and logical and…
Alex Bellos: Yeah and it mean that children find learning numbers much easier than they do in a country like ours where you go ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen… like what's that about? Twenty rather than… with French it's even worse you've got quatre vingt for eighties. Right, eighty which is four twenties, but of the European language the one that certainly that has the most weird unfathomably bizarre system for counting for one to hundred has got to be Danish. And there's a fantastic puzzle in the Language Lover's Puzzle Book…
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Alex Bellos: …that what I do is that I is that I give you…
Brandy Haran: What was that called? Was it the Language Lover's Puzzle Book, you say?
Alex Bellos: I think it was called the Language Lover's Puzzle Book. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) By Alex Bellos? (laughs)
Alex Bellos: It's true, Lexical Perplexities and Cracking Conundrums from Across the Globe.
Brandy Haran: Okay. Alright.
Alex Bellos: You can re-edit that.
Brandy Haran: Alright. (laughs)
Alex Bellos: And… what I do is that I give you a bunch of words in Danish and say those represent these numbers and then I give you a few other words in Danish and you need to work out what those numbers are. And you will realize that the word for fifty in Danish… doesn't have the root of the word for five in it anywhere but has the root of half and of three.
Brandy Haran: Right. Half and a three and you use that to build fifty somehow.
Alex Bellos: Yes, and it becomes fifty.
Brandy Haran: Okay, well. (sighs) I'm sure our Danish listeners are thinking that was the easy puzzle you've ever set.
Alex Bellos: Do you wanna know the answer, a bit?
Brandy Haran: Go on.
Alex Bellos: Well it's so essentially it's a… vigesimal system so it counts in their twenties and fifty is basically half three because it's halfway to the third score. So it's half way between forty, which is the second score, and sixty which is the third score.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Alex Bellos: So it's just like half… I think it's called halvtreds, really complicated for people learning Danish. The Danish government once tried to change it to the equivalent of fifty, with the word for five in it and put it on their banknotes but it looks like no one ever used that word.
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Alex Bellos: 'Cause once it's kind of ingrained, it's complicated but you just get used to it. And there's lots of other languages that I've got puzzles about.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: Number systems of, so Papua New Guinea is unique linguistically around the world because it's the most linguistically diverse place in the world, it has something like five, six hundred languages for a quite a small population. It also is the only place where the number systems are often body tally systems. So, apart from Papua New Guinea, you get bases of five, bases of ten, bases of twenty. That's because we've got five fingers on hand, ten both hands, and twenty with fingers and toes. You get things like base fourteen, base twenty-eight.
Brandy Haran: In Papua New Guinea?
Alex Bellos: Papua New Guinea, because what they're doing is that they count, pinky, then you're five fingers.
Brandy Haran: Your tips.
Alex Bellos: Then I might go wrist, elbow… what else… yeah elbow, shoulder, nipple, chin, nose…
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Alex Bellos: And that's how you do it.
Brandy Haran: So rather than just counting on fingers like they'll count on all sorts of protuberances.
Alex Bellos: Yes, they do.
BH Yeah? (laughs)
Alex Bellos: And some even, you know, penis and testicles.
Brandy Haran: Really?
Alex Bellos: Yeah they do. (laughs) They do.
Brandy Haran: What number are those ones?
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) So let me ask you a final question then. They'll be a links to the books in the notes for this podcast and I'm not gonna recommend the book.
Alex Bellos: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Because I haven't read it yet, but if your past books are anything to go by I'm sure it's really good. But let me ask you this, of all, 'cause you've written numerous books now.
Alex Bellos: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: You mention towards the start that you thought maybe your father had deep down had wished you'd gone into academia and things like that. Of all the books you've written, how do you think this one will rank in his standings? 'Cause now you're… you're veering into his wheelhouse now.
Alex Bellos: Well it's very interesting to say that. This is the first time that I have kind of stepped on to his patch and…
Brandy Haran: Has he read it?
Alex Bellos: Yeah he's got a copy but… interestingly we've had less discussion about this book (laughs) than any of the others.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Alex Bellos: So… yeah.
Brandy Haran: What do I read into that?
Alex Bellos: (laughs) But the thing is…
Brandy Haran: Hang on if he's not reviewing it does that mean he doesn't like it? (laughs)
Alex Bellos: (laughs) Well, it's a book of puzzles…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: …within language.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Alex Bellos: And I think that… also I think that it is language but you need to have a mathsy brain to solve these puzzles.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Alex Bellos: So, I think he would struggle. I think he does struggle there, actually doing the puzzle. Even though he might know about the languages concerned, you know, there's a puzzle in there which is… it's a cross number where all the clues and all the numbers are in Malagasy, okay? So you might be brilliant at… well actually that's a bad example but… you still need to understand about how crosswords, a cross numbers, and like logical deduction, Sudoku, you know, if you're good at crosswords, you're good at Sudoku, this is the book for you.
Brandy Haran: Okay. Well I'm gettin' into my crosswords at the moment so maybe this is the book for me. This is a good book for a pandemic, isn't it?
Alex Bellos: It's perfect because it will take you, you know, as the evenings draw cold… well not in Australia, they get warmer…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Alex Bellos: And you stay in, well just doing puzzles… puzzles are, I spent the last five years essentially writing puzzles in the newspaper and puzzle books and what's wonderful about puzzle books is that well firstly they're entertaining.
They're fun doing, sort of satisfying, but they're a way of learning something interesting. So I'm only interested in puzzles that at the end of it, you think, wow I never knew that. So it's a way of getting this kind of thrill of discovery something new but with the pleasure of having worked it out for yourself, so it's kind of this like, you know, amazing thing, rather, you know, you could read a book about something but you might get bored but if you're… and it wouldn't sink in but if you're actually having to try and work it out by yourself, you know working out… well why do the Babylonians write numbers like that? Why did, you know, why is Esperanto like that? It's much more satisfying I think to not be told but to work it out for yourself and I think that's what a good puzzle does really well. It gives you a bit of fun but also you learn something by yourself.
Brandy Haran: Thank you so much for your time. This has been great.
Alex Bellos: Thank you.
Brandy Haran: I wanna see one of those Club Automatic posters as well.
(music fades in)
Alex Bellos: Oh yeah, I'll send ya them. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Alright. (laughs)
(music fades up)
Alex Bellos: Definitely (laughs)
(music fades up and continues)
⁂
(gentle piano music)
Brady Haran: Today's guest is Simon Pampena. People who watch our videos will doubtless recognize Simon's wild curly hair and unbridled passion for all things mathematical. (music continues) His videos have been millions of times, including Epic Circles and the Legend of Question Six. But on the otherwise of the world in Simon's homeland of Australia, his career's followed an interesting path, from hanging upside down in trees attempting to be a Jedi to analyzing the statistics of wine sales.
(music continues and fades out)
Brandy Haran: Let me start by asking, Pampena? Where's that from, that name?
Simon Pampena: Well that name is from Australia because that's not the way it's actually pronounced.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: I grew up thinking that it was Pampena (PAM-PEE-NA).
Brandy Haran: Hmm?
Simon Pampena: Because that's the Australian English pronunciation.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But it's actually Pampena (PAM-PUH-NUH) or in Italian, Pampena (PUM-PUH-NUH), so it's from Italy but my family came to Italy couple of centuries ago via Spain.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: So I kind of look more Spanish but then my mum's Southern Italian which is more Greek.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: So I'm Mediterranean basically.
Brandy Haran: Very Mediterranean. So Simon how do you introduce yourself? Like, do you say Pampena (PAM-PUH-NUH), you pronounce it correctly?
Simon Pampena: I do say Pampena (PAM-PUH-NUH) now, but there isn't a consensus in my family so some people say Pampena (PAM-PUH-NUH), some people say Pampena (PAM-PEE-NA). It's one of things, when I was in Italy everyone got my name right.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And I was I getting it wrong.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: So when I came back to Australian I was kind of… I started pronouncing it even with more of an… affectation. Like Pampena (PUM-PUH-NUH)…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: You know, with the Italian accent and I was just annoying people and…
Brandy Haran: (sighs)
Simon Pampena: …that wasn't good when you're starting a career of trying to get people to like ya.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: So… I toned it down a bit. I kinda went a little bit half half. So Pampena (PAM-PUH-NUH) is what i say now.
Brandy Haran: Do you correct people or do you just let it slide whatever they say?
Simon Pampena: As long as they get my first name right, I consider that a win, so that's fine.
Brandy Haran: So, you're born in Adelaide weren't you?
Simon Pampena: Yes I was. Yes.
Brandy Haran: Same as me!
Simon Pampena: It's actually a really cool thing, it's great to be from Adelaide.
Brandy Haran: I'm Adelaide proud, I think I'm more Adelaide proud than you are from previous conversations we've had.
Simon Pampena: Well I've changed. I've changed.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: Adelaide was just an incredible place to grow up for what you and I both are doing, it's like… it was perfect. There was nothing much to do.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: We had access to, you know, the best kind of entertainment and education in the world, and if you had an idea of like doing something exciting you could… there was time and space to do it. So it's perfect.
Brandy Haran :Whaddya mean nothing much to do! We got the Big Rocking Horse, got Mall's Balls…
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: There was Magic Mountain, Marion Shopping Center.
Simon Pampena: So after a weekend of doing that (laughs) then there's time to follow your pursuits.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Let's say the weekend definitely were chock-a-block but then you know, maybe during the week, you know, you had time to do other things.
Brandy Haran: So, as a child what were you like? Were you geeky? Were you really into mathematics? Was, you know, was the writing on the wall?
Simon Pampena: The writing on the wall was that I was a geek absolutely. Everybody knew I as a geek. My cousins told me how I would get unusually excited about… things.
Brandy Haran: Hmm?
Simon Pampena: So you know, if we were… to do something remotely space oriented.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: I was the one who was getting really excited about Voyager II visiting Uranus and the fact… the ABC… a national broadcaster was gonna have a special on it, and I was getting exciting and telling people.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: I mean look I was a Star Wars fanatic.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And, you know, my story now I've heard plenty of times, you know, I was so into Star Wars, I so wanted Star Wars to be real and like I took a scientific approach and I studied the way that Luke, you know, was learning to be a Jedi in Empire Strikes Back and so I was tryin' to do the same thing and we had a peach tree out the back and I would hang upside-down from that and try and focus my attention the Yoda figurine and…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: You know I was just trying to like… be scientific about having this ability to use the Force. Then what ended up twigging was that and it was… this was science fiction and there was this thing called science fact that was actually kind of more amazing.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: Because you could do real things. So my imagination was prone to… (sighs) getting excited about like complicated awesome things that kind of eventually led me here.
Brandy Haran: Do you know… Mark Hamill liked one of my tweets the other day? I don't think I've ever been more excited in my life. Like Luke Skywalker himself interacted with me.
Simon Pampena: Hang on was that… was that the one that you baited him with?
Brandy Haran: (laughs) I've baited him numerous times.
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Well is this the latest one? Was that the one with the chicken piece? The nugget?
Brandy Haran: Oh, yes, yes. The chicken nugget that was the shape of the Millennium Falcon.
Simon Pampena: That is well done.
Brandy Haran: Which Star Wars film was your favorite?
Simon Pampena: Which one do you think?
Brandy Haran: Well… I mean most people like to say the Empire Strikes Back but…
Simon Pampena: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: I could see you being a Return of the Jedi man.
Simon Pampena: Oh really!
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: Return of the Jedi is my chicken soup.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: That's the one I go to when, you know, I've liked… if I'm feeling a little bit emotionally raw, I will go to that. But Empire was the first one I saw and that's the one that like I'm sure my parents lamented because, you know, they ended up having to spend so much money on those toys. Yeah that was the one that just grabbed me and the… you know and the story telling and just… everything about it… then I discovered Star Wars after that and…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: Star Wars has been the one that I've kind of grown up with now.
Whenever I'm involved in something artistically or making something… education film or, you know, like a show or something. I always compare what I'm doing to Star Wars.
Brandy Haran: Hmm?
Simon Pampena: Just to kind of like… I've watched that so many times. I've tried to extract the juice from Star Wars, like why was it so good?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And yeah and for me one of the biggest things I took out of it as an adult was editing. That it really was like… a beautifully crafted film which you don't see because you see all the explosions and lightsabers and stuff. I think if you asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, it would be I wanted to make Star Wars.
Brandy Haran: So when you weren't hanging upside down from trees trying to use the Force…
Simon Pampena: Mhm?
Brandy Haran: Were you into mathematics, or were you just into more general science and spacey stuff?
Simon Pampena: Yeah, like that's… (sighs) I've been asked this lots of times, especially by kids 'cause you know I do a lot of school shows and they don't believe that I actually love mathematics and I really do and… you wouldn't be doing something like this for as long as I have if you didn't.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: I was absolutely fixated with physics and, you know, Einstein's Theory of Relativity and I suppose I was into it a little bit because Einstein was so famous…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: But you know, I was young. But yeah I can remember sort of really getting into it, really getting into like Carl Sagan's stuff, Cosmos when that was on telly in Adelaide, you know, like it was the most mind blowing thing I've ever seen on television and it was like… it was those sorts of ideas that kind of really encapsulated my thinking. And it was that kind of like that Star Wars feeling. You know, it's like okay this is the real thing. And I had a really… a great teacher in year 9, he was fresh out of… university. So he was like twenty-four and me and my mate Paul were both into science and we asked him what E equals MC squared was, and after class he just explained it to us.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And I was like… absolutely… like blown away. And we had a book on Special Relativity in our library, which is nuts. And nobody borrowed it. It's like the last time it was borrowed was twenty years before I borrowed it.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And it had a proof of E equals MC squared. A mathematical proof.
Brandy Haran: Huh.
Simon Pampena: Which is… it's really interesting, it's like… I studied that 'cause it's like it had this thing called binomial expansion which is kind of like expanding brackets for square roots.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: So it's kind of… it's kind of a little bit bizarre but I could follow it as like a very precocious… what, twelve, thirteen year old. And I could follow the logic, it was like, they expanded the relativistic mass equation and they ended up getting like a conservation of energy and from that they worked out that there had to be a rest energy. So there had to be E subscript naught equals M subscript naught C squared. Which was the rest energy, so mass is equal to energy. And that I think was the first time I really even with a simple equation like that I really thought, wow, you can understand something absolutely sublime about the universe through mathematics and I think it's one of an important part of me getting so excited about is that nobody told me, I found it myself. I think that's part of being a nerd as well is like… you kinda stake a territory and you kinda own something and you… kinda revel in the fact that you know more than someone else in some sense.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: Like I felt like I peaked behind the curtain and I saw all this maths running, all these equations that were creating the world. So… I started becoming like extra into mathematics. One of my nicknames, which I don't think was done with much love, was Albie, which was, some sort of shortening of Albert Einstein.
Brandy Haran: That's pretty cool.
Simon Pampena: (laughs) it is, but it was more when I was being… when I was getting excited about problems in (laughs) in maths class.
Brandy Haran: Also though, I mean, obviously any one who's seen you in our videos and the many videos and things you're in, you have like this incredible shock of hair which is really like, you know, striking looking, did you have like sort of Einsteinian hair then or were you a bit more trim?
Simon Pampena: No… no. I was going to my mother's hairdresser.
Brandy Haran: Right? (chuckles)
Simon Pampena: So they were suppressing what was to become my signature look.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: I mean like I was pretty nerdy… (chuckles) and in my shows I still show like a picture of me when I was fifteen and it's like… you know, the bum fluff above the lip and the braces, I mean like, seriously it's like when people are at their lowest point and their most insecure, parents like, you know, put braces on their kids.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Crikey, I don't know how we come out of it.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: So yeah, so I… I was super super nerdy and… this thing that I discovered which was at uni my hair… kind of fits the type, right? It's like…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: You know, it's kinda like the crazy scientist.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But, all that love and all that stuff I hope people see when, you know, they watch the videos that you and I've made together is like, that's pure me. That's kinda like you're not talking to me as like… however old I was… thirty. It's like, I'm still that kid when I'm getting into this stuff. So it's kind of special, it's like I can time warp back to that period in my life and have that enthusiasm again.
Brandy Haran: So if I'd spoken to you when you were at an age, you know, in mid sort of teens where it's you start to actually seriously think about what do I wanna be when I grow up.
Simon Pampena: Yep.
Brandy Haran: Beyond, you know, astronaut or fireman, and you're starting to seriously think, okay what am I going to be.
Simon Pampena: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: What sort of answers would I have been getting in like high school, as you start making those decisions about what subjects to do and what would I have heard?
Simon Pampena: Mathematical physicist. I knew that by year 9, yeah.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: I knew I wanted to be a mathematical physicist, so much so that when it came time in year 12 to list what you wanted to do at uni…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: I put Bachelor of Science, at Adelaide Uni, Bachelor of Science, at Flinders Uni…
Brandy Haran: (chuckles)
Simon Pampena: That's like two of the main universities out near Adelaide.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And then… something else and something else science related and then right at the end I just put Bachelor of Dance.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: There's only one thing I wanted to do. I wanted to go to Adelaide Uni and I wanted to be a mathematical physicist. Even though I had to like… I did get a letter and it was like, no leg warmers in your… (tsks) in your routine for your audition.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: For Bachelor of Dance, and I was like, yeah okay, well that's not gonna happen.
Brandy Haran: What did you wanna do? Did you wanna like make rockets or build nuclear bombs or… what did you see yourself doing if you had achieved this goal?
Simon Pampena: I wanted to solve the big problems in physics. I wanted to be the guy! (chuckles) You know, I wanted to get involved in String Theory, I wanted to do quantum gravity. Like quantum gravity I was trying to solve quantum gravity pretty much straight after E equals MC squared. So I took like what I was learning in geometry.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: And like I've lost it now but I was basically trying to bring together the quantum realm and special relativity in year 9.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: And… because like everyone realized, you know, I was going fanatical about science, one of my mum's friends knew a guy, a physicist who was in Adelaide.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: There's lots of physicists in Adelaide. It's a nice place. And this bloke came around. A physicist came to my house and sat with us and I still remember like he came in and he had this cool tweed jacket with like leather patches.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: And… he was like salt and pepper hair, super smart…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: Really amazing, and we just sat and… he just sat on a… in our lounge and my mum was there and I was there and he just talked to me about physics and told me about CERN and told me about, you know, all the exciting stuff that was planned.
Brandy Haran: So he was brought around purely just for your entertainment?
Simon Pampena: I mean I would do that for someone now. But… yeah like, yeah he just was like there's a curious mind… Peter Toy I think his name was. Peter Toy.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: And so that was my first in and this was one of my first kind of like, you know, hustles, I remember getting on the bus one day and going into town and actually going to his desk and dropping my thirteen year old theory of quantum gravity on his desk.
Brandy Haran: (chuckles) Yeah?
Simon Pampena: And I'd stapled it really nicely and I put it on his desk.
Brandy Haran: Did he read it?
Simon Pampena: Yeah, well, you know…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: (laughs) I don't know. (laughs) Probably didn't. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Pretty cocky that I'd thought I'd solved all these equations.
Brandy Haran: He then published it under his own name. He won a Nobel Prize for that.
Simon Pampena: Yeah yeah he probably stole… yeah I'll have to go through his back catalog.
Brandy Haran: Ahh.
Simon Pampena: And of course, like I got all this great support, you know, like, it's one of these things that I found out about and then, well you know, when it was like parent teacher night, you know, my teacher would just say to my mum, oh, you know, what are you doin' with him? Like, it's… this is amazing. You know, what's your secret? How is he so engaged? And I would just listen to this going oh wow, I'm like, all the adults love me.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: What did your parents do, Simon? Were they fostering this? Did they have this kind of background or was this completely alien to them?
Simon Pampena: So my dad was a mechanic.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: So he was a motor mechanic and very smart, very good with his hands and very mechanically minded.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But my mum is, she was a primary school teacher, but she is very humanities based like… super humanities based.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: So I asked her when I was a kid, I was like what is pi? And she… oh, sorry mum, but she couldn't answer me. She was like, oh I don't know.
Brandy Haran: Well there's a few Numberphile videos we can point her to now.
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: (laughs) She knows now! Yeah, she knows now.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: Everyone knows now.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: But the interesting thing is, is that my whole life has been, you know, it's kind of like I've always found myself between both of those worlds so… the whole humanities thing, like, you know my mum and I would watch BBC documentaries or we enjoyed watching like I Claudius which was like this amazing BBC thing from the Seventies which was, you know, it was this just this incredible piece of theater art. Like we would… we'd love that stuff and we'd watch it together and I was really into literature and into ideas.
Brandy Haran: You say you were nerdy. Were you shy? Or were you kind of outgoing, you know, show-off, performer, as a boy, as a teenager?
Simon Pampena: I didn't realize I was a performer until (sighs) I did the Italian play. I was doing my only humanities subject in the end was Italian.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: Which was, you know, I think I was just trying to get the marks but you know I like learning Italian.
Brandy Haran: Do you speak Italian now, still?
Simon Pampena: Yeah, I still speak Italian, yeah.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: Do you speak Italian?
Brandy Haran: No, I tried to be smart and reply with no in Italian and I realized I don't even know how to say no in Italian. (laughs)
Simon Pampena: (laughs) Tutti benvenuti.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) I've got no idea.
Simon Pampena: So we did as part of Italian culture, theater is a big part of Italian culture and history and so we did an Italian play. My Italian teacher wrote it and it was kind of a send up of Australian Italian weddings, so it was very kind of, classic kind of ethnic kind of comedy where it's like…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: Groups come from different countries and they try and hold onto their culture and they… and it's kind of laughing at that sort of thing.
Brandy Haran: So my Big Fat Greek Wedding before that was a thing.
Simon Pampena: That's what it is. Yeah. So it was my Big Fat Greek Wedding Australian style.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: Very similar. So I played the mother of the bride.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: And I basically channeled my hysterical auntie and…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: All these kind of incredible personalities, you know, from Southern Italy.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And I just channeled it, it was effortless, it was like I just existed and just… it would just flow through me.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: Like electricity and that was shocking to me.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: And I remember it like my mum like… laughing to the point of tears but at the same time straight after she was like, okay, well you have to forget that.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Because, there's no way my son is gonna go and become unemployed, you know, trying to make it in Hollywood.
Brandy Haran: You think that gave you the taste though? That gave you… that was your gateway drug?
Simon Pampena: But once you experience something like that and performers will understand, as soon as something like that happens you can never go back.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Because it was like magic. It was just like, oh my… what just happened?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But I can remember specifically before that, 'cause my favorite TV show was a show called Beyond 2000.
Brandy Haran: Oh Yeah! (pause) Now you're talking.
Simon Pampena: Yeah, Beyond 2000, like it made… I was very easy to shop for at Christmas 'cause like they always bought me the Beyond 2000 merch.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Simon Pampena: So I've still got them.
Brandy Haran: This was a show in Australian where it was like a sort of a magazine style show where there's a series of reports about technology and what the future's gonna be like, you know, look at this new thing it's called a computer printer and things like, yeah.
Simon Pampena: And it was called Towards 2000, beforehand, that was the previous show.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: On the ABC again and you can actually find online there's like, they introduce this amazing thing called the CD.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: But anyway, yeah there was this show called Beyond 2000 and I was so into like every week. There was a core of really hardcore nerd friends. Paul was especially big, he's like an aeronautical engineer now. But we would both just like talk about it and talk about what they found. 'Cause I was thinking about this just recently, I remember thinking I can do this. And it was a really interesting like, I don't know if you had this happen in your life where it's like you see someone do something and you go, oh I can do that. And without having actually tried it, it was this really weird thing. And that's before I performed, it was just this sort of like, oh these people are talking about science and they're telling people about science and it's like I can do that. And it was one of those things which… I dunno it was really clear.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: Did you get into the University of Adelaide?
Simon Pampena: Yeah, yeah, I did. Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Doing the Bachelor of Science?
Simon Pampena: Yes, I did. Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: But yeah the weird thing that happened was… when I got to Adelaide Uni, you know, life started. Like I didn't have a social life beforehand. I was such a nerd and just like didn't go to parties or anything, only in year 12 I started going to parties. But I'm made up for it (laughs)…
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: …in my first year of uni.
Brandy Haran: Right. (chuckles)
Simon Pampena: And one of the things that happened was, is like I didn't study very much, I got terrible marks in my subjects.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: Which is… I'm still kind of lament now 'cause it's like I wasted time but I mean… I was learning stuff that I… it's been invaluable after university which was really kind of becoming a social person. Which I think a lot of nerds go through.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But basically the weird thing that happened was that when I started doing physics and I was like, yeah okay so, you know we had some pretty amazing people in mathematical physics, we had a guy called Szekeres who was the son of a famous mathematician, Szekeres, who we actually did a video on one of his theorems, Szekeres and Erdös. And so he was like… he found like asymmetrical solutions to general relativity, like… amazing stuff. And he was the most sociable out of all of them. So…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: What I found was it's like… the people that I wanted to join, I didn't wanna be, like they were just too nerdy for me. And there was no like…
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: …conversation, I didn't see them talking to one another. I didn't see them joking, I didn't see them like interacting. They just were all holed up in their rooms. And so what I found was, it's like, I kind of lost heart, I was like, oh you know, I wanna find people that, you know, are into like talking and ideas and excitement and I found (laughs) the humanities people, maybe because they didn't have as many contact hours, it's like they were up for that.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: So, I ended up kind of being a little bit lost, 'cause it's like I still loved maths and physics, I just didn't feel like I belonged.
Brandy Haran: Simon, do you think you had that right? Because that feels to me like a stereotype that a lot of popularizers of mathematics and physics and that try to overcome, you know? Oh, no we're not nerdy people, it's a fun life as well.
Simon Pampena: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: And you're kind of now reenforcing that stereotype, that people think, oh I don't wanna be a mathematician, they're all nerds. And you're kind of saying, that was the impression you got when you started surrounding yourself with them.
Simon Pampena: Now but this is the thing is that, it's all changed. So…
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: If I went to uni now, it's completely different.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Simon Pampena: Or maybe I was just very sensitive to it. Maybe that's probably what it is, like if I'm gonna get a little bit…
Brandy Haran: Hmm?
Simon Pampena: …kind of self reflective. Maybe I just was like, no, I probably amplified certain aspects.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: I definitely was more attracted to hanging out with the humanities people.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: So it's like anyone who was like, you know, wanting to talk and wanting to communicate, that's what I was like craving. I was all filled with maths and physics so I didn't really need (laughs) I didn't need any more of that. Like I didn't even study for my astronomy exam, my first year astronomy exam.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: 'Cause I'd been like prepping it for, for five years.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: So it was definitely the humanities was like, that's what I found that I… but then it was like what job do I do? Like I had no idea.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: 'Cause it's like… you know… do I just become a teacher? Is that my calling? What is it?
Brandy Haran: So what is university for you, Simon? Is it sitting in maths and physics lectures and then going to the pub with the art students?
Simon Pampena: Brady, it wasn't even that, I mean I'd… (laughs) like in my first couple of years I wasn't even going to lectures. I was just… just socializing.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: Terrible. But… I made up for it big time, so… probably after first year, second year, I started… I just pulled my socks up and I studied really hard.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: And what was great was by that stage I found that the maths got really interesting. Like, pure maths gets really interesting in third year of a bachelor, like you start learning about group theory, you start doing real analysis, topology.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: Like it gets really exciting.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: (laughs) 'Cause what happened as well it was like, I had sort of lost some of my chops, I had been like this A grade student, like really really good and then it's kinda like I sort of was out of practice.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: 'Cause I was kind of, you know, I wasn't a great student, but that was really good because then I can sympathize with people who struggle with maths, because it's like I had to struggle to get back on top, so… it kinda works out.
Brandy Haran: Hmm. Hmm.
Simon Pampena: I ended up moving to Melbourne, where I still am.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: And then that's when I did pure maths and I found a bunch of people who… are pretty much like… some of the best maths people I've ever met.
Brandy Haran: Are you still at university at this point, Simon? Like did you do like a further qualification or…?
Simon Pampena: Yeah well I moved to Melbourne Uni.
Brandy Haran: So you moved like mid degree, did you? So you sort of transferred your degree?
Simon Pampena: No, no. I had finished by Bachelor…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: …but because Melbourne University is… specializes in low dimensional topology, so lots of knot theory…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: I had to… and that wasn't the Adelaide University speciality so I had to kind of do extra undergraduate subjects.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Simon Pampena: Which they called a postgraduate diploma.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And at the same time I did honors.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Simon Pampena: Which I… I did with a crazy Polish mathematician.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: Who I'd got the feeling he hated me but I think that was just the way he showed affection.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Okay. (laughs) What happens then? How do you kind of start a career?
Simon Pampena: It was gonna be more study, so I ended up, you know, kind of like doing Masters and all in pure mathematics.
Brandy Haran: Hmm
Simon Pampena: Like, pure maths I absolutely love but it really… it can really do your head in. Like when you're doing it all the time, you know, like one of the reasons why people who are like mathematicians are not very social is 'cause your brain is absolutely sometimes fixated on a problem and you can't think outside of what your brain is absolutely filled with.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: And for me that was like a bit of a problem 'cause it's like I need to be social. I need to communicate and this is… my head was fill of… my thesis was on the Banach–Tarski Paradox.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: Which is a nutso theorem and you know I decided to throw in understanding Zorn's Lemma at the same time which is another nutso result. So it was like I was just in this world of pure psychedelic abstraction. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: So I had to pull away from it, like just going into more of that wasn't… I just I think I'm gonna have some sort of nervous breakdown. So yeah, so I ended up getting a job and I ended up working as a statistician which, (laughs) I, you know… I don't think… I think I did one subject in statistics, maybe Statistics 1, but nobody asked.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: I just had this first class, you know, (laughs) honors degree and I started forecasting wine sales for Foster's Wine Estates.
Brandy Haran: What kind of factors go into forecasting wine sales?
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Like obviously you can look at what's been sold before but are you like looking at things like… weather or demographics or what kind of inputs are going into that? That sounds fascinating.
Simon Pampena: Yeah and it was! It was really fascinating yeah. And I mean like if I didn't have all this stuff that I was doing I think I would've been very happy to keep doing it.
Brandy Haran: Hmm!
Simon Pampena: It wasn't using all that other stuff like that's… (sighs) I think I was actually sold on that when I started. It's like, you know, we're going to bring in (sighs) you know, like economic data and forecasting, you know, like…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: …whether you know they'll sell more sparkles or whatever but…
Brandy Haran: You're gonna be the person who finds like the Riemann Hypothesis of selling wine and find this incredible sweet spot of how to sell…
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …a zillion bottle of wine in a day or something 'cause of some code you cracked. (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Well it was actually it was all about… so my job was all about saving money. So it was all about streamlining production.
Brandy Haran: Oh alright.
Simon Pampena: Yeah. So it was not as (sighs) it's not as sexy as all that.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: But I mean it was the alcohol industry so that was like…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: …incredible. Like one of our meeting rooms was the bar.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: Where it was all free booze.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Which sounds great but it's not when you're, you know, your boss kind of bails you up at the end of the day.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: And you're kind of feeling a bit weak because (laughs) you've had a few beers.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: I mean basically I was babysitting a statistical software package and I had to tune models. It was just all about getting like the right R squared, so you're trying to kind of get these models which are forecasting at the right level and you kind of link safety stock to…
Brandy Haran: Ahh.
Simon Pampena: …you confidence intervals and…
Brandy Haran: So it's not like you'd say, quick, ship four hundred crates to South Yarra there's about to be a major run on white wine, I can sense it! (laughs)
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I've got the data! (laughs)
Simon Pampena: I'm sure that's what the people who hired me wanted.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But that was never gonna happen.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Simon Pampena: One of the things that actually happened was I had to start… like this wasn't actually in the job description but I actually had to start communicating mathematics or statistics which I know some people don't accept it but it is part of mathematics. I had to start communicating that to people who, you know, like… left… only had a high school qualifications.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: So, the people I was like working for, these sales people, who were like fighters really.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: And they wanted to like carve up, you know, the Melbourne wine buying public into like these artificial territories. It's like we're gonna put these three suburbs together and you're gonna forecast that. And I'm trying to go, no, that's not how forecasting works.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: You need to look at the total. And I was… and I found myself having to like run these presentations where, you know, it's kind of like a Youtube video, you gotta make it as interesting as possible and you've…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: …gotta stop people from like hitting the kill switch as soon as it gets boring. And I found that that was a big part of the job.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: But the maths part was… like I think I could've made it… if I had more time, I could've made it more interesting but it was mostly just the software was doing most of the job and I just had to understand what the software was doing.
Brandy Haran: Okay, well keep me going on the path then. I feel like we're still a long way form where we are now. How do you suddenly become this math superstar of Australia?
Simon Pampena: So the other thing I was interested is in performing.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: And so finally finally finally I could not ignore this performing bug that I had inside.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And I had to go on stage so I did the thing called Raw Comedy, which is a big thing in Australia, it's kind of run by the Melbourne Comedy Festival, which kind of like is the Edinburgh Festival, it's a big one.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: Yeah I did this kind of Raw Comedy, which was all about undiscovered talent and it was my first time on stage for ten years since that performance I did in year 12.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And so I had like, so much pent up energy and like…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: I just was bursting so I just remember like giving this performance which was incredible, it was just this incredible performance.
Brandy Haran: Was it math related, Simon? Or was it just like general comedy or…?
Simon Pampena: No it wasn't. No. It was (laughs) pretty (laughs) it's not for this podcast, I don't think.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Simon Pampena: But anyway (laughs) so yeah…
Brandy Haran: It was adult humor.
Simon Pampena: Yeah it was definitely adult humor of a time. I think what was great about it was like I reconnected with something that I knew was there. But it was good.
It was really good. And all my friends came along and after that it's like oh, I was like, I won the night, it was like I won this heat.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And it was all kind of like too much and I was overwhelmed. And I had to do the next heat and then I kind of bombed. I was a little… I was like, you know, I was like too much. So, after that I spent some time kind of like, you know, kind of forgetting about it and kind of getting used to the idea of performing.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: But I did have this sort of sense that if you want to be a really great performer you have to do something new or you have to find something very distinctive. You have to find your own voice.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And I kind of studied someone like, you know, Steve Martin was like when he was doing his stand-up back in the Seventies he was incredible but he was doing silly when everyone else was doing political stuff.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: And I kind of thought, oh that's how you do it, it's like…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: You work on your skills, but I thought… well I'm into maths so I'm gonna try to put maths and comedy together.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: And this is going back to 2003.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: So I was like, you know, that's what I'm gonna do and (sighs) nobody was with me like…
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (chuckles)
Simon Pampena: My girlfriend started crying…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: …and she said you're gonna fail.
Brandy Haran: What she was… like 'cause you're like, I'm gonna quit my job and become a maths comedian and she's like oh no I'm never gonna eat again?
Simon Pampena: No it wasn't even that. She just thought I was just gonna like embarrass myself.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: And she was like crying for my own pain and her reflected pain.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: So, you know, it was like nobody believed that I could do it and so, I ended up getting really angry and it was after like my first year, my second year I did something, then my third year, it was my third time doing Raw Comedy, and that was 2004, and yeah, and I did this thing called the Angry Mathematician that wasn't my name, it kind of that's what it was. And I was just was this ranting like maniacal kind of mathematician who would just scream at the audience and kind of tell them that they'd lost their mathematical souls and it was very funny but it was like this energy. It was this energy and this kind of like nobody knew what was happening. Nobody knew what I was gonna do next including myself.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: There was like one maths joke at the end but it wasn't like… it was just more a performance.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But that got me all the way to the state final.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: So that was a huge… it was like I was one of ten people in Victoria which is the number one place for doing comedy in the country.
Brandy Haran: Mhm.
Simon Pampena: And I kind of dropped out of that, like, again it was just too much, I couldn't handle other performers like jealousy or just that energy, I just was like, man this is weird, like it's so different to what I was used to. But after that that's when I realized that I couldn't ignore this thing and so that's when I did my first comedy festival show.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: Which was called the Angry Mathematician.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And what was incredible now was like I can see what I did back then kind of by accident is what I've repeated over and over again, it's like, I had an idea and I made it work, and people who were also talented wanted to join forces. So I had like a director who wanted to direct me and I had like a publicist who wanted to, you know…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: So this thing just happened. And I just kind of rode it.
Brandy Haran: Are you still working in the wine industry at this stage? Like at what point do you…
Simon Pampena: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: …like you know, let go of the… the safety of a normal paying job?
Simon Pampena: So I did that first comedy festival show in 2005 and it wasn't until 2009 because basically I didn't go to drama school, I went to Melbourne Comedy Festival.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: So that was my drama school.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: So I had three years of performing and it was the best education for me in terms of theatrical training.
Brandy Haran: Simon reading between the lines it sounds like, you know, you had some bad shows, you had some duds as you were learning along the way, why did that not deter you? Why did you keep getting up to get punched in the face again and again? Like, you obviously had some belief you were on the right track.
Simon Pampena: (laughs) That's a great question. I think performing is weird because when it's going really well you're not thinking, you're just experiencing it. And so it took me a long time to work out how I was doing it. And, how it was going wrong. The way I've explained it to people, it's like… if you wanna learn how to play the guitar, you can't think about playing the guitar, you actually have to hold the guitar in your hand and use your hands to strum it to learn how to play.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: And so, learning how to do comedy is learning how to play the audience and you have to be in front of an audience to do that. But, a guitar isn't gonna make you feel small and worthless and…
Brandy Haran: (chuckles)
Simon Pampena: …hate yourself.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But an audience is very good at that.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Simon Pampena: (laughs) So for example the first time I performed was a magical night, that first performance in Raw Comedy.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: I had no idea how I did it. I had no idea.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: It just was pure energy coursing through my veins.
Brandy Haran: I think it must be like golf. The first time I ever hit a golf ball with a driver by fluke…
Simon Pampena: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: I hit it beautifully and it went really straight and far and I though, that felt great this is amazing. And I've probably hit a hundred thousand golf shots since that have all been terrible. But that first one's (chuckles) just kept me going.
Simon Pampena: Yeah, I've since discovered (sighs) in my long life of, you know, researching things, it's like flow and its sum.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: You know being in the zone, but yeah it's a lot to do with kind of activating your brain and connecting everything together.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: Yeah I definitely had plenty of gigs that didn't work. Sometimes it's not your fault, it's just the audience, you know, your publicist comps it with a bunch of people who hate mathematics, that's a really hard gig to, you know, kind of win people over.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But, I do remember at one point after my third comedy festival I sort of said to myself, I think I was walking around Fed Square with my girlfriend and it was like I just was thinking maybe you're not good at this, maybe you just have to give up. And I remember clearly thinking that to myself in the same way that I thought, you know, when I was younger like, oh you could be on (laughs) Beyond 2000.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: This voice came through but at the same time I thought well, I just couldn't imagine given up. Like I'd rather go down in flames like I just thought there's no way I could forgive myself for stopping.
Brandy Haran: Is that a stubbornness or is that a kind of just, you know, a mindset of give it a go? Or is it like a lack of shame?
Simon Pampena: Well I don't know if I had shame.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: I was deeply insecure about performing.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But that's 'cause I'm a perfectionist, it was like anything that went wrong I would be like, oh no! What it was is that, you know, there were moments of absolute bliss on stage.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: It was just pure connection. I didn't know what I was gonna say next and I just open my mouth and I said things and once that happens it's like even if there's lots of bad shows, that will happen again, and I just want that to happen again. So I suppose it's like the work itself ended up being the thing that pulled me through.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But I have to say anyone who wants to be a performer or definitely wants to do science communication 'cause we need lots of good performers doing science communication, is that it really really comes down to experience and that's the thing that I gave myself by not stopping was just… I just ended up accumulating enough experience that I started finally working out what was going on and I finally got consistently good, which is what you need.
Brandy Haran: Now tell me how does this become your job, Simon? How do you break the shackles of wine statistics?
Simon Pampena: That's when the other part of being good at this sort of job is the hustle. And so I ended up somehow getting into a cocktail party at the ABC in Sydney. I flew there one night, came back the next day.
Brandy Haran: What you flew there with the intent of getting into this cocktail party?
Simon Pampena: A friend of mine was a like a biomedical engineering and he had won an award and he was at a science mixer.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: And they had a bunch of people from Catalyst which is the number one science program in Australia.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And so he said come along there'll be Catalyst people there. So… I just went along and I met all these people and…
Brandy Haran: So you flew to Sydney for one night just to the intent of… semi-crashing the party and networking?
Simon Pampena: Yeah. If I did it now it'd be a tax write off. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Yeah but that's what I did I just… I just went there and…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: You know, Brady, I don't even know why. I mean like I think people like me and you do things like that, I don't know what was driving me.
Brandy Haran: Oh, you speak for yourself, Buddy. (laughs)
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I wouldn't fly to another city to crash a party.
Simon Pampena: No, I wasn't invited!
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: I was his plus one, but, you know…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Yeah. So that was a really important event and then a woman named Frankie Lee who ran ABC Science Events, so the live arm of the ABC science thing, so not the TV programs or the radio.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: She was on the lookout for good science content for live shows.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: So she flew down to my show the second year I think I did it.
Brandy Haran: Mhm.
Simon Pampena: And… that's when I knew that I was a performer because… I knew she was in the audience, she didn't really talk to me very much before we got started. I knew that this was my kind of big break. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: In Science Communication. And that night was amazing.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: And so I kind of really like because everything was on the line and it was like so kind of like charged.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: After that she was like okay you can do it, and then it took like maybe two years… well she did something with me the next year but by the second year I'd asked her again, 'cause we were like friends and she was like a really big supporter of mine.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And that's when I said, can I get a grant for National Science Week?
Which is the one week in the year in Australia which is like, they do lots of science events in August.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And she said absolutely and she got me a touring grant.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: Which I could not believe, like it was twenty grand and it was like what! And I was like, are you sure? And she was like, of course!
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And so she put me in touch with like all these people at universities in Tassie, in Darwin, in like all over the place.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And, I did that tour in August 2008, I was not the same person when I came back. So, that was the huge break for me because I took my show to audiences that actually wanted to see science content. So it was the first time (laughs) I was like I wasn't part of a comedy festival where it was like people who are taking a punt on some weird show. It's like I had rooms full of like… science and maths lovers. And we just connected. It was like we found each other.
(gentle violin music)
Simon Pampena: So four months after that seminal kind of tour I was doing a major project at Foster's, I had to go overseas and like train people to do my job.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And at the same time I had this other grant for this massive… another massive show.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And I hadn't even written that, so that's when I left my job. That's when I went professional.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Simon Pampena: And I thought, oh no, like, and this was just at the, you know, like global financial crisis, I told my mum, I'm leaving my job, she started crying, she said, sorry Simon, I have to call you back. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: And… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: It was amazing, it was this amazing thing. But yeah it was like one of the… I knew this was one of the biggest decisions in my life where, it's like I kinda had this idea where it was like, in like there were two rivers in your life, like I was on one river which was like corporate and like houses and wealth and that sort of thing.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And then I had this other life and I felt this kind of sensation that these two rivers were at their closet point but they were never going to actually intersect. So I had to like pick up my canoe and go through the wilderness and put it in this other river.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: If I was ever gonna make this happen.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And I'm so happy I did because a week later I was made the Australian Numeracy Ambassador.
Brandy Haran: What is that?
Simon Pampena: So back then it was the Federal Education Department in Australian had kind of like a National Science Week but it was for kids at school.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: And it was focusing on literacy and numeracy and so they had two ambassadors, one a literacy ambassador and one a numeracy ambassador and I was like the best candidate at that time…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: …to promote numeracy. So yeah, I had this huge thing and at that time it was Julia Gillard was in charge of Education.
Brandy Haran: Right this is a future Prime Minister of Australia.
Simon Pampena: Like that was her year, like everyone was talking about Julia Gillard and everyone was, the media was all over it and I was her ambassador for numeracy.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: And so I ended up performing for her during this National Literacy and Numeracy week, which again was a huge event. That was that August, sorry September. And she personally wrote me a letter and said, to make me again the Numeracy Ambassador which hadn't've happened before.
Brandy Haran: That's such a fancy job title, Australian Numeracy Ambassador.
Simon Pampena: Well what it did was it just kinda gave me, it was like a certificate of authenticity. So with that, I could go to schools all over the country and just go, oh I'm the Australian Numeracy Ambassador, what's that? Oh, I promote numeracy.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: But really what it did was, people just took punt on me.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: And that's all I needed because as soon as I did my shows they could see that, okay this guy connects with the kids and he's… 'cause I'd, you know, I'd spent years in front of people who didn't want to listen to me…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: …like and I was trying to make them laugh so by the time I got to kids this was like… this is amazing.
Brandy Haran: Does it also give you like diplomatic immunity from like parking tickets and stuff when you're abroad?
Simon Pampena: Becoming an ambassador?
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: …a couple of times I did put ambassador on the…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: …the ticket when you have to come back into the country. It's like…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: …I'm an ambassador.
Brandy Haran: Oh you get to go through that channel and don't have to line for your passport?
Simon Pampena: (laughs) Yeah that's right! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Just get through on the VIP.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: It just gave me a great opportunity to kinda get out there and let people give me a go and also it was, you know, when it comes to communication having like a three word bio was pretty amazing. Australian Numeracy Ambassador.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And that sorta says everything.
Brandy Haran: What do you do now? How do you describe your job now? How do you eat?
Simon Pampena: Well… I'm a professional science communicator.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: So I do work (sighs) man I've done so many things, so I've… live shows have been a big part of what I do…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: …which has been a bit difficult this year, 2020. So there's been… a lot of kind of movement around with that.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: So, lots of live shows moving into kind of mathematician in residence.
That's the next thing which is gonna be happening soon in the next couple of months. So yeah, kind of like getting really stuck into engagement, it's all about engagement but now it's… I've been doing it for so long it's kind of like really clicking into the curriculum. So we're trying to advance STEM, we're trying to get kids engaged and really my job for that education part is really about connecting the dots for people, and that's a huge need. So my money comes from this huge need of like in Australia and in the UK and all over the world about getting students into STEM. That's really my job. So I've got my comedy which is kind of like the icebreaker. That's the pointy bit that kind of gets people…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: …you know, kind of like get their attention and then after that I've developed workshops, I do moderation, I do panels.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: I flew to Brazil in 2018… for the International Congress of Mathematicians where like I was just asked by someone who'd seen the Numberphile videos to just be the moderator for a panel on mathematical engagement. So a mixture of writing and performing and workshops and…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: (chuckles) and engagement.
Brandy Haran: Simon, a lot of people you might talk to about public engagement with mathematics will talk about a lot of altruistic things like I think mathematics is so important for the future of humanity and I want to progress it and inspire the mathematicians of tomorrow.
Simon Pampena: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: But a lot of the time talking to you maybe you're just being brutally honest, but a lot more of it is… I love it when people laugh at me. I love it when people applaud. It seems a lot of your drive is coming just like a more base just love of performance. You know?
Simon Pampena: Well, that's probably where I let myself down because all this maths stuff is so innate. I don't mean to make that sound like I'm big noting myself but I mean, my relationship with mathematics is kind of so kind of old and like I was doing this sort of thing when I was a kid explaining mathematics to people and because I would look at their faces and see when they were getting bored I'd change things up. I mean, I'd been practicing this, you know, all my life and so… I get really excited about doing a good performance and making those connections but all the maths stuff, I mean, I should talk about that more 'cause really the most… kind of necessary thing and the most interesting thing to a lot of people who are outside of mathematics. It's like how do you engage people with mathematics. And it's like, well, for me, it's hard work but it flows because I love mathematics, so I've done so much of it, I understand how it works, I understand how it's put together, there's a whole bunch of math I don't know. I don't pretend to know everything, of course. But when it comes to talking to someone who doesn't understand it, that's when this thing comes out of me, like I engage and I connect and I try and see, you know, I have like a feedback loop with one person or an audience.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: But I mean for me it's the performance side of thing is the thing that I've really enjoyed developing.
Brandy Haran: The math thing almost goes without saying for you it seems, like, you know? Of course I love talking about mathematics to people.
Simon Pampena: I suppose. Well, I mean like, you know… I mean I've done a lot of content, right? And the stuff that you and I have done, what's really interesting is that people have asked me, you know, like how much preparation goes into, you know, the Numberphile videos, and it's really interesting 'cause it's like I've spent… or the stuff I did for Discovery, you know, I'd be… working for days preparing that stuff.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: But with you and me, it just happened live. So I prepared what I was gonna talk about, but I didn't prepare what I was gonna say, like that just all came out.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And I think what's… really important about that is the fact that it's really good because it is so flowing. I think science communication has a problem where lots and lots of smart people are in science communication but they don't have necessarily that experience of flow and communication and making things really watchable and really engrossing and like the idea of stopping doesn't even enter your head, but… if you're reading a paper or like, you know, you're reading some research sometimes you… you have to stop and have a coffee because it's just not written for a human being. It's written for some sort of Turing machine to go through step by step. So what we've done on Numberphile is the opposite, it's like, we've made maths for humans and… that's what I think now more and more in my career, that's what I need to do, I need to part of that process of making more humans doing maths and humans talking about maths rather than, you know, list of axioms and like, you need to know this before you know this before you know this, and it's like, yeah… that's not how we work, you know? Don't bury the lede, start with the most important thing.
Brandy Haran: You've talked a bit today about how performing to an unreceptive audience that hates mathematics can be discouraging and the pleasure you'll get from then performing to a receptive audience that appreciate mathematics.
Simon Pampena: Or winning over a bad audience as well. (chuckles) That's pretty amazing.
Brandy Haran: How do you reconcile that? Preaching to the choir, the ease of having a rapport with an audience that already appreciates mathematics to, you know, are there uncrackable nuts?
Simon Pampena: A younger version of me would be like, I can crack any nut.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: But in actual fact, I can crack them but you can't crack people wide open unless they want to be (chuckles) cracked wide open.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: But definitely you can get through to people and so for me the whole joy of performing and this is in this time now of the coronavirus it's like I'm missing doing that live performance, is that a performance is a two way street. It's like, for me at least as my improvisation chops and what I get out of it is, I'm telling my material to the audience and I'm getting a response and then that's changing what I'm saying, even if it's scripted, it changes your intonation, it changes your motivation, and there's this thing going on. It's what we feel when, it's like, oh this is really authentic. It's like it's moving too fast to be faked and so what I find is, is that when I get into that kind of zone even if it's a tough audience, if I'm somehow connecting to them, it's like this absolute rush of like… you know, energy, you know? It's like this… wow! And then I separate… like I'm not longer conscious of myself as a person it's like I'm just this performer. So like that can be incredible and so at the end of it if I can get people, like some of the best experience I've ever had was a lady came up to me after a show in Hobart once and she said, and she actually had tears in her eyes, I'm not making this up, I've got a photo, and she said my father was a mathematician and he always lamented that he had a daughter who never understand mathematics but this is the first time I've understood Pythagoras' Theorem, 'cause of your show.
Brandy Haran: Wow.
Simon Pampena: I do an explanation of Pythagoras' Theorem which involves like a Hollywood trailer.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: Anyway I won't go into too much, but it's like it's very engaging.
Brandy Haran: And then you took a photo of this crying woman.
Simon Pampena: Yeah of course! I had to document.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: My god! Tears, Brady! Tears!
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: That's what we do it for! We wanna move people!
Brandy Haran: You must see a lot of science communication by other people, whether they're kind of professionals or wannabe professionals, or just scientists and mathematicians who are doing a bit of outreach on the side.
Simon Pampena: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: What do you think they do wrong the most?
Simon Pampena: The checklist, you've gotta put the checklist away. And that's really hard. So whatever checklist you've got about, you gotta get to this point, this point and this point, or you know, you've gotta try and explain this whole concept, I find that with science communication it's like just pick one thing and say it well. Like if you can just get one thing across to an audience or a person and it really engages and really kind of they get it… that's your job, because with that kernel of knowledge comes a change in perception about their relationship with science.
What I feel like I've got is a good sense of is like I really… I really empathize with my audience and I always think about where they're at. So I always think, okay, what does audience know? If I'm speaking to like undergraduates in mathematics, okay they know what the direct function is, right? That's the level they're at. If I'm talking to a bunch of just general public and they're just mums and dads, okay they're sleep deprived, they don't know really know much, the kids are looking at me wild eyed and going look at the guy with the crazy hair. So, what do they know? How am I gonna engage them? Maybe just talking about prime numbers and doing something interesting is going to get people on board, so… where I think people in science communication it's like the… most of the job is just understanding your audience. You've gotta know your stuff and you gotta know your stuff back to front and you've gotta know it so, you're not thinking about it, and then the big job is who am I talking to. Which is all kind of the dramatic arts, it's like that's what drama is all about and performing like theatrical performing and songwriting is all about, you know, feelings and emotions which don't really kind of sit with science communication but I feel as though it's central to really good science communication. 'Cause feeling comes through and feeling is what you need as foundation before you can put any knowledge on top.
Brandy Haran: Early in our conversation you were telling me about when you were a boy wanting to make a breakthrough, wanting to prove something in the theoretical realm that hadn't been proven before and even writing such a proof.
Simon Pampena: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: However ill conceived that may have been.
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: That's quite unusual for someone so young…
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …to already be thinking that way… you know that this is how mathematics works. This is how you become great in the world of mathematics and physics. And yet you haven't gone down that path, rather than being a hero of science and mathematics you've become someone who tells the story of the heroes.
Simon Pampena: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Do you ever wish you'd gone that other path? That other river? That we were making videos about the Pampena Theorem?
Simon Pampena: (laughs) There was no other river.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: That's the problem. I think I've been a successful scientist because I've looked at the facts. And the facts that were presented to me were that I wasn't a fantastic research mathematician. For me to actually get new mathematics, it was gonna be really hard work and I… worked closely when I was at uni I met people like John Hii, the guy that showed me the tennis ball, we did that Tennis Ball Theorem video.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: Like he is amazing. And he could think mathematically in a way that I couldn't. I was always inspired by the, you know, the story of Johann Kepler, where it's like, he saw the poetry in the universe and he tried to create a universe where the solar system was made out of platonic solids, but the evidence presented to him told him that he wasn't and then he just made them into ellipses and his heart was broken but he actually created the science that we still use today.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: That was inspirational, 'cause I thought wow that's… that's some gangster stuff, you know, he like broke his own heart to get to answer, to the truth.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: And for me it's like, I had to admit to myself that like I just was… it was gonna be an absolute slog for me to do great mathematics. Because I'd met people who were… it was obvious they were gonna do great mathematics and there was a difference between us.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Simon Pampena: But what I did find I could understand it and I could understand it in a way that was like I sort of felt… I've heard of other people talk about this, I'm dumb, which is not true, but it's like you know, like I struggle to try and understand something but once I understand something, I can communicate it to someone else and I'm good at that and that's what I recognized. There was that river. There's no river to me being a research mathematical (laughs) not in this lifetime. That was like… there was like… it's a tributary and it's not the way.
Brandy Haran: Would you swap it? Do you envy those people? If you had that divine people to swap your performance abilities and life you've had to be Terry Tao?
Simon Pampena: Wow. (sighs) I mean… there's a lot of human experiences, you know? And it would be amazing to be able to be in Terry Tao's brain and be able to see mathematics the way he does. The way my brain overheated with trying to understand Banach–Tarski Paradox and writing a thesis on it, I can only just kind of like maybe have a pale facsimile kind of appreciation of what Terry Tao must go through. I mean I would love to have that, but I am actually really very very happy with my own little joyful mathematical discoveries (laugh) so you know like if I do an International Maths Olympics problem and that's been set by someone who's, you know, way above my level, and I get it, I can see the structure and I get… I see what the whole questions about, I mean I wouldn't swap that for anything, even though that's probably the feeling Terry Tao has when he solves like an amazing like unsolved theorem. (chuckles) I don't have to solve new maths, I just wanna be able to have that feeling and have that realization even if it's something that's been discovered a thousand times before, I don't care.
Brandy Haran: Well, Simon, I don't know when I'm gonna get to see you again and film in person for Numberphile. At the moment it feels like it's a million years away, as we're locked in our houses on opposite sides of the world.
Simon Pampena: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: I hope its not too long 'cause it's always really good fun for me and your videos are always super popular on Numberphile so let's do it again… soon? Hopefully.
Simon Pampena: I've got some good ideas too.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Simon Pampena: Oh, jeez I got some good ideas.
Brandy Haran: (sighs) Oh, don't tease me!
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Simon Pampena: Some really good ideas.
Brandy Haran: Ah!
Simon Pampena: But anyway, yes, we'll have to wait… well you know maybe if you come down to Australia…
Brandy Haran: I was scheduled to come before the pandemic.
Simon Pampena: Oh.
Brandy Haran: I was over. I was there. I was gonna be there, it was on.
Simon Pampena: It's a great place to ride out 2020.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: We'll see.
Simon Pampena: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I have given some thought to coming over for a few weeks but we'll see. If I do I'll come over to Melbourne and…
Simon Pampena: No, no, no, no! We should go to Adelaide.
(gentle music fades in)
Brandy Haran: Adelaide?
(music continues)
Simon Pampena: And we should film ourselves going to the big rocking horse.
Brandy Haran: (gasps) Ah Yeah!
(music continues)
Simon Pampena: Going to the beach!
Brandy Haran: We'll do a video about spheres about the Mall's Balls.
(music continues)
Simon Pampena: There you go!
Brandy Haran: Yeah!
Simon Pampena: Touching… I will do a 3D version of Epic Circles.
(music fades up)
Brandy Haran: Yeah? (laughs)
Simon Pampena: It'll be Epic Spheres.
(music fades up and continues)
Brandy Haran: That's all from us today, our thanks to Simon and until we get to make more videos together, I will link to some of his work and other material in the show notes, please do have a look. (music continues) I'm Brady Haran, you've been listening to the Numberphile podcast, and if you'd like to help us make more episodes please do consider supporting us on Patreon, the address is
⁂
(gentle piano music)
Brady Haran: Today I'm talking to Dr. Katie Steckles, a mainstay of the UK maths communication scene. Katie's involved in more projects than I could possibly name. Numberphile viewers may recognize her from videos about Rubik's Cubes, Pancake Numbers, the Poincaré Conjecture, and Langton's Ant, plus a bunch of others. (chuckles) Her journey's been an interesting one full of lots of useful lessons, but beware there may be pirates ahead.
(gentle violin music)
Brandy Haran: Katie, I was looking at your website earlier this morning. You do so many things.
Katie Steckles: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: You have your fingers in so many pies. What do you put on like a passport form when you've gotta put like occupation?
Katie Steckles: Uh… I tend to just put mathematician.
Brandy Haran: Mathematician?
Katie Steckles: Yeah and hope nobody asks any further questions. (laugh) I guess, I mean there's probably some people who would claim that I'm not really allowed to call myself a mathematician because I'm not actively doing research in maths at a university but I kind of feel like it's more a state of mind… (laughs) than a job title. So, you know, if you think like a mathematician then you are a mathematician. I dunno.
Brandy Haran: What do you think your family says, like at Christmas gatherings when someone says, oh what's Katie doing these days? How do you think, you know, they would describe your job?
Katie Steckles: I have no idea. (laughs) You could sort of describe me as a presenter I guess because like most of the work that I do and get paid for is kind of communicating presenting maths.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: But I guess I'm very keen to present myself as being a mathematician 'cause if I stand up in front of a room full of people and say, I'm a mathematician, if I can do something to kind of nudge their perception of what a mathematician is or what a mathematician looks like… I'd much rather do that and if I stand up and I'm just another person who's like a teacher, you know that doesn't necessarily help with that sort of stereotype, so…
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Well alright let me decide if you're a mathematician.
Katie Steckles: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …by hearing a little bit more of your story. Let's go to the very beginning.
Where were you born and were you born into a very mathematical family?
Katie Steckles: I'm not… I don't know actually. I think, I mean it was definitely a very kind of supportive and… you know, pro-learning family, I guess, so… both my parents had the willingness to learn and go to school and very kind of grateful for the opportunity to go to school, like my mum did the exam and got into the local grammar school and was over the moon with herself.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: And they both actually work in the NHS, or worked, they're both retired now.
Brandy Haran: Right?
Katie Steckles: So my mum was an occupational therapist, did a big long sort of training for that and my dad was a chiropodist, who also had previously worked as a technical illustrator and towards the end of his career he went into sort of IT within the NHS type stuff.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: So there was always a very supportive home environment with like my dad buying far too many computers and leaving them lying around and my mum studied, I think while we were kids, she kind of stopped working in order to have kids but then just did an Open University degree in her spare time. (laughs) So she kind of continued learning and training so it was always that kind of vibe.
Brandy Haran: And where abouts is this? Is this like Manchester way or…?
Katie Steckles: Yeah just outside of Manchester.
Brandy Haran: Were you like, you know… nerdy, mathy, computers?
Katie Steckles: Yeah, I was the worst. I was an awful nerd. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: As a kid I was just that person who's always super keen and turns up and answers all the questions very quickly.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: I felt like I maybe just had a lot of different interests. So there wasn't any one particular subject that jumped out as being my favorite subject when I was at school. Like I was definitely into computers a lot. Definitely kind of good at maths, science, interested in things, you know keen to have a go at everything.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: But I think it was maybe when I got to A level that I started thinking about what I actually wanted to focus on.
Brandy Haran: So when you were younger than A levels, like when you were a little girl, where you more likely to be playing with dinosaurs and things like that or what would have been your toys and things?
Katie Steckles: I think a mixture I think, so there's a lot of Lego.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: A decent amount of Meccano.
Brandy Haran: Right. A decent amount… right. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: Yeah. Not too much just the right amount.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: But like Lego, but Lego Technic as well, so like the, you know, the stuff you can make cars and things out of.
Brandy Haran: Ah, you put me back in my place. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: (laughs) I was very into making things, so there was always a very strong kind of, you know, don't through away yoghurt pots or toilet rolls, put them in that box that Katie's gonna use to make something out of.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: And I would always go and see my granddad and hang out in his shed and hammer nails into bits of wood for no reason.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: I just enjoyed kind of physical hands on making things.
Brandy Haran: So when you're a little girl, if someone had said, oh Katie what do you wanna be when you grow up? And you're in that genre of the answer being, you know, fireman, ballerina, astronaut, that sort of stuff, what would little Katie have said?
Katie Steckles: I think at one point it definitely was carpenter.
Brandy Haran: Right?
Katie Steckles: (laughs) That was definitely the answer to that question at one point and then it was journalist, I think.
Brandy Haran: Oh yeah?
Katie Steckles: For a little while.
Brandy Haran: Alright, yeah.
Katie Steckles: But it was kind of like as well as all of that I did also have loads of dolls…
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: …but they were kind of like I'd kind of build like houses and like there was, you know, the upper shelves of my bedroom would have like a little pull system that you could use carry things up to the upper shelves and things like that.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Right.
Katie Steckles: It was, you know, just everything all mashed in together and I think probably having an older brother meant that I was always like I wanna do the things that Rick's doing so…
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: You know… I played football, I did, you know, a lot of things that maybe weren't expected of me but no one really cared so I just went for it.
Brandy Haran: So like you might've had a Barbie but she would have an awesome Meccano car?
Katie Steckles: Yeah exactly yeah.
Brandy Haran: Right, yeah. (chuckles) So mathematics isn't at the forefront at this point?
It's just in the mix, until a bit later.
Katie Steckles: Yeah and I think… maybe in terms of early influences my second cousin once removed…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: …so my gran's husband's brother's son. (chuckles) You know…
Brandy Haran: Oh okay I think I get that. You might need to draw me a diagram.
Katie Steckles: Someone that I go and visit once every couple of months, basically…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: … in my family did maths at Cambridge.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: And it was probably when I was sort of at sort of high school age and we'd go round to visit and he would occasionally show me little things, like little maths tricks and puzzles and things.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And my parents definitely remember sort of long sessions where I would just sit there and be like show me some more stuff, what's this, tell me about this thing, and that was kind of a really nice sort of way to get excited about it, I think.
Brandy Haran: Was there any extent to which like, you're impressed by… like by him? You thought that's the sort of person I wanna be like or was it purely just like the content? It wasn't like I wanna… he's cool and he's a mathematician? It was just… it was just the puzzles are cool, I wanna learn more about the puzzles.
Katie Steckles: I think it was definitely the maths, yeah. It was the puzzles, I think. I mean he's a lovely guy. I'm not (laughs) doing him down at all (laughs).
Brandy Haran: No.
Katie Steckles: But he's like now an accountant which is a really aspirational thing to be when… (laughs) when you go do maths at uni.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Yeah.
Katie Steckles: It's like the solid career that you get out of doing maths and I think like I'm now the person who's buying him like recreational popular maths books and he's really excited by those, so it's kind of… it goes both ways.
Brandy Haran: The wheel has turned for circle, sort of thing. Okay, so this is in like high school, mathematics starts to catch you more and more. Do you then zero in on that? At like at high school are you thinking… this is it? This is my career?
Katie Steckles: Well I think, so I picked my A levels because at the time… post journalism phase I went through a being a doctor phase.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: I think I was just watching a lot of ER at the time.
Brandy Haran: Yeah? (laughs)
Katie Steckles: And like genuinely that is literally what was happening and my brain just went, oh I can be a doctor, I can work in an ER or whatever.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: And I talked to the career's advisor and this that and the other and they said okay if you want to go into medicine you need maths, biology, chemistry, and then I guess you could do physics but maybe don't because then you'll just be doing four sciences so maybe do something like a language with that.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And that's what I went for. I'm not sure whether that specific advice that I got was because I'm female… like… I definitely know that there were guys in my year who did chemistry, physics, maths, biology.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: And I kind of always regretted not doing A level physics 'cause… it feels like there's just a chunk of my knowledge that's missing, but I've got some A level physics revision guides on the self that I keep meaning to go through and kind of train myself up on. 'Cause you know there's a lot of cool stuff in there.
Brandy Haran: What language did you do?
Katie Steckles: I did French.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: So it's kind of nice that I can speak a bit of French and I've got… I've still got most of the stuff in there but a lot of the vocab's disappeared so…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: I would be vaguely useful at French right now, but I think it kind of broaden me a little bit.
Brandy Haran: And then, did you go off being a doctor or…?
Katie Steckles: I think, it was less that I went off the idea of being doctor and more that once I started doing A level maths I was like, oh this is good.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: Like I started to see a bit more of where maths was going and what kind of stuff you can do with and… like our A level maths teacher was, I think it was the head of maths, 'cause we were taught by a few different people for different modules but the person who taught us mostly, basically just kept bringing in interesting stuff and giving us little puzzles to do and that kind of thing and it kind of grabbed my attention and I was like this subject is much bigger than I thought it was and there's a lot of cool stuff in here and this is now what I wanna do.
Brandy Haran: Alright so then it was like all in on maths and that's what you aimed for at uni and stuff?
Katie Steckles: Yeah and I think at the time there was also an aspect of kind of the realization that if I did go into medicine that would be very much locked in for the next sort of at least seven years for training plus probably a few years after that for actually working, like I would be stuck on that one path.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And I talked to a few people about, you know, the idea of what do I wanna be when I grow up and I think it was like our head of music at school was a former concert pianist who'd also been a postie, prior to that.
Brandy Haran: Right?
Katie Steckles: And like thinking about my dad who was like doing all these different roles within his job and doing, you know, other stuff before that, and thinking actually I don't need to just pick a lane, like I can do various different jobs in my life.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: Like what's gonna set me up the best for that and I think a maths degree, you know, there are some things that naturally come out of that like maybe being an accountant but like you're not then tied into that in the same way that you would be with medicine, I guess.
Brandy Haran: Okay. So 'cause my next question was going to be, and you've sort of preempted it but my next question was gonna be, when you chose to mathematics at university but before you got to university, what job did you imagine you were gonna end up doing but you were totally open minded at that point?
Katie Steckles: Yeah, I think I was deliberately trying not to think too hard about that question I guess.
Brandy Haran: Right, right.
Katie Steckles: You know, 'cause, you know it is a kind of degree that essentially just says to an employer, this person is quite switched on and is good at problem solving and is good at learning new stuff really quickly.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And it… you know there's a lot of like management roles at things where they'll just take a maths graduate because they know that they'll be a useful person. So I was sort of having that in mind and, you know, thinking about what kind of things do I wanna do with my life and I didn't really wanna pin myself down.
Brandy Haran: You mentioned before at school you were wondering whether some of the advice you got was based on the fact that you were female. At high school were you in quite mixed classes or were you surrounded by boys or like when you were doing maths and that or…?
Katie Steckles: It was a mixture. So that (laughs) that's not a simple question to answer so… I started at a mixed high school.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And because as mentioned I was an awful nerd, I was quite badly bullied in the first couple of years of high school.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: And so… we had a sort of family meeting discussion and we discussed whether it would be possible to move to a different school and there was a… a fee paying grammar school in the next town over.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: And we kinda went to some open days and chatted around it and we decided to go there and like my mum started working again in order to pay for it, like it was a big decision and I went there and that was an all girl's school.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: So I kind of went out from this mixed environment to an all girl's environment and… but at the same time I had lots of hobbies, so I was in a brass band for twenty years or whatever…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: …with, you know, a mixed group, so all of my friends were kind of all over. And for Sixth Form I went back to the first school again. (chuckles) Partly just to be like, you know, I'll show them.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: But also the people that were bullying me pretty much weren't going to stay on for A levels so…
Brandy Haran: No? (laughs)
Katie Steckles: …I wasn't too worried. (laughs) So it was mixture of those two things. And I think it was really nice to sort of go to a different school and be like, oh actually no people are horrible everywhere.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: I just need to deal with this. Like that was the main lesson I learned was that, there are horrible people wherever you go and it's about your attitude more than anything else.
Brandy Haran: I can imagine when you're getting bullied a bit and you're a bit… you've got like nerdy interests, you know, nerdy in quotation marks. It would be quite easy to turn your back on those interests or sort of, you know, go with the crowd and forsake them just for the sake of avoiding the hassle. That never came into you thinking, you never thought, oh maybe if I just quit the puzzles and the Meccano, and just, you know, go with the flow, it'll just make my life easier?
Katie Steckles: Like with the support that I had from my family I never felt that was necessary.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: And I think partly I kinda saw myself as being a rule breaker except that the rules I was breaking were the rules that my peers imposed on me, not the actual rules.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: Like I was being a rebel in the sense that I was probably the only person to ever go into the school uniform shop and say, do you have a longer skirt?
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: And the person looked at me, was like, what are you?
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: Like no one's ever asked that question before.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: But you know, I just I wasn't interested in following the sort of norms that people were presenting and I think having made that move and gone, oh actually no it's not me. (laughs) This is just how the world works, anyone who's slightly different is gonna get knocked around.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: I was like, well you know what, I'm gonna double down. I'm just gonna be myself and I'm gonna decide what cool is and for me being cool is being a nice person and looking after your friends and being interested in things.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: So.
Brandy Haran: Doing loads of puzzles. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: Yeah. (laughs) Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Where did you get in and go to university?
Katie Steckles: So I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to go to uni in Manchester.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: Because I didn't wanna move to far away from home. There was also the option to live at home for the first year which would save quite a lot of money which is quite useful.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And in Manchester at the time there were two universities, there was Manchester and UMIST.
Brandy Haran: Mhm.
Katie Steckles: Where UMIST is essentially the nerd version of Manchester 'cause it had all the science and technology, traditional stuff.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: So I applied for UMIST and my UCAS form was literally just UMIST at the time and then I just made up five like random choices to go underneath it because I was definitely going to UMIST and there was no point in applying anywhere else.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: But I put like, you know, Manchester, I dunno, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, like just some nearby places that I didn't care about. And they were all emailing me goin', come to an open day! I was like whatever. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Yeah.
Katie Steckles: Definitely going to UMIST.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: And I got a good offer from there and… I actually technically didn't make my offer for uni (laughs)
Brandy Haran: 'Cause we obviously have a lot of like, you know, American listeners.
Explain how the system works then, to get into university.
Katie Steckles: Yeah, so you pick you A levels, I mean it's all changed very slightly since then as well 'cause…
Brandy Haran: A levels is like your final year of high school.
Katie Steckles: Yeah. So you kind of pick maybe three or four subjects to do there and then the university makes you an offer that will be, say for instance three As and a B or whatever.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And depending on the course and the university those offers might be higher or lower, if they like you and they want you to come they'll give you a lower offer so I got…
Brandy Haran: So this is kind of like setting the bar, saying we'll take you but as long as you score these results and if you get lower than those results then your offer's off the table.
Katie Steckles: Yeah or at least we'll have to talk, you know. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: Like we'll have a more serious conversation but yeah so my offer I think was A in maths, B, D.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: So they were like get an A in maths and then B and whatever, like we don't care.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: Which was quite a nice sort of feeling that actually, you know, this was slightly lower, I think the standard offer was A, B, C or A, B, B.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And it was nice to know that they were keen enough to have we there, that they would offer it lower. Although I technically (laughs) for various logistical reasons didn't actually get an A in maths.
Brandy Haran: Ooh!
Katie Steckles: This is my secret… my secret shame.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: I mean… I don't care, I've got a PhD now.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: The way it fell out was, you kind of split it into different modules and there were a couple of modules… there were so few people taking A level maths at our school there were about six of us I think and there were a couple of modules where it was just me and one other guy who were doing those particular topics and this other guy had basically given up on the idea of school. Like he's a lovely guy, so we're really good friends but he basically spent the whole time like looking on his phone and doing other things and not really paying attention and it was… I mean I'm not blaming this at all, obviously I've got my own… you know, I'm my own person, I'm not too influenced by this.
Brandy Haran: Hmm. No.
Katie Steckles: But it kind of threw the kind of teaching a little bit. You can imagine if you've only got two people in the room and one of them doesn't care… (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: …like, what ya gonna do? But it meant that for a couple of modules I didn't do as well as I should have so I think…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: I'm gonna say the lowest mark I got in anything was like a fifty-two percent.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: So I'm not failing things but it was… it was basically numbers that you have to sort of shuffle around into different combinations…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: And I remember my maths teacher sitting down with post-it notes trying to arrange this so that we could make it so that I could get an A overall and she was like I'm really sorry 'cause this has gotta go somewhere and I can't combine with other things in the right kind of way.
Brandy Haran: Ohh.
Katie Steckles: There's rules about how it all…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: Like these three modules make up your first year and these three modules make up your second year but you can kind of shuffle things around a bit and as it was I got technically a B… in maths at A levels.
Brandy Haran: Tech… what'd'you mean technically a B! You got a B.
Katie Steckles: Literally a B.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: Yeah. And… it's 'cause I was also doing A S level which is like half an extra A level in further maths…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: So it was between those three kind of chunks of maths I had to shuffle everything around. I remember on results kind of looking at this and going… okay… this is terrifying, have I not got into uni and ringing up the admissions office and UMIST and someone going, oh no no, don't be ridiculous, we definitely want you to come here, don't worry, you're fine.
Brandy Haran: Ah. That was an ambit claim, asking for an A? They were gonna take you anyway.
Katie Steckles: Yeah, and I think like if they've met you and they've had a chat with you and you're like this is an intelligent person they're gonna do well, you know, they can make notes to that effect and they'll know.
Brandy Haran: Jumping forward a bit briefly, now that you're, you know, alpha math woman and like, you know, Ms. Mathematics. Do your friends who know you got a B in mathematics at school…
Katie Steckles: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …rib you about this all the time?
Katie Steckles: Oh no one knows. No. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Oh. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: No one I went to uni with knows. I mean they do now. But like it was… it is sort of irrelevant, right?
Brandy Haran: Uh, yeah well… I'm still…
Katie Steckles: It's just a number on a piece of paper.
Brandy Haran: I'm still gonna give you a hard time about it. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: (laughs) Hey! I got ninety-nine percent in one of those exams.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: You're not getting ninety-nine percent if you're not, you know, at least…
Brandy Haran: Yeah. God imagine what you would've got without that?
Katie Steckles: I know.
Brandy Haran: You would have been on like a D or a C.
(gentle violin music)
Brandy Haran: (chuckles) So you end up at university. What was that experience like?
Was it everything you dreamed?
Katie Steckles: It was very cool. Yeah. So… UMIST as was merged with Manchester while I was still at uni, so there was a whole pile of kind of bureaucracy and temporary buildings and you know everything being changed but it… it was a lovely course and you know both UMIST and Manchester have some really nice lecturers. It was just wonderful to sort of discover all these aspects of this subject and loads of really good friends that I made there. I mean one of which I married, so, I can't really argue (chuckles) with the quality of friends that I got out of that.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: But you know, I also took loads of opportunities to do loads of other things outside of the course so like I was in the trampolining club.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: At one point I was Boatswain of the Pirate Society… which is a great thing to be able to say. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Oh my goodness. You've just thrown trampolines and pirates at me! Like my brain is jammed. (laughs) (stutters)
Katie Steckles: We've already been over the fact that I do too many things, right?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: This is essentially a brand that I have.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And I also… joined and at one point was president and secretary of the caving club. So I did speleology.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: For the whole time I was at uni.
Brandy Haran: Alright, so. Caving club, cool. Trampolining, awesome. But I feel like I can imagine what you do in both of those. What does the Pirate Society do?
Katie Steckles: Mainly, we dress up and go on pub crawls.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: And raise money for charity. 'Cause that sort of feels piratey, right? You know, taking money from people…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: …but in a very legal way. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: And it…
Brandy Haran: You realize piracy not's legal, don't you?
Katie Steckles: Well yeah but it is if you're just asking for donations to the university charities.
Brandy Haran: Okay. Alright.
Katie Steckles: We did a bit of that, and we'd go to like the Freshers' Fair at the start of the year and we didn't actually sign up for our own stall, we just… you know stole things from other people's stalls. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay. Yeah.
Katie Steckles: It was, you know… and just argued with the Royal Navy recruiters outside.
Brandy Haran: Did you have a pirate name? Like a character name when you were in pirate mode?
Katie Steckles: No. Just me.
Brandy Haran: No?
Katie Steckles: Just me dressed as a pirate. I won the award for best dressed pirate one year.
Brandy Haran: Yeah? What's the key to a good pirate outfit?
Katie Steckles: Just flair… I think. Just having, you know, having some piratey bits but just…
Brandy Haran: Would you have a parrot or an eyepatch or…?
Katie Steckles: Inflatable parrot.
Brandy Haran: Right. Did you ever go the peg leg?
Katie Steckles: I didn't go that far no. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: No? okay.
Katie Steckles: No. But some good… some quality like faux-suede boots.
Brandy Haran: I'm imagining at university like, you know, you would be… you are fitting in more. Now you're surrounded by, you know, people for whom being smart and interested is like, you know, a defining quality?
Katie Steckles: I mean surprisingly there are still people there who think they're too cool and are just like, oh I'm here to get a good career what are you here for? So you kind of seek out the people that are on the same wavelength and make friends with them and you know I had a bunch of friends on my course and off my course from all these other activities that I was doing.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: And yeah but it's really nice to sort of surrounded by people who agree with you about how cool maths is. It's a… I mean university is fantastic and I know that not everyone goes and not everyone gets the opportunity to go but it is such a really nice place to sort of be around people who are interested in the same things as you and are all working towards the same goal for a few years.
Brandy Haran: Did you perception of mathematics change much when you made that jump from high school to, you know, mathematics and being lectured by professional mathematicians?
Katie Steckles: Oh I think definitely, yeah. Like school maths is really just about methods, you know, it's about learning techniques that you can use to solve problems and you kind of start to get glimpses of what maths really is but it, you know, you're not really doing proper maths.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: And at university it just totally flips on its head and it's like right, now we're proving things. Right? We're not just gonna take things for granted. We're gonna prove everything. We're gonna go strip it down, be rigorous about it and oh, by the way there's so many more things in maths than you ever possibly realized. Yes there are numbers, numbers still exist, but also there's these beautiful algebraic abstract structures that don't really exist that you can just build from definitions from the ground up and then use them to do things and oh look they pop up again over here and there's, you know, all these different branches and probability and operational research and applied maths and modeling and all of these things that… you know, cryptography and coding theory and things that just hadn't even occurred to you were maths and it's a really nice place to be.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: To sort of be able to look across that vista but you're also at the same time aware suddenly of how much you don't know which you could take either way but I think I took it as being quite exciting.
Brandy Haran: Did you excel as a student or were you a good student or was the… was the distraction of caves and trampolines and pirates…
Katie Steckles: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …like you know, nibbling into your study time or…?
Katie Steckles: I think I did okay, yeah.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: I wasn't top top but just, you know, did the stuff, got on with it, like it was one of these things that… I certainly now having kind of taught students at uni and things like that you get a lot of these people who are like, okay exactly how much work do I need to do in order to get a passing grade for this course?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: Like to the point where they're kind of working out which questions they can afford to not revise for, and I'm like… hang on, why are you here? Like if you're not here to just absorb as much information as you possibly can and, you know, improve yourself and enjoy this subject, then… you know that feels a little bit wrong to me that you're not there to, you know, get really stuck into it, you're there to sort of do the absolute bare minimum. And I know for some people it's, you know, it's a lot of work and they've gotta, you know, gotta have a job and they've gotta do all these other things at the same time and they do have to kind of prioritize a little bit that way. But you get some people that are really kind of counting marks and going to the lecturer and complaining because they didn't get quite the mark they were expecting. It's like, well you shoulda done better on the assignment, you know?
Brandy Haran: It sounds like it would almost be more work to manage…
Katie Steckles: I know! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (chuckles) how to find out how little work you have to do like…
Katie Steckles: Yeah, and I never really get that as an idea, 'cause you know it's obviously someone who thinks they're clever and they're applying their skills but to me it was just like stick my head in this big pile of cool interesting stuff and absorb as much of it as possible and I suspect that that is just as effective in terms of how well you do in the exams, so, that was my approach to it.
Brandy Haran: As you go through these first years of university and you know, you start to see the whole world of mathematics open up before you, is it crystalizing at all in your mind about what your future could be? What career you might want? What your path is? Or is it still, I dunno, everything's an option?
Katie Steckles: Yeah I think it was still steadfastly not making a decision yet for a good while and I kinda almost didn't decide what I wanted to do afterwards just at the end of undergrad. And this was a four year undergrad course, I came out of it with a Masters.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And at the end of undergrad I was sort of like, oh I don't really know what to do next, like is there anyway I can put off making a decision about what I wanna do with my life for a bit longer and I acknowledged that this is the worst possible reason to do a PhD but… a few of my friends were also doing a PhD. (laughs) I was like, oh maybe I could do that. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: Like I was peer pressured into it 'cause they were all like, yeah of course you can do that, you'll be great. And I was genuinely partly like, are you sure that I would be good enough to do that? And I don't know if that's just Imposter Syndrome or whatever, I've always sort of had that as a constant companion.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: But part of me was like, yeah but it sounds really hard. And they were like, yeah yeah, you'll be fine. You know, you're into maths, you'll love it. Yeah, so like… I'd went along with the cool kids and did a PhD straight off the back of my undergrad.
Brandy Haran: Was your course… particularly male dominated? Was it a good mix of men and women, what was it like then?
Katie Steckles: It was okay actually. Maths undergrad tends to be pretty evenly split. I don't know why that is. There's obviously something weird about maths that kind of… you do tend to get a reasonable number of women on the course.
Brandy Haran: Right?
Katie Steckles: It does drop off once you get to research level.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: And so kind at PhD level it was me and the four other girls. (laughs) And… you know, that makes a big difference and I think also you don't see it represented in the lectures. There were maybe two female lecturers in our department.
Brandy Haran: Having done it… having done… having walked the path… has it given you any insights as to why there's that sort of dropping away as you start moving into sort of PhD land and beyond?
Katie Steckles: It's kind of hard to say, I guess, there's… there's a lot of personal decisions I guess that make a difference. To some extent it might be about why people are choosing to do a maths degree. One completely valid reason to do a maths degree is 'cause it sets you up for a good career in finance or accounting or…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: You know, actuarial science or something that is well paid and solid and dependable and I sort of got a sense that the people who were… I mean it's… I'm not saying this is the only two types of people that do a maths degree but there are some people who enjoy maths and go do a maths degree because they want maths and there are some people who go and do a maths degree because they want a maths degree and I think maybe… maybe girls tend to be more in the second category… maybe they wanna go and teach maths or they wanna go and do something else with it.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Right.
Katie Steckles: This is a massive generalization but it may be that's part of the reason.
Also I mean, research is massively intimidating.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: It's a competitive environment and it's widely acknowledged that it's basically horrific, in terms of how stressful it is and how much pressure there is to constantly be doing things and producing work and publishing and I think that, you know, there's this potential idea that women kind of take a look at that and go, actually you know what, no. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And go and do something else, which is a completely sensible decision but I think, you know, in terms of how that environment works, there's a lot of improvement that could be made in terms of how well that as a career actually functions and how inviting that is to people. 'Cause they'll be a lot of people who get put off from that and not just women but people who could do a really good maths research career who don't (laughs) because of that.
Brandy Haran: How do you improve that? I imagine there is some benefit to, you know, the competitiveness and the ruthlessness of mathematics because like it drives the subject forward, that kind of you know, will to prove (chuckles) but… you're right it does create this intimating atmosphere as well.
Katie Steckles: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: How would you start to think, I know it's not your job alone to like, you know…
Katie Steckles: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …change the culture of mathematics but do you have any thoughts about what can be done?
Katie Steckles: It's part of the nature of it, right? If you wanna be the best university and get all the grants and get all of the prestige, you need people to be producing stuff but…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: It's just about kind of what the job of a lecturer is. What the job of a research at uni is, because, yeah, there's the massive overlap with lecturing and depending on the university sometimes you get this sense that people are there to do their research and there's inconvenience of lecturing alongside that, that they occasionally have to, you know, lower themselves to. Obviously there are some absolute brilliant maths lecturers that put so much work into their teaching but at the same time it's not really considered a priority, which is weird because at the same time the university main priority is how many students can we get through? How much funding can we get in from students, so there's this weird kind of mismatch with that.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: But yeah if you're in a culture where the only thing that's considered to be a good output is how much, you know, research funding you've pulled in or whatever, then you do need to really work on publishing hard and it's whether if everyone else took the brakes off slightly, if the levels that people were working at were slightly lower, people could take a bit more time over things, be a bit more considered, but, you know game theoretically there's no incentive for anyone to do that. You know, you always gotta keep pushing, and…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: …it's just that's just kinda the nature of it. And I guess it's true in a lot of other subjects as well not just in maths.
(gentle violin music plays)
Brandy Haran: You're starting a PhD so obviously by now you have some kind of specialization… what's your PhD… like what are you doing for your PhD? What's your area of expertise within mathematics? And what is the probability that I will understand it in anyway whatsoever? (laughs)
Katie Steckles: (laughs) Well, this was interesting because I kind of didn't choose it… in some sense. I was sort of just like, yeah I'll do whatever, you know, some maths, it'll be great.
Brandy Haran: You sound very easygoing, Katie. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: Yeah I don't even remember being this easygoing but I was kinda like, I mean I think it's always a thing that I've done, so like when I was in the brass band I was there from the age of about eight up to eighteen and had to leave then because it was a youth band and they don't let you carry on when you're not a child, it's annoying.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: I started off as everyone does at the, you know, kind of the bottom end of the back row, as it's known.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And a lot of people kind of worked their way up so as they get older and they get better they sort of progress upwards.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And I was a third coronet to start with and… for ages I was just like, no it's alright I'll stay on third coronet 'cause, you know, it's important that there's someone here that's good that's doing a solid job of playing the third coronet part.
Brandy Haran: Well, someone's gotta do it.
Katie Steckles: Yeah, and people around me were like… but do you not wanna be second coronet, or first coronet? And I was like, no, no, I'm happy, I'm fine here.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: And I wonder if I've got this sort of sense of not prioritizing my own…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: …you know, achievement or whatever and I'm just happy to be doing a thing that's going well.
Brandy Haran: So when you left the youth band at age eighteen, were you still third coronet?
Katie Steckles: Uh. No I was on the front row by then. I did (laughs) eventually progress, it was someone was just like no this is ridiculous get off third coronet.
Brandy Haran: Okay. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: But like, I never pushed for it, I guess. And I dunno if it was sort of a fear of wanting to stay doing the thing that I know I can do and not trying something new and you know, to some extent I've tried to counter that in my adult life by always kind of pushing myself and making myself do things that I'm not completely sure I'm ready for yet. With a slight awareness that that's something that people don't do enough of. But also not doing it too much. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: Yeah, but I kind of… I wanted to do a PhD, I'd made this decision and I wasn't really sure what to do it in but there was a lecturer in… I guess in dynamical systems.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: So kind of studying the motions of things that evolve over time. He was stealing PhD students from topology. So topology was the topic that I'd done for my… kind of final year project in fourth year. I'd done a thing on… oh what was it called… it was kind of a topology geometry thing and I'd started to get into this idea of topology, 'cause it's not a subject you necessarily even cover even in a maths degree unless you get the right combination of lecturers. Some maths degree don't even cover it much at all.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: But I'd gotten kind of into it, so it's this idea of sort of shapes and thinking about things in different numbers of dimensions and ways to categorize and describe shapes and things like that and essentially this dynamical systems lecturer was stealing ideas from topology and stealing PhD students as well.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Right.
Katie Steckles: So he (laughs)… I mean there are valid crossovers. So Moore's Theory is a nice sort of crossover between dynamical systems and topology.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: And there are various other things that you can do to connect them and he just basically went, do you wanna do this? (laughs) Like a friend of mine was doing a project in the year above. So she was already on a PhD doing a similar kind of thing and he's like, yeah I've got space for another PhD student doing this slightly different aspect to the same topic. And I was like, yeah, okay.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: Because it was sort of related to this stuff that I already knew. Sort of something a bit new that I hadn't done much on, so I had to kind of learn a lot of the dynamics stuff from scratch at that point. Having not done that much applied maths in my undergrad. Technically my PhD certificate says PhD in applied maths on it which is completely nonsense 'cause I'm not an applied mathematician.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: It's one of the many contradictions about my existence. And… it was looking at N-body problems, so thinking about… you know, groups of particles moving around in space.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: And trying to apply ideas from topology so thinking about the shapes that they're drawing and thinking about how to categorize the shapes, how to look at the symmetries of them, look at the, you know, the ways that you can simplify stuff to try and get some kind of classification and in particular we were looking at a thing called choreographies.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: Which as you can probably guess from the name involve things that are sort of dancing in a very nice pattern.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: So it's if you imagine, you know, a set of particles orbiting but they're all following the same path, one after the other, and if you take the whole system and time delay it, you get the same thing but the particles have moved round one.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: So there's like… there's various different symmetries in this, 'cause there might be symmetries in the shape of the path that they're moving around on but there'll also be kind of time symmetries that you can kind of push it forward in time and get to the same spot except all the… the particles have moved round one, and then there's also kind of permutation in there as well 'cause you can move the particles around in a cyclic permutation, so that's… there's that aspect of symmetry as well. So it was kind of a project about sort of looking at these choreographies and saying okay what possible things are there, given this set of rules that they have to all do the same thing, how do we describe them all?
Brandy Haran: Was it hard doing a PhD?
Katie Steckles: Yeah. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: It should be, yeah.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: It was… a kind of alternating nightmare of not having any idea what I was doing and then having loads of stuff to do and then suddenly not knowing what I was doing again. People say that doing a PhD is ninety percent being stuck.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And I think that is very much true of doing research in maths. Like you're not constantly making progress, you're often just kind of stalled and going, oh I don't really know what to do with this or I don't know how this works or I can't see how to prove this thing. And then you think about it and you look at something else and you read a thing and you talk to someone and you go, oh my god I can do that and you do the thing and it's like, great! I've done a thing. Right, now I have to do another thing. Okay… (laughs) and it's that over and over again for three years… which is for some people it's really demoralizing.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: If you kind of go into without an awareness of the fact that you will spend time thinking, I know nothing at all, what am I doing here? Then it can be really bad and I know some people who dropped out. Who kind of found that it didn't really suit them to be in this kind of environment. But it was a lot of kind of peer support and chatting to each other and going no no, that is completely normal, don't worry, was the way that a lot of people got through it, I think.
(gentle coronet music plays)
Brandy Haran: So as you come towards the end of your PhD, you must surely now be thinking… what am I gonna do when I grow up?
Katie Steckles: Yep. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: Yeah, I realized I couldn't get away with that any longer but luckily something came along that I was interested in doing and there was this kind of… so a lot of people were telling me oh you're really good at explaining things. You're good at teaching stuff.
Brandy Haran: Were you… why is that? Were you doing like exposition on the side or like… how did people know you were good at that?
Katie Steckles: I don't know. Just like a knack that I had for it that when people were like…
Brandy Haran: So it would just be they'd just… they would just know it from the pub then, like you know? Oh you're always good at explaining things in the pub or something like that? It wasn't…
Katie Steckles: Yeah, I guess sort of yeah. And that kind of thing, and we did a little bit of demonstrating and teaching during the PhD like they allow you to do paid work teaching for lower years.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: But never proper teaching, like just the sort of…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: You know doing the tutorial sessions or whatever.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: I'd kind of generally always been told by people that I was good at that.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And I talked to my mum who… as I mentioned worked in mental health and she said, well, the unit at work is full of maths teachers who've had nervous breakdowns, don't be a maths teacher will you?
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: (laughs) I was like, well, that's a strong argument.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: Like I'm the kind of person who cares deeply about things and invests a load of my emotional kind of energy into things and if I found something incredibly stressful, my mum basically said I don't think you could handle the stress. (laughs) And I was like, well.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: That's… yeah, you know, potentially a reasonable comment and I've so much respect for maths teachers, 'cause they do absolutely fantastic work and it's incredible what they're expected to do and the ones that do it and then also do a bunch of extra stuff on top, it's just unbelievable. But a small part of me was sort of like, I kind of agree with my mum. Like as lovely as it would be to have a really nice sort of solid career as a maths teacher (groans) yeah, I can sort of see that argument. And, at around about that time there was a conference that they ran in Manchester, it was kind of a one off conference that no one had done before, called How to Talk Maths in Public.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: And they basically pulled together a bunch of people who communicate maths so like people who do talks, people who write books about maths, people who make TV shows, like anyone in the UK maths communications community, had brought them all together and I had just got involved with a little project that someone was doing called Maths Busking, which was this idea to kind of take mathematical ideas and just show them to people either in the street or in a context where you were kind of just going like, have you seen this thing, isn't it cool?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And just sort of using the innate interestingness of bits of maths to engage people. Kind of like the way that, you know, you tell someone a joke and they would go, ha ha! That's excellent and then they'd go and tell someone else the same joke, so that kind of viral almost but in real life (laughs) aspect of that. And the Maths Busking thing, we'd done a couple of training sessions and we'd done a couple of science festivals where we'd gone and sort of stood around and talked to people in… around the science festival. But we were invited to go to this conference… to sort show some of the work that we'd been doing with Maths Busking and talk about it, and it was in the building where I worked so I was like, yeah. That's fine, I can go to this.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: But it was just… it was really eye opening to see that there is such a thing as the maths communication community.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: You know it's not just a weird thing that I'm doing as hobby on the side of my PhD. It's actually a job, it's a career for a lot of people and in a hundred different ways people are doing this, and they're kind of making their own niche and they're doing things in their own way or they're working with others to build something.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And I thought it was really inspiring to see that this is actually a proper thing. (laughs) Almost, it hadn't occurred to me before so…
Brandy Haran: Katie was it inspiring because, you know, you love mathematics and love communicating it and like that kind of altruistic math disciple type thing or was it inspiring 'cause you thought, oh my goodness I could earn money doing this?
Katie Steckles: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I could pay for a mortgage, I can eat, and still do something I'm good at and I like?
Katie Steckles: Yeah maybe a bit of both. I guess like…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: With that kind of awareness in the back of my mind that this was… I'm gonna have to get a job eventually, like actually this is not just a hobby, this is a valid job.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Katie Steckles: And I could use this to fill that gap and also that the inspiration that actually I wouldn't be on my own doing this.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: I'd kind of gone into the Maths Busking thing with a kind of attitude of like, well you know I already have regular experiences of making an idiot of myself in the street, I might as well do that while talking about maths.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And it was kind of just a… an experiment I guess but through that I made some connections that kinda gave me an insight into actually those people who would let me come and do talks, or they would pay me to come and do this and I thought, well you know… I've got… I've finished my PhD in summer. I'll give it six months. I'll try being a freelance maths communicator, I'll just do whatever comes a long.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: You know, I have a little bit of money to fall back on to do that, so I wasn't too worried about not having a proper job for six months, but if at the end of six months I haven't got enough work and it's a complete nightmare, I'll suck it in and get a proper job, but I'm gonna try it.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: And I had the support of my other half and, you know, was in a good situation to do that and it really frustrates me that a lot of the kind of science and maths communications scene is founded on the idea that people can afford to work for free for a little while.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: It really annoys me because there's a lot of people who can't do that and I feel incredibly privileged to have been in the situation where I could do that, but it was… I'm always trying to kind of give opportunities to people and if possible paid opportunities, you know, to try and kind of balance this out.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: Because I feel like the universe has given me this massive kind of pile of karma that I need to dish out, but yeah it was… it was a bit of an experiment and I started doing some talks in schools and some workshops and doing Masterclass sessions for the Royal Institution and doing bits of these Maths Busking jobs and it kind of worked. So I kinda just kept doing it.
Brandy Haran: That's pretty amazing, though! Like were you hustling hard? Like were you like always on the phone and email and pestering people for work? Like I imagine a lot of people who dream of doing what you just did would think, how did you get them to say yes?
Katie Steckles: Again I was very lucky in terms of the connections that I managed to make, so some of the people that were involved in the Maths Busking project essentially just took me under a wing and shepherd me and gave me opportunities.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: So in particular Matt Parker, who you may or may not be familiar with. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: I've heard of him. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: Passingly familiar with… so he at the time was kind of taking off in his sort of maths communication career and he'd got involved in this project and he was like, I've now just got to the point where I'm getting too many emails to answer myself.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: So, as a part-time job that I'd just sort of billed hourly, I would do Matt's emails. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: And this was like…
Brandy Haran: That's how we met. (laughs)
Katie Steckles: Yeah it was like a conversation in a pub where we were just like, he was just like, ahh it's getting, you know, effort.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And I was like, well you know what? (laughs) I've got some time and interest. So I did that for a little while and it was really useful actually to see the backend of a maths communicator's kind of life.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: You know, what that kind of contacting schools and organizing talks and books and all that kind of stuff, how that all worked, that was a really good insight.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah.
Katie Steckles: But it also meant that I could answer emails that came in that had slightly mathsy questions in, so it was useful for Matt that I could, you know, I had a sort of secret code that if I was pretending to be Matt I would answer a particular sign off on the email. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Right.
Katie Steckles: If it was an easy question that I could answer, I would answer it, and you know, it was… an incredible opportunity and really helpful and I'm very very grateful to Matt for that kind of initial thing.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: 'Cause he also put me in touch with people to do talks and that kinda think. He was doing schools' talks and getting too many bookings as well so he was like, well I can send you in place of me if people are happy for me to do that, and we kind of developed a set of talks that he already did and kind of built versions that I could do.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: That I could then take into schools and we had a couple of other people that did them as well at the time so it kind of started a little company, which became Think Maths.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And that kind of went from there and that was a major part of the work that I was doing, was doing schools' talks for Think Maths for a good number of years.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah. You had your break. What sort of… what've you evolved into since?
Katie Steckles: It's hard to say, really. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: I wake up in the morning, think what am I? I'm still a mathematician. So I've never kind of lost that love of maths but I just basically do whatever comes along and in the interim I've done so many different kind of weird projects and random things that've just come along, either 'cause someone's seen me do a thing and though, oh they're alright, let's get them to do this other thing… so I've done as well as the sort of standard science festivals, talks, workshops, things like theater projects, so someone was doing a theater show about the Poincaré Conjecture and I was like, yeah, I know some topology I can talk about the Poincaré Conjecture and I did sort of consulting on that to make sure that the maths in the show was right, but also did a little workshop that was performed alongside the show to explain the Poincaré Conjecture in half an hour to an entirely lay audience, which is a good… good initial challenge as a…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: Communicator, I was like I'll need some inflatables and some plasticine (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah? (laughs)
Katie Steckles: Give me half an hour and some inflatable and plasticine and I will explain the Poincaré Conjecture for you.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Katie Steckles: And, you know, and things like I did a residency in an art gallery for two weeks. Someone was like we want a mathematician in residence doing some kind of art thing in this art gallery on a uni campus and I was like, yeah okay. (laughs) I'll do that, put something together. And you know it's been a bit of that kind of pushing myself to try new things, you know, I've ended up doing all sorts of stuff, writing, podcasting…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: …you know, Youtube videos. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: What I will do, definitely, obviously, is link to Katie's website in the notes for this podcast, 'cause you know you can just go… you can scroll down the list, it's a little bit overwhelming the number of things you're involved in and you do.
Katie Steckles: Yeah, I need to update that list, there's a couple of project on there that I haven't put on yet.
Brandy Haran: This'll be a good excuse for you to do an update.
Katie Steckles: (laughs) Yeah.
Brandy Haran: I will point people there. Could you tell us perhaps just one thing you're doing at the moment that you're most excited by? Like, what's like, you know, what's the thing that's… getting you really fired up?
Katie Steckles: Recently I've had a very weird experience that I imagine a lot of freelancers have also gone through which is that, you know, lockdown has happened and its meant that a lot of my live work has disappeared, which is annoying, 'cause that's kind of fun stuff. Thankfully I've got plenty of non-live sort of writing work to fall back on, but I've had a couple of people who've come to me and said well we're gonna try and do an online version. So Cheltenham Science Festival did a fully online version this summer, and they said we wanna try and do some online workshops and they've come to me as someone who's done a bunch of in person workshops there in the past that they know is a solid kind of bet. Could you try and do something online? And I was like, well I've not thought about kind of specifically running online workshops, I was kinda just gonna wait until this all blows over but I realize that's probably not a practical solution longterm. So I ended up developing kind of online stuff that I could do remotely and it, you know, not just me stood in front of a camera doing the talk that I would do in person, but thinking about how the people on the other end can get involved, what can I send them to a website where they get to play with a thing and get to click on stuff?
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: You know, can I get them thinking about a thing and then feeding back and sharing their answers and trying to sort of model what I would do in a real workshop but also not too closely because this isn't a real workshop and everything's weird and different and trying to incorporate that as well. So… having been kind of asked to do that, I developed a thing, but now I'm like I could do more of these. So there's like me and a few other people that I'm working with to kind of put together online workshops and training and that's kind of exciting, 'cause it's sort of a new medium. It's not a thing that people have done much of. I suspect there are people who have done it before but specifically thinking about I've got an audience of people all of whom are just sat in their house, like how do I make this feel like they're at an event and experiencing a thing together, so that's kind of cool.
Brandy Haran: What would you say motivates you? Because like I don't pretend to know you really well but like, you know, and you're obviously a good speaker and good in videos but you also seem to be someone who does a lot of behind the scenes stuff. You do do a lot of… third coronet type work.
Katie Steckles: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: You know, you're always the person who's organizing things and doing all the behind the scenes and someone will always say to me oh yeah we've got this event happening talk to Katie, she's the one who knows everything that's going on and stuff.
Katie Steckles: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: So you're obviously you're a really good behind the scenes organizer too… what gives you the buzz? What keeps you working so hard on all this stuff?
Katie Steckles: I think I just like making things happen. I find logistics immensely satisfying. And certainly having done a bunch of work in this sort of project management stuff.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: So one of the things that Matt got me to do quite a lot was, he was like, I would like to do a ridiculous large thing with maths and I was like, I will Google some stuff. And kind of did the sort of project management and the managing the finance and the kind of… corralling volunteers and all of this kind of stuff and chipping in with ideas about the thing itself and how to communicate it and that kind of thing. So it was a good sort of collaboration relationship because I was good at the stuff that… Matt is… less strong on like… answering emails.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Katie Steckles: (laughs) He was, you know, he was there with the sort of ideas and the brand and the presence.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And we'd kind of work together on things like that and I would do all the tedious admin stuff, (laughs) which meant he didn't have to. I feel like I've almost had a sort of personal revelation now, when you describe that as third coronet stuff, I kind of just realized that's exactly what that is. But I think it's also a very important aspect of it. And I know a lot of people that I've worked with over the years that have been professional project managers and it's incredible how much work they have to do that people don't appreciate at all. So it's good for me to see kind of both sides of that and I feel like it makes me better as a presenter to work with, 'cause I can go to a science festival and they'd say can you do this and I'd say well, I know what you want me to say is this, but here is what I and here's what we can do instead and like I've got a view from both sides almost.
(gentle coronet music plays)
Brandy Haran: You talk about calling yourself a mathematician, that's what we talked about right at the start. Do you ever wish you'd done… you'd gone down a more conventional mathematician path or do you think that wouldn't have been for you? You know, would you liked to proved the Riemann Hypothesis?
Katie Steckles: Well, (laughs) I think I had a moment at the end of our PhD where I had to sort of sit down and think to myself, do I go into this sci-comm career or do I go into like a postdoc and do more research?
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: And there's a large part of me just went, I have done enough maths research. (laughs) Like the…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: …the amount of time that I have spent bashing my head against the wall of maths is… is enough. I am happy with the amount that I've done and for me personally this is kind of sufficient for me to have got a feeling for how this subject works and I've done something, I've contributed, I've written this thesis and I've published a paper, you know, but maths is welcome to that, it can have it and I'm now gonna go and do something else because I've enjoyed this very much but it's also been incredibly difficult and I think one thing that's actually been really interesting to me is, in the last couple of years, I managed to get a part-time post lecturing in maths at Sheffield Hallam University and that has been really cool because to some extent like while I'm doing my maths communication stuff I'm always talking about kind of higher lever maths stuff.
I'm talking about university level maths often with school aged people or with general audiences and that's brilliant but I'm not kind of really doing maths at that level. And it's always felt like a slightly that I'm not quite in there with the mathematicians, whereas having done this teaching at university level I can really get my hands dirty and get stuck in and do this proper stuff and I'm explain it and discovering that actually I've got all these nice explanations for this stuff at that level as well and you know, having some really nice moments in class where people ask me a question, I'm like, ah well, here's a really nice analogy for that. And they're like, oh I get it now, and that's been really wonderful to sort of… I hate to use the phrase do some proper maths for a change, 'cause a lot of this stuff that I talk about to other audiences is proper maths. But I always have to kind of temper it with like, you know oh there's some extra conditions that you have to put in here for this to work but it definitely works. Whereas at the uni level I can be like, oh it's these things, like here's the proper definition. Here's how this all fits together. Here's this beautiful structure that you can build out of maths and here's how it works and kind of watching people discover that is really nice.
Brandy Haran: I almost feel silly asking you this because you seem like someone who just sort of tumbles from one thing to the next and didn't look too far ahead, but do you have a grand plan or an ambition or a thing you really want to make happen or do down the track that you're working towards or hoping will happen one day?
Katie Steckles: I'm to some extent still resisting the idea of deciding what I wanna be when I grow up.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: I think one of the things that I've started getting involved with while I've been at Sheffield Hallam is bits of research into not maths but specifically maths communication. So research into teaching methods and into how people interact with maths communication activities.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: We've been doing a bit of research into like, you know, if you watch Numberphile videos when you're a kid, does it increase your chances of going and doing maths at uni and things like that.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: Which is obviously a very difficult thing to pin down but kind of looking at that, potentially going more into that kind of stuff might be fun but I don't know and I guess I'm also just open to whatever comes along really. I've done okay with people just approaching me and saying, d'you wanna do this thing?
I've done bits of TV stuff which is been fun but… a nightmare and difficult and TV is awful, but it's also brilliant. Potentially something like that but I don't know where that would go, like I'm genuinely open. I've got an idea for a book.
Haven't written it yet.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Katie Steckles: You know, some part of me feels like I need to maybe put the brakes on a little bit and reduce the number of different projects I'm working on at any given time but it's, I don't need to yet. I've still got the energy to keep going with this, I think, for a bit longer, so…
Brandy Haran: Can you tell us a little bit about the Talking Maths in Public… what do we call it, is it a business or a program or a project? It's a project isn't it?
Katie Steckles: It's a project yeah. I think we're technically a trust. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Right.
Katie Steckles: On paper. But this was kind of having gone to the How to Talk Maths in Public conference all those years ago and having had that experience of like, oh wow this is a thing. I kind of wanna give that to other people, like I want there to be people who, you know, still at uni or at the kind of age who are looking for something to do, do realize that this is a industry and a career and a thing, so there's a conference called Matrix which is a maths communication type conference that's run every two years. One year recently it was in Leeds, and I was there with a few other people who were all saying, this is like an international one that moves around so I think it's… it's gonna be in Paris this year and it's been in various different countries. Why isn't there a UK one of these? 'Cause there's certainly a large community of maths communicators and we all just looked at each other and went, should we just make one? (laughs) So we decided to do a conference for maths communicators in the UK and it could be training and workshops and discussion sessions and networking and chances to meet other people doing maths communication but just mainly to give people that experience of feeling part of a group. So I've done loads of stuff on that now, that's become another kind of branch of my work is running this conference and running various online events sort of tangential to it as well.
Brandy Haran: It was good. I went to the most recent one… when was it? I can't even remember when it was. Was it…
Katie Steckles: (sighs)
Brandy Haran: Was it last year?
Katie Steckles: 2019, yeah.
Brandy Haran: 2019… I was lucky enough to come along and it was fantastic. It was very motivational to get all the people in one place and mixing and like not just hearing ideas and hearing people talk but also just like the networking side of it was fantastic.
Katie Steckles: Yeah I think it's useful to see like if you're the one maths person in the place where you are or the one person that's doing outreach in the maths department where you are or, you know, the… kind of feeling slightly lonely if you're a freelancer say, to just go and be in a room full of other people who do the same thing and who communicate maths in all these different ways, that's a really nice aspect of it, but it's also useful training.
Brandy Haran: You talk about, like looking at math communication with a more sort of critical or research eye, so you obviously you spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the best and worst ways to communicate mathematics. Have you got one insight or secret sauce or…
Katie Steckles: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …clue or puzzle or anything that you would say to someone who might be listening to this who wants to be a math communicator. One thing… everyone gets wrong or a few people get right?
Katie Steckles: Ooh.
Brandy Haran: What would be like a little nugget you'd drop?
Katie Steckles: I'd guess to pick one, which I think might be quite useful universally, is to always remember the person that you're talking to doesn't have the same experience of maths as you do.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: So like I as a person who's, you know, a that level where I'm teaching maths in a university, always got okay with it, enjoyed it very much, went through it, if I now talk to someone who's at school, who's either, you know, missed a chunk of teaching or struggled with it for whatever reason, you know, their experience of maths is very different to mine, and the one really nice bit of advice would be, don't kind of make assumptions about that. So like don't say, oh we're gonna do this one next, it's an easy one, because if someone doesn't find it easy that really kind of… you know, slams a door down for them because they're like, oh well I'm not finding this easy so obviously that must be my fault.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: And I… I never… I try never to describe something as being easy or kind of make any prejudgements about how people are going to interact with something. I'll say something's interesting or fun or, you know, whatever, but I won't kind of tell people how they feel about something, I guess. And I feel like that may be useful advice.
Brandy Haran: That is good advice. How do you feel about, taking it the other way? Sort of people who will say, look I know maths is hard, I know math sucks but let me show you this, like will you… do you avoid that or will you sometimes fall into that?
Katie Steckles: I mean if anyone directly asks me… then I will definitely agree that maths is hard.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Katie Steckles: And it's a quote from… the ever present Matt Parker that I often repeat for people is… you know, mathematicians aren't people who find maths easy, they're people who enjoy the fact that it's difficult, right? So it's kind of… wanting that puzzle and wanting the thing that's gonna challenge you.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Katie Steckles: And I think that a lot of the problems that people have with maths are because they don't realize that it's normal to feel like it's difficult. Like they look at something and they go I don't really know what to do here, and because they're not trained to go, let's ignore the fact that I don't know what to do here and just try something anyway, that they kind of are more likely to give up too soon, I guess. And it's partly to do with the fact that the way we teach maths is very much there is a correct answer, you've gotta do this, you've gotta get the right answer and if you're not getting this right answer, it's because you're bad and you don't know what you're doing, and I know no one would ever deliberately say that to someone but that is kind of the impression that comes across from the way maths is sometimes taught and you've kinda gotta get across to people that actually finding it difficult is normal and the way that you'll succeed with it is if you find it difficult, feel the fear and do it anyway, I guess, is a thing people say. And I think mathematicians tend to be people who are just prepared to get stuck in and have a go regardless of whether they actually feel like they've got a handle on it yet, just try some stuff and see what happens.
Brandy Haran: Well Katie if… one of the defining traits of a mathematician is someone who's willing to work very hard and do things that are difficult, you are definitely a mathematician.
Katie Steckles: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: The third coronet of mathematics.
Katie Steckles: (laughs) Maybe, yeah.
(gentle coronet music plays and fades into piano music)
(music continues)
⁂
(gentle piano music plays)
Brady Haran: Hi everyone, something different today. Our guest is Matt Parker, he's one of the most familiar faces in our videos. Now Matt's been on the podcast before talking about his life, his career, and you can go back earlier in your feeds and find that episode. But today I invited Matt here with seemingly no plan, then I surprised him with a lockdown quiz that I'd prepared in secret. Now it's supposed to be fun, just to chance to joke around during these strange days, but I invite you all to play along, maybe grab a scrap of paper to keep of score. We'd certainly love to hear how you do. But please do bear in mind many of the questions are supposed to be like… fun, more messing around than truly a test of knowledge all the time.
(gentle music box)
Brandy Haran: So Matt the world has been in lockdown. You of all people is someone who I think of as being everywhere and doing a million things at once and, you're quite a flighty bird. I can't imagine how it's been, sort of being a caged bird for you.
Matt Parker: Both like very, comforting and satisfying and very surreal, so you're absolutely correct, I'm normally traveling a ridiculous amount and I should've done a UK tour during the lockdown. I had a run of maybe ten or twelve like due to adequate demand extra tour dates on my Humble Pi tour and they all got canceled and postponed.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: And so, I think Lucy, my wife, and I have set a new… definitely marriage record, potentially relationship record, of number of consecutive nights spent in the same place.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Matt Parker: I don't know.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: We've actually put in the diary, mid next month we will have one hundred consecutive nights spent in the same bed together.
Brandy Haran: Wow.
Matt Parker: And so… we're have a little celebration, we'll put in the diary. I think now we're like well over seventy and so, we can't think of a time we've both been in the same place for as long and so it was good to know that our marriage wasn't successful solely because both us traveled a lot and we weren't around each other all that much.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Excellent.
Matt Parker: It's… thankfully we're doing okay.
Brandy Haran: What are you doing? Like, what's taking most of your time?
Matt Parker: Yeah well all the live stuff just went and so I used to do a lot of obviously stand-up performance and so the tour went, the regular gigs in London that I do all went and then also all the work I do with schools just evaporated.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: So both the Maths Inspiration shows, which are like the big shows I do, you know with James Grime and everyone else, Rob Eastaway, they all got canceled. And Maths Fest got canceled and then visiting schools that all got canceled. And so the live, anything that involves me standing in front of an audience obviously, audiences are frowned upon now.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: So that all just disappeared. Thankfully though, the rest of my career is a combination of, obviously making Youtube videos…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: …which I can do from the comfort of my own study and writing books.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: And previously I was planning to do a lot of writing work kind of after the summer and so I just mentally thought, you know what, I'll… instead of touring now and writing after the summer, I'll just swap them. So I'll do more writing now and more touring afterwards.
Brandy Haran: Touch wood.
Matt Parker: (laughs) Yeah. Neither aspect of that deal has quite worked out but we'll see.
Brandy Haran: Have you been doing a lot of quizzes?
Matt Parker: Too many quizzes. Oh my goodness. I've… never had to do so many quizzes in my life. Our record, we did five in one weekend.
Brandy Haran: Oh Matt, I've got bad news for you.
Matt Parker: Oh no. What? What? Have you got a quiz lined up?
Brandy Haran: Yep.
Matt Parker: Oh my goodness! Oh! (groans) Well… I've never been so prepared and trained for a quiz…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: …in my life as I am now.
Brandy Haran: I've made for you in the last few hours, the special exclusive Parker Quiz.
Matt Parker: Oh my goodness.
Brandy Haran: The Parker Quiz.
Matt Parker: The Parker Quiz. Oh…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Well I can already see how this is gonna go. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: It's like it's tailored! It's tailored to you. It's tailored with you as the person doing it. That was very much in the front of my head as I wrote the quiz.
Matt Parker: I'm gonna start grateful and I will update that regularly.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. I think it will change from question to question probably.
Matt Parker: Do I need paper and a calculator like what's the… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Well… I mean I… I can't imagine you haven't got paper and a calculator with you but… (laughs)
Matt Parker: I've got… um…
Brandy Haran: You won't need it.
Matt Parker: Three calculator… yeah… okay, good, good, good.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: I was just looking 'round my office going which one's closest, probably the Casio.
Brandy Haran: Yeah? (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Now I know people at home will want to play along. There are some they will be able to get, there are others well maybe they won't. But if you wanna play along at home please do and let us know how you got along. But I guess we'll go through these questions.
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: See how it goes.
Matt Parker: I'll be very keen to see how other people do.
Brandy Haran: Yes.
Matt Parker: See where on sit… see where I sit in the pack on my own quiz.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. So we'll add up your score as we go and people can tell us what they're score is, so Matt like a true professional if you do know the answer, like, don't blurt it out straight away, give the people at home a chance to pause and, you know.
Matt Parker: It's not gonna be easy to give the impression I don't instantly know all the answer but I'll do my best to…
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Matt Parker: …hold some of them back.
Brandy Haran: How are you feeling about this? Are you like, apprehensive? I mean obviously I have a track record of dropping you in it. So…
Matt Parker: I'm somewhere… exactly I'm somewhere 'round thirty-five percent apprehensive.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: And I'm somewhere around sixty percent excited. And then there's like a little five percent of, what's Brady actually up to.
Brandy Haran: X factor.
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Like just five percent of X factor.
Matt Parker: Yeah, yeah.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: There's… there's… yes.
Brandy Haran: As I've said I've written this quiz with you in mind.
Matt Parker: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: So I'm starting with question zero.
Matt Parker: Excellent! Oh, I already love… this is already my favorite quiz.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Alright, question zero. The famed Terrance Tao regarded by some as the greatest living mathematician…
Matt Parker: Yep, including me.
Brandy Haran: …was born in what city?
Matt Parker: Oh… I… I… I'm starting to see your own bias coming through in this quiz, Brady.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: So, I mean, I… by the way when I say including me I mean I also regard him as the greatest living mathematician.
Brandy Haran: Okay. Right.
Matt Parker: And it's fantastic that an Aussie has that title.
Brandy Haran: Yes.
Matt Parker: And as you know there are many… many cities in Australia which produce people of a wide range… of calibers.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: But I think… he's probably Adelaide's greatest gift to mathematics.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) He most certainly is.
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs) I don't know who else is on the list but it's definitely Terry in number one.
Brandy Haran: I don't know if we should do the answers at the end or as we go. Maybe we should just do them as we go.
Matt Parker: So you're gonna mark me as we go along?
Brandy Haran: I'm gonna mark you, yep.
Matt Parker: You okay?
Brandy Haran: Yes, so you get a point. That is correct. (chime dings)
Matt Parker: Hey. One point!
Brandy Haran: He is from the great city of Adelaide. We're also almost the same age, Terrance Tao and I.
Matt Parker: Really?
Brandy Haran: I too am from Adelaide by the way, people, in case you didn't know that. And I am not the world's greatest contribution to mathematics, but…
Matt Parker: And was there any chance that you overlapped going through the education system in Adelaide at the time?
Brandy Haran: Well no, because by that at the age of four he was already at university of something.
Matt Parker: Oh Yeah. Yeah.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: No we didn't cross paths. I have met him since though for a Numberphile video.
Matt Parker: Yes.
Brandy Haran: I tried to bond with him over Adelaide stuff but… I don't… I don't think he was feelin' it. Okay the next question is a music question.
Matt Parker: Oh dear.
Brandy Haran: I want you to identify… this piece of music. And I'm gonna have to play it off my phone into the microphone but I think we've probably got a good enough connection so.
Matt Parker: Oh yeah.
Brandy Haran: Are you ready?
Matt Parker: I'm ready.
(thematic strings and piano music song plays)
Matt Parker: It feels like a film soundtrack…
(music continues, flute and woodwinds play)
Matt Parker: Oh, I know what this is.
(music continues)
Matt Parker: It is a film soundtrack, isn't it?
(music continues with chimes and guitar joining in)
Brandy Haran: Alright, you've had enough? You've heard enough?
(music continues and fades out)
Matt Parker: Oh I've gotta guess… I've gotta guess, now that I've though of my guess I can't unthink of it.
Brandy Haran: Okay, go ahead.
Matt Parker: It just… I was thinking you were gonna play in like some mathsy piece of music or like oh, that's the music we had commissioned for the calculator testing sequence on video whatever, but it sounds an awful like the soundtrack from Titanic.
Brandy Haran: Well. (buzzer) No. (laughs)
Matt Parker: No! What is it?
Brandy Haran: (laughs) You were right, it is a movie soundtrack.
Matt Parker: Is it… oh…
Brandy Haran: I would… you kind of should've stayed in your lane a little bit.
Matt Parker: Oh really is like Beautiful Mind or… uh… The Man Who Knew Infinity or something?
Brandy Haran: It is… Good Will Hunting.
Matt Parker: Good Will Hunting!
Brandy Haran: Ahh. I thought you'd nail that. I'd though… when you said film score I thought oh he's nailed it.
Matt Parker: No, no, no. Do I get a percentage of the point for genre or is that not how we're doing it?
Brandy Haran: No. No.
Matt Parker: No? Fine. (grumbles)
Brandy Haran: No, I don't think so. I think that's zero I'm afraid. I can't give a point for that.
Matt Parker: I scoring separately here at home. I'll do that.
Brandy Haran: Okay (laughs) the alternative score.
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: So…
Matt Parker: Would you believe I've not seen Good Will Hunting?
Brandy Haran: Have you not?
Matt Parker: No.
Brandy Haran: Oh dear. Well you're not gonna like the next two questions then, 'cause this is the Good Will Hunting section. (chuckles)
Matt Parker: Oh my goodness. Like I've watch James Grime's Youtube… like Numberphile video about it.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: But I don't… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Well I don't think you'll get the next question then.
Matt Parker: Oh okay.
Brandy Haran: But here we go. I'll ask it anyway for people playing at home. Question two, is who directed the film Good Will Hunting. I'm guessing that's gonna be a blank from you.
Matt Parker: Oh. (sighs) Yeah…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Oh… who was in that? It was um… what's his name and what's his face.
Brandy Haran: Yeah they were, they were in it.
Matt Parker: Yeah those guys. Matt Damon and… thing a ding.
Brandy Haran: Yes.
Matt Parker: Yeah. Uh… so I'm gonna go with Matt Damon…
Brandy Haran: (laughs) It was not. (buzzer) Although he did write it interestingly enough.
Matt Parker: Oh, yeah, I knew there was some…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: …like a behind scenes thing where they were shopping around the script for ages.
Brandy Haran: Yes. And question three. You could guess this, so you may as well have a stab. How many academy awards did Good Will Hunting win?
Matt Parker: Oh, like some ridiculous number. What's a big number?
Brandy Haran: I'll give you a clue, it's a prime number.
Matt Parker: (laughs) Okay. Okay. I reckon they won… like… 'cause I know like seven is a lot.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: Five is also a lot, but seven's like probably like, up near record levels, and three would be adequate, two's fine… yeah I'm gonna go with seven.
Brandy Haran: It was… two. (buzzer)
Matt Parker: Two!
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Yeah?
Brandy Haran: Robin Williams was the Best Supporting Actor and Ben Affleck and Matt Damon won it for their original screenplay.
Matt Parker: Well there you go.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Alright, next question, Matt. This is question four. I'm gonna read you the name of five mathematicians, I'm gonna read them in the order that they were born into this world.
Matt Parker: Right?
Brandy Haran: But I want you to change the order. I want you to put them in the order of how old they were when they died.
Matt Parker: Oh okay…
Brandy Haran: So the oldest, the one who lived the longest will be first…
Matt Parker: Got it.
Brandy Haran: The one who died the soonest will be last, obviously.
Matt Parker: Got it, got it, descending age of death.
Brandy Haran: You've got it.
Matt Parker: Go.
Brandy Haran: Here are your names.
Matt Parker: Yep.
Brandy Haran: Newton.
Matt Parker: Newton.
Brandy Haran: Euler.
Matt Parker: Euler.
Brandy Haran: Gauss.
Matt Parker: Gauss.
Brandy Haran: Ramanujan.
Matt Parker: Yep.
Brandy Haran: And Turing.
Matt Parker: Turing… okay so they were in chronological order.
Brandy Haran: Mhm.
Matt Parker: Okay so Turing… Turing sadly died in the… fifties… I wanna say around '54ish but I'm guessing.
Brandy Haran: But they year they died you realize is irrelevant.
Matt Parker: Oh yeah but then I'm gonna… guess what year he was born, and that's gonna give me a rough ballpark.
Brandy Haran: Oh, okay.
Matt Parker: So I think he died around '54.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: I think he was born around… oh goodness. When…
Brandy Haran: I didn't think you'd go into this much detail to solve this.
Matt Parker: I reckon… oh god… I reckon he died probably mid thirties. That's my guess. Okay maybe thirty-five, fortyish. Okay, Ramanujan was writing to Hardy around… just before the First World War, he died pretty young, I think Ramanujan died just younger than Turing. So I'm gonna put five and then four.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Matt Parker: Gauss… Gauss did a lot, but… Newton was super old when he died.
Euler, I don't know. I mean Euler did a lot but reasonably youngish so I'm gonna say that… okay here we go, so…
Brandy Haran: Yep?
Matt Parker: Final ranking.
Brandy Haran: Yep.
Matt Parker: Newton was the oldest, position one.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Matt Parker: I think then this could go either way but I'm gonna say Euler was two, Gauss was three and then Turing then Ramanujan. So it's the same ranking as yours except I've just swapped the last two.
Brandy Haran: So, Matt. You did really well there. I'm gonna give a point for each slot that was correct.
Matt Parker: Yep.
Brandy Haran: The only mistake you made was Euler and Gauss, you got them just the wrong way around.
Matt Parker: Ah, I should've swapped them to.
Brandy Haran: Gauss was slightly older, but they were actually Newton was eighty-four when he died, Gauss seventy-seven and Euler seventy-six, so you were…
Matt Parker: Oh wow that is close.
Brandy Haran: You were so unlucky. You were unlucky there. And Turing was forty-one.
Matt Parker: Okay.
Brandy Haran: Ramanujan, thirty-two.
Matt Parker: Alright. That's an adequate... yeah that's good.
Brandy Haran: I'm giving you three points there from a possible five.
Matt Parker: Thanks!
Brandy Haran: Well done. (three dings) Okay, here's the next question. What are the seven Millennium Problems?
Matt Parker: Oh… (sighs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (heavy sigh) Okay so…
Brandy Haran: I should set a timer, shouldn't I? (laughs)
Matt Parker: Let's start… I don't… obviously I know them instantly but people are playing along at home and I respect that. So…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Obviously we're gonna have the Riemann Hypothesis.
Brandy Haran: Yes.
Matt Parker: So, I'm just gonna get that one out of the way.
Brandy Haran: I'll give you a point for each one you get. So yes. (dings)
Matt Parker: That's done, boom, out of the gate. Okay. Up next we're going to have, well Fluid Dynamics is gonna be the Navier-Stokes. I'm going from more mathsy down I think.
Brandy Haran: Yes, Navier-Stokes is one. (dings)
Matt Parker: That's a big one. Then there's… the Yills… Mills-Yang… which is the Mass Problem in physics, about mass.
Brandy Haran: Yep. Correct. (dings)
Matt Parker: Okay, that's three. How many more do I need? Another four.
Brandy Haran: Yep.
Matt Parker: Wait you said seven.
Brandy Haran: Seven.
Matt Parker: So the Poincaré Conjecture counts.
Brandy Haran: Yes it does.
Matt Parker: As one of the problems despite being solve.
Brandy Haran: Yes.
Matt Parker: Okay so I'm gonna have Poincaré.
Brandy Haran: Yes. Point. Yep. (dings)
Matt Parker: Um. (sighs) Now okay I've got three then I'm missing.
Brandy Haran: I feel like there's one that you should definitely get, and the other two. Oh I dunno. I wouldn't have known them but you probably do.
Matt Parker: Oh I'm gonna kick myself when… when you give 'em away. I mean Twin Primes… I feel like that's not one. I'm not a hundred percent convinced it's not. And what else is on that list. You know what? I'm going to guess Twin Prime and then I don't know the other two.
Brandy Haran: Alright. So…
Matt Parker: Is it a magic square where all the numbers are square?
Brandy Haran: (laughs) No.
Matt Parker: Oh! Oh. That's the kind of caliber problem I'm thinking about.
Brandy Haran: Hodge Conjecture is one.
Matt Parker: Hodge.
Brandy Haran: Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer.
Matt Parker: Oh!
Brandy Haran: And the one that you'll…
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: …kick yourself is P versus NP.
Matt Parker: Oh of course it's P versus NP! Argh!
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Alright.
Matt Parker: Oh that's embarrassing!
Brandy Haran: Nah, this happens in the fire of a quiz.
Matt Parker: Sorry everyone out there who was yelling P versus NP.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (sighs) I knew that.
Brandy Haran: Question six. What would the word maths score in a game of scrabble?
Matt Parker: Oh no! Okay.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: I'm writing out maths in front of me.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Now. I'm hoping… 'cause I'm gonna have a lot of error bars on these.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: It all cancels out.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: So I reckon A is gonna give you one point, T is gonna give you one point.
They're both pretty straight forward. What's the maximum value? They go… it's up to like seven, doesn't it, on a Scrabble tile? (groans) Roughly.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Roughly, yeah.
Matt Parker: Let's say… that an M is gonna give you three points. The H is gonna give you three. S, you can tack an S on anything! So… I'm gonna say… one that can't be a high scoring tile, surely, so if I add those up I've guessed nine but I feel like I've lowballed that but I'm gonna stick with it. Nine points.
Brandy Haran: Oh, Matt. It was ten. (buzzes)
Matt Parker: Ah! (groans) C'mon!
Brandy Haran: The H was a four.
Matt Parker: H was a four. It was the only one I was off?
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Well. I mean that's the power of estimation for you. You get close.
Brandy Haran: You should've just added that one. I mean you get zero points that was good play. It was a good effort.
Matt Parker: Thanks. Thanks.
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Matt Parker: That's kinda my thing. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Yep. Alright. The next section is fill in the blank word or words.
Matt Parker: Okay.
Brandy Haran: And these are either reviews of your performances or…
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …books.
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (chuckles)
Matt Parker: Okay, okay.
Brandy Haran: Alright. Question seven. This comes from the Wee Review of your Humble Pi stage show.
Matt Parker: Got it, Wee Review.
Brandy Haran: Here's the quote. Humble Pi is a charming mix of Eighties nostalgia, full on geekery and really excellent blank.
Matt Parker: Oh. I mean Eighties nostalgia because I play Pac-Man live on stage.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Matt Parker: Geekery is heavily implied.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: So the other… oh thing is there are lasers in the show and that offer got a mention in a review. They've already mentioned… 'cause most reviewers get a little fixated on the… just absolute… (pause) uh… nerdy… unashamed nerdiness and mathematics.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: In what is been billed as a comedy show.
Brandy Haran: I feel like you're reviewing it now, Matt. (laughs)
Matt Parker: Uh, exactly! And….
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: All dates are on standupmaths.com/shows so I reckon it's gonna be lasers.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: I think lasers is the final word.
Brandy Haran: Okay. I'm afraid that's incorrect. (buzzers)
Matt Parker: Ugh.
Brandy Haran: It was eighties nostalgia, full on geekery and really excellent puns.
Matt Parker: Puns!
Brandy Haran: Puns.
Matt Parker: Puns.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Matt Parker: Oh.
Brandy Haran: Now we're gonna hear from Matt Buck on Amazon…
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …talking about your book…
Matt Parker: (groans)
Brandy Haran: …Humble Pi.
Matt Parker: (sighs) There's a very high variance in the…
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Matt says your book is, enjoyable but not enough blank.
Matt Parker: Oh wait. This would be enjoyable but not enough maths. Because a lot of people got upset that I had too much like programming and engineering and like applied things, so I reckon not enough maths.
Brandy Haran: Correct. (dings) Point.
Matt Parker: Yes!
Brandy Haran: Finally, Peter Ennals, again on Amazon.
Matt Parker: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: This time it's a review of Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension. Another of your books.
Matt Parker: Thank you.
Brandy Haran: Peter says, my inner nerd was awoken again by this book and I'm glad it was. You do not need a blank to enjoy this book.
Matt Parker: Oh Peter. I feel like I've changed Peter's life. Um…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: It's probably something like, you do not need a maths degree to enjoy this book.
Brandy Haran: Point! (dings) Correct.
Matt Parker: Yes! Alright.
Brandy Haran: Alright.
(gentle music box music)
Brandy Haran: If you're enjoying this quiz, or just quizzes in general then you really should check out Brilliant. They're today's episode sponsor. Brilliant's a site crammed with interactive courses and problems and quizzes, designed to sort of change the way you think, to sharpen your brain for math or science or anything else really. The people who make them are really obsessed with knowledge and learning, they're always thinking about the best way to make a new course or a puzzle. Kind of opposite to the quiz I'm doing today, you could say. They've got all sorts of bells and whistles that help you keep track of how you're doing. It's not about like keeping score but it's always fun to like go on a streak or at least see how other people fared with a particular question you just tried. The big meaty courses are definitely the highlight on Brilliant. Things like number theory and logic, probability. They're all covered in depth and that's just to name a few. But I'd also just like to point out how much I love their daily challenges. A new conundrum everyday, usually with great little animations and artwork, they often get you smiling. They always get you thinking. This week there was one about Fibonacci numbers actually. I mean the question was basically this, if you got a Fibonacci sequence starting naught, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, et cetera, we're assuming the first term is zero, which of these terms will be an even number, will it bet the 17th, 18th, 19th, or 20th term? Have a think about it. Maybe even go to Brilliant, answer the question, and then look at all the discussion that comes after that. Check them out, brilliant.org/numberphile. Use the slash numberphile, that'll tell them that you came from here, it'll also get you a twenty percent discount on Brilliant's premium service. That's the extra level that unlocks everything. You can also give a Brilliant subscription to someone else as a gift if you think they might enjoy it. Again brilliant.org/numberphile.
(gentle chimes play)
Brandy Haran: The next section is Festival of the Spoken Nerd, this is the show that you do with your good friends.
Matt Parker: Yep. Steve Mould, Helen Arney.
Brandy Haran: Ten years you've been together on planes, in vans, this is your sister and brother from another mother in many ways.
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: Yeah. We spent a long time in enclosed spaces.
Brandy Haran: These are important people in your life.
Matt Parker: They are, they are.
Brandy Haran: Okay. Question ten. What is Steve's birthday?
Matt Parker: (laughs) Oh that's just… (sighs and groans) Hang on. Steve's birthday.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Steve's birthday often falls while we're touring and normally when we're doing an autumn tour so his birthday if I had to guess is in September.
Brandy Haran: Well that's not a… I'm looking for a bit more specific date than that but…
Matt Parker: Oh! I mean if that's already wrong… is that… I mean… I can… eighteen, 18th of September.
Brandy Haran: 18th of September, incorrect. (buzzer)
Matt Parker: (tsks) Ah! 1978.
Brandy Haran: 5th of October.
Matt Parker: 5th of October! That's practically September.
Brandy Haran: Question eleven. What is Helen's birthday?
Matt Parker: See I knew that was gonna… (groans)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Oh goodness.
Brandy Haran: By the way for the record, Steve didn't know your birthday, Helen does know your birthday.
Matt Parker: Of course she does.
Brandy Haran: Because she says she has to fill out all the passport stuff and all that when you guys are touring.
Matt Parker: Exactly!
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: And Helen organizes the party for myself or Steve, when it's our birthdays.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: If were… but when it's Helen's birthday like… a couple days out, one of us will text the other one, Steve and I going, oh! Have we done anything for Helen's birthday? No, we haven't.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Oh quick! And then we… but we always do something, we put the effort in. Um… so hers…
Brandy Haran: When is it? When is Helen's birthday?
Matt Parker: It's also on tour, it's gonna be… it's October, November time, so I'm gonna guess the 27th of October.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) (buzzer) 4th of November.
Matt Parker: Oh! What is it with… (sighs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: See months really just kind of fade out for me. I don't see it as an abrupt end.
Brandy Haran: Do you feel close to these people? Are they friends?
Matt Parker: I… yes… well the reason we're good friends is we automate much of our lives and remembering birthdays is not a something we trust our brains to do. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Well then question twelve, what is Steve's middle name?
Matt Parker: (tsks) Peter.
Brandy Haran: Correct. (dings)
Matt Parker: Yes!
Brandy Haran: I know why you know that though.
Matt Parker: It was a joke in the show. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yes. (laughs) 'Cause when he told me, I knew it. (laughs) Question thirteen.
Matt Parker: Oh no, don't…
Brandy Haran: What is Helen's middle name?
Matt Parker: No! (groans) I don't know Helen's middle name.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (sighs) Ah (groans) Helen… Catherine Arney? No her sister's… um… is it… um… is it… also Helen Arney?
Brandy Haran: No. (buzzers)
Matt Parker: Oh. What is it?
Brandy Haran: Benoit. No it's Amanda.
Matt Parker: (laughs) Amanda!
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Amanda.
Brandy Haran: Alright, this question…
Matt Parker: Helen Amanda Arney so her name is just Haaaaaa. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) This is a question suggested by Steve.
Matt Parker: Hey, did they know my middle name?
Brandy Haran: I actually didn't ask.
Matt Parker: (grumbles)
Brandy Haran: Helen did know your middle name.
Matt Parker: Of course she did.
Brandy Haran: I don't know your middle name, but Helen does.
Matt Parker: Oh yeah.
Brandy Haran: And she didn't tell me what it was.
Matt Parker: Hm!
Brandy Haran: What is your middle name?
Matt Parker: Thomas.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: This is a question via Steve. How many more subscribers does Steve have on Youtube…
Matt Parker: Oh my goodness!
Brandy Haran: …than Matt. (laughs)
Matt Parker: (groans) He overtook me…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: …like six or twelve months ago and hasn't let me forget.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: I think he's… oh he just wants to make me say it out loud. I bet he's on the order…
Brandy Haran: Within… within ten K I'll take as an answer.
Matt Parker: Oh. (groans)
Brandy Haran: What's the difference between ya?
Matt Parker: Eighty thousand.
Brandy Haran: No. (buzzer) It's only fifty-nine.
Matt Parker: No? Really!
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Well, there you go. I'm very happy to have that point. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah? (laughs) Zero. Zero points. Six hundred K to five forty-one K as it stands at the time of recording.
Matt Parker: Oh, I thought he was just over six hundred. Oh there you go.
Brandy Haran: Uh…
Matt Parker: Good. Good.
Brandy Haran: Maybe it's rounded? Maybe you were right, but…
Matt Parker: Either he's faltering or I'm catching him, we'll find out.
Brandy Haran: Alright, links in the show notes, people.
Matt Parker: That's a great question because people answering it at home can change the answer themselves.
Brandy Haran: And here's one from Helen.
Matt Parker: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: She wants you to name the first Edinburgh Fringe venue that you performed at as a trio presumably.
Matt Parker: As a trio?
Brandy Haran: And she said, yeah, she says our, so I assume it's the Spoken Nerd.
Matt Parker: Yeah, yeah.
Brandy Haran: And she says you can have a clue. Apparently you guys only did one show there.
Matt Parker: We did.
Brandy Haran: And it was 2011.
Matt Parker: 2011. So we started doing shows 2010. We went up and did a one off show… 2011… oh 'cause our first regular show's 2012. And it was in a night club…
Brandy Haran: Hmm
Matt Parker: Which I think at the time was the Sin Nightclub? Or Sine. Or Sine Nightclub, depending on your personal spin on it.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Correct! (dings) Sine…
Matt Parker: Hey!
Brandy Haran: No not sine… now I'm saying it, the Sin Club. (laughs)
Matt Parker: The Sine Nightclub.
Brandy Haran: She was… I think she was confidant that you wouldn't get that one.
Matt Parker: Oh come on. Come on.
Brandy Haran: There you go.
Matt Parker: I don't remember a solid maths named nightclub… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Alright, the next section is the inevitable Parker Square section.
Matt Parker: Oh my (grumbles)
Brandy Haran: To the nearest fifty thousand…
Matt Parker: Yeah?
Brandy Haran: …how many views has the notorious Parker Square video on Numberphile had?
Matt Parker: Oh my goodness. I mean I can try and scale it based on how many people show up wearing the t-shirts…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: …to my various… it's gonna be… it's in the ballpark, it's somewhere between half a million I reckon and one and a half million. Or has it gone over a million? Oh. I wanna say… gimme… nine hundred thousand.
Brandy Haran: (buzzer) No. One point two one million.
Matt Parker: One point two one, it is over.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Well there you go.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Thanks everyone.
Brandy Haran: Goes from strength to strength.
Matt Parker: (laughs) It's the video that keeps on giving.
Brandy Haran: Now here we go, obviously everyone listening surely knows what the Parker Square is, it's a three by three grid with numbers in it that are squared. But let's remove those squares. What are the non squared numbers in the Parker Square…
Matt Parker: Oh my goodness.
Brandy Haran: …from top left down to bottom right.
Matt Parker: You want them in position!
Brandy Haran: So like you're reading on a page. In position. What are the numbers?
Matt Parker: Oh my goodness.
Brandy Haran: In this three by three matrix.
Matt Parker: Oh! (groans)
Brandy Haran: Starting at the top left.
Matt Parker: Well, I've only gotta do half of it because it's symmetric around the… middle diagonal.
Brandy Haran: Right? (laughs)
Matt Parker: I want to say the middle number is thirty-seven.
Brandy Haran: Okay there's one point, (dings) I'll give you a point for each one you get in the right position. Yeah.
Matt Parker: I want to say top left is one. (buzzer) What to say… oh no I didn't get a point for that. There's a forty-seven…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: I think there's a… either a thirty-one or a forty-one.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (groans) Okay!
Brandy Haran: You're making a Parker Square of this Parker Square.
Matt Parker: I know… well, you…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: This whole quiz is a set up for you to deliver that line!
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: I reckon top… top right is twenty-one (buzzer), top middle is… forty-one
(buzzer), bottom left is forty-seven (buzzer), I should just guess they're all one, and I woulda got it.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: You didn't respond when I said one before so I'm gonna move that to being… uh… on the second one down on the left (buzzer), one I'll put one over there.
Brandy Haran: Oh this is just… you're just dying here, Matt.
Matt Parker: Any of those? Any!
Brandy Haran: No, the thirty-seven in the middle, I'll give you one point.
Matt Parker: That's the only one, that I don't get a second one for free?
Brandy Haran: I'll give you another go from scratch. There is no one in a corner.
Matt Parker: There's no one in a corner. So is it the top… is it the second one on the top then?
Brandy Haran: Yes. (dings)
Matt Parker: Okay. I'll have that one.
Brandy Haran: Alright. You've got that.
Matt Parker: Okay, I'm gonna put… um… thirty-one top left.
Brandy Haran: No…
Matt Parker: I'm gonna put forty-one top left.
Brandy Haran: (sighs) No. (laughs)
Matt Parker: I'm gonna put forty-seven to left.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: C'mon!
Brandy Haran: It's twenty-nine in the top left!
Matt Parker: Twenty-nine!
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Oh wow… (grumbles)… okay.
Brandy Haran: You're getting two points, I'm pulling the plug on this.
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: I'm gonna do it by exhaustion! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Here's another Parker Square question though.
Matt Parker: Oh…
Brandy Haran: What four digit number do all the rows and columns and one of the diagonals add up to?
Matt Parker: (tsks) Oh my goodness. It's something…
Brandy Haran: What is that?
Matt Parker: It's something like three thousand six hundred and ninety-one… that I'm guessing.
Brandy Haran: Oh that was not a bad guess but it's wrong. (buzzer)
Matt Parker: Oh, what is it?
Brandy Haran: It's three thousand and fifty-one.
Matt Parker: Oh three zero five one. I had the middle bit wrong.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, 'cause the final question about Parker Square is, what does that one stray diagonal add up to?
Matt Parker: Oh! It's high two hundreds isn't it… that's no… or is it low four… no it's four… thousand… (pause)
Brandy Haran: Ooh?
Matt Parker: Ooh.
Brandy Haran: Good start. Good start.
Matt Parker: No it is, it is, 'cause I was thinking it was like two thousand eight hundred but it's not it's like four thousand one hundred and something…
Brandy Haran: Oh! (yells) You're close! (yells)
Matt Parker: (sighs)
Brandy Haran: If you get the last digit! (yells)
Matt Parker: Uh… is it… a… three?
Brandy Haran: No! (buzzer)
Matt Parker: Seven!
(silence)
Matt Parker: Five?
Brandy Haran: I'll give you… I'll give you half a point. (dings)
Matt Parker: Seven, okay.
Brandy Haran: It was seen.
Matt Parker: Yay! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Four thousand one hundred and seven.
Matt Parker: That feels… that feels incredibly on brand.
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Matt Parker: You know the great thing is people will occasionally get me to draw a Parker Square on a thing and sign it…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: And every time I'm like, oh let me just double check this.
Brandy Haran: What do you check it on?
Matt Parker: I've just got it on my phone.
Brandy Haran: Oh right? (laughs)
Matt Parker: I bring it up. Yeah. You'd think I would've memorized out of sheer repetition by now.
Brandy Haran: I would've thought you'd had it tattooed by now.
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) How cool would that be? If someone came up to you with a Parker Square t-shirt like to rub it in and you just pulled up your sleeve and like…
Matt Parker: And I'm like, oh yeah! Check this out. Yeah.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) I'll raise ya.
Matt Parker: That's owning it. Yeah. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Alright. The next section is about the name Parker.
Matt Parker: Oh, okay.
Brandy Haran: Alright? Question nineteen, who was Bonnie Parker?
Matt Parker: I don't… Bonnie Parker?
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: Sounds like an outlaw. Like… someone in the Wild West. I'm gonna go American Outlaw. But it's an absolute guess.
Brandy Haran: You're right! (dings)
Matt Parker: Really? (laughs)
Brandy Haran: But's Bonnie… but it's different. It's not from the West…
Matt Parker: Right?
Brandy Haran: But American Outlaw is the most correct answer you could've given.
Matt Parker: Yes!
Brandy Haran: Bonnie Parker is Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde.
Matt Parker: Really!
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Oh there ya go.
Brandy Haran: I can't believe you got that wrong and yet got it right.
Matt Parker: Y'know, the important thing is I gave it a go.
Brandy Haran: You did!
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: One point. One point.
Matt Parker: Thank you.
Brandy Haran: Question twenty, the Arch Bishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker…
Matt Parker: Correct.
Brandy Haran: …lived in which century?
Matt Parker: Oh! It was like… um… uh… 11th century. (sighs)
Brandy Haran: No. (buzzer)
Matt Parker: Ugh.
Brandy Haran: 16th.
Matt Parker: Ah. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah. This is obviously a namesake. Matthew Parker is this someone you've studied, obviously not…
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: …if you had him in the 11th century.
Matt Parker: Oh, I had him in the wrong… I couldn't remember… I thought there was some link between him and the Domesday Book.
Brandy Haran: Oh.
Matt Parker: Which is why I guessed that but actually I should've known because there's a college… oh actually maybe not… there's a college named after him, I think, at… Cambridge. Cambridge or Oxford?
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Matt Parker: And I've got… every so often someone will give me a book about Matthew Parker. Um…
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Matt Parker: And there's a street. There's a street named Matthew Parker street in… London as well, named after… either…
Brandy Haran: I think I've seen you… I think I've seen you take selfies there on numerous occasions.
Matt Parker: You know it. You know it.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) For people who don't know by the way the Arch Bishop of Canterbury is like the head of the Church of England, kind of like, you know, the closest thing the Church of England has to the Pope, but… not really the Pope. He's the boss.
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Question twenty-one. A mathematician named Parker helped disprove a famous Euler Conjecture relating to the mutually orthogonal Latin Squares of order four N plus two. He also had, and was known by, catchy initials. Was he… (pause) E.T. Parker, A.I. Parker…
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: Or O.K. Parker.
Matt Parker: (laughs) Hey… okay… oh… I haven't watched James Grime's
Numberphile video about Euler Squares yet. I'm sorry Latin Squares. Ah. (tsks)
Brandy Haran: He… it's okay, this wouldn't be helping.
Matt Parker: It's not in there, okay, right, right, right.
Brandy Haran: No.
Matt Parker: Um… I'm gonna say… oh… O.K. Parker, that is tempting. E.T. Parker, A.I. Parker. I'm gonna go A.I. Parker.
Brandy Haran: Alright. (pause) Wrong. (buzzer)
Matt Parker: Ugh.
Brandy Haran: It was E.T.
Matt Parker: E.T.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Matt Parker: I figured O.K. was… definitely written by you.
Brandy Haran: Okay, yeah it's too good to be true.
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Literally. Uh… (laughs) Question twenty-two, the Parker Solar Probe…
Matt Parker: Oh! Okay.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: That's interesting.
Brandy Haran: …is name after which astrophysicist?
Matt Parker: See the reason this is particularly interesting, for everyone listening, is my wife is a solar physicist.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: And so she… this is like the Venn Diagram of our household.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: And it is Eugene Parker.
Brandy Haran: Correct. (dings)
Matt Parker: Thank you.
Brandy Haran: Eugene Newman Parker, for those of you…
Matt Parker: Oh!
Brandy Haran: …who are…
Matt Parker: All those middle name fans out there.
Brandy Haran: Unbelievable timing. Because, I'm gonna put in a new question here.
Question twenty-two A.
Matt Parker: Oh.
Brandy Haran: And the reason is, I actually emailed your wife earlier.
Matt Parker: Oh what?
Brandy Haran: For help with a question and she hadn't gotten back to me but she just emailed me back then.
Matt Parker: Oh no.
Brandy Haran: With the information I needed.
Matt Parker: Lucy!
Brandy Haran: (laughs) So here we go.
Matt Parker: She's like… ah okay, yep.
Brandy Haran: Question twenty-two A.
Matt Parker: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: What was the title… of Lucy Greene's PhD Thesis?
Matt Parker: Oh my… (groans)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: I've not read it. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: If it's close I'll give it to you.
Matt Parker: Okay, okay, okay. Now I can do this.
Brandy Haran: If you've got four key… five key… five words.
Matt Parker: Okay, okay.
Brandy Haran: I want five words correct.
Matt Parker: So… what was she doing at the beginning of career? So it's definitely gonna involve coronal mass ejections, so… um… CMEs are gonna be in the title somewhere. It's probably gonna involve in the sun's atmosphere. It's probably gonna involve magnetic structures or fields. And it's probably gonna involve reconnection. So I'm going to put them together and say…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Magnetic Reconnection and Energy Release in Coronal Mass Ejections in the Sun's Atmosphere.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: You don't get a point. (buzzer)
Matt Parker: Ah! What is it?
Brandy Haran: It was called… you got three words. You got the easy one.
Matt Parker: Okay… oh.
Brandy Haran: The title of her… which her thesis… which I have in front of me now is, Aspects of the Relationship between Active Regions and Coronal Mass Ejections.
Matt Parker: Active… active regions is where all the magnetic reconnection goes… okay, no fine.
Brandy Haran: You're not havin' it.
Matt Parker: Active regions. Fine.
Brandy Haran: You're not havin' it.
Matt Parker: Well I may not make that record number of consecutive days after all.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) I will… but we'll link to her thesis in the notes for the podcast so that'll win you some brownie points.
Matt Parker: Oh good. Good, good, please do. Please do. I'll make sure I… I'll make sure I read it before… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Up the citations. Alright.
Matt Parker: (sighs)
Brandy Haran: Okay question twenty-three, we're back in the Parker zone here. For fifteen months, an American woman named Edna Parker was the oldest person in the world.
Matt Parker: Hmm.
Brandy Haran: How old was she when she died in 2008?
Matt Parker: Oh, oldest person in the world…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: I don't think anyone's hit a hundred and thirty… a lot of people get to a hundred, so… by the distribution I'd say she's gonna be between a hundred and fifteen and a hundred and thirty, so I would say on the order of a hundred and twenty-three.
(pause)
Brandy Haran: No. (buzzer)
Matt Parker: Ah!
Brandy Haran: She was a hundred and fifteen.
Matt Parker: Hundred fifteen! Oh wow.
Brandy Haran: And two hundred and twenty days.
Matt Parker: I have over estimated how old people live to.
Brandy Haran: For her birthday, when she turned a hundred fifteen, they released multi-colored balloons, because Parker enjoyed watching them float into the sky.
Matt Parker: Oh.
Brandy Haran: But it doesn't say whether it was a hundred and fifteen different colors or just like…
Matt Parker: Just…
Brandy Haran: …three or four…
Matt Parker: …two.
Brandy Haran: …different colors.
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Next. We're doing Rubik's Cube section.
Matt Parker: Okay?
Brandy Haran: Alright? Question twenty-four. What was the Rubik's Cube originally named in the patent application?
Matt Parker: Oh, it was originally named something like Magic Cube but then when they couldn't get the… patent… they just trademarked the name Rubik's Cube instead. So I'm gonna go Magic Cube.
Brandy Haran: Correct. (dings)
Matt Parker: Yay.
Brandy Haran: Well-played. What are the six colors on the current configuration? Don't look at one if you've got one in the room, which you probably do.
Matt Parker: I am but I'm starring straight ahead out the window.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: So I don't try and sneak a peak.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Um… so… I should be able to do this. White (dings) is opposite yellow
(dings). Green (dings) is opposite blue (dings). Red (dings) is opposite orange
(dings).
Brandy Haran: You got it. I'll give you six points for that, 'cause I feel like boosting your score a bit.
Matt Parker: Oh! Thanks. That's… bordering on patronizing. I'll take it. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: A point for each color.
Matt Parker: Oh good, oh good. Oh yeah.
Brandy Haran: The Rubik's Cube is famously three by three by three.
Matt Parker: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: The variant known as Professor's Cube is of what dimensions?
Matt Parker: Oh the Professor Cube is… oh… it's in the teens… it's either eleven or thirteen or fifteen or seventeen or nineteen… I think it's an odd one in that range… Professor ugh… I'm gonna guess… oh… it's (groans) I'm torn between eleven and thirteen… I'm gonna go… it's… eleven.
Brandy Haran: (buzzer) Five by five by five.
Matt Parker: What!
Brandy Haran: That's what Wikipedia says.
Matt Parker: Professor. Huh. Wow, I have… I have overestimated… the academic qualifications for different sized cubes.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Alright. The next section is sport because… I love sport even if you don't.
Matt Parker: (groans)
Brandy Haran: But I've tried to number it up a bit for you.
Matt Parker: Oh thank you! I appreciate that.
Brandy Haran: Alright? Why was it curious that the fiftieth Super Bowl, held in 2015, was called Super Bowl Fifty?
Matt Parker: Oh! I know this. I know this!
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: It's because previously they had always used Roman numerals… to do the Super Bowl.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: But they didn't… they didn't do that. They didn't want it call it Super Bowl… well it'd be L. They called it Super Bowl Fifty using traditional digits.
Brandy Haran: Correct. (dings)
Matt Parker: They were in Hindu-Arabic instead of Roman.
Brandy Haran: Well done.
Matt Parker: I remember that. That was exciting.
Brandy Haran: Now this… these bonus points are only for Matt. People playing at home, especially Americans, aren't eligible for these bonus points.
Matt Parker: Oh… oh my goodness.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Five bonus points if you can tell me the teams that played in the game.
Matt Parker: Oh.
Brandy Haran: A hundred bonus points if you could tell me the score. (laughs)
Matt Parker: Oh my goodness. Okay. Okay.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Okay, okay. That's worth a stab in the dark.
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Matt Parker: I bet it was the Seattle Seahawks…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: …versus the New England… Patriots.
Brandy Haran: Hmm?
Matt Parker: And, I bet the score… was integers.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs) Does that… can I win like… can I get accuracy through ambiguity.
Brandy Haran: You get nothing there. (buzzers)
Matt Parker: Oh.
Brandy Haran: Neither of the teams are correct…
Matt Parker: (groans)
Brandy Haran: …and I'm not havin' your funny buggers with the scores.
Matt Parker: Fair enough.
Brandy Haran: It was the Broncos and the Panthers, twenty-four, ten.
Matt Parker: Broncos and Panthers, hmm.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) One bonus point though, Matt, if you can tell me how many points an American football team gets for scoring a touchdown.
Matt Parker: The touchdown.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: Ooh! 'Cause they get the conversion afterwards.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: (sighs)
Brandy Haran: Just the touchdown.
Matt Parker: So it's not gonna be six 'cause that's Aussie rules. And I feel like it was the same I would know that. Oh but then… the score goes up… often like
(groans) I'm gonna… oh goodness. I'm gonna guess seven. (buzzer)
Brandy Haran: It was six.
Matt Parker: It was six!
Brandy Haran: Yep.
Matt Parker: I can't believe I talked myself out.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: I was like six, no wait that's Aussie rules.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Unbelievable.
Brandy Haran: Alright. Now two points for this question.
Matt Parker: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: One I think is easy, the other one… I also think is easy.
Matt Parker: I'll be the judge of that.
Brandy Haran: Less easy. What two double digit numbers is basketballer Michael Jordan most famous for wearing?
Matt Parker: Oh… well… 'cause originally he either wanted forty-five or his… idol had forty-five and when he couldn't get that early on he took half that, twenty-three. But then he briefly… well he wore it briefly when he came back. After his first of two… unsuccessful retirements, he wore forty-five for a bit. So twenty-three and forty-five.
Brandy Haran: Two points. (dings)
Matt Parker: Thank you. NBA is like the one sporting area where I can…
Brandy Haran: Oh yeah!
Matt Parker: …actually answer.
Brandy Haran: You used to play basketball, didn't you? I remember.
Matt Parker: Yeah I used to play basketball and I loved the NBA.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: So that…
Brandy Haran: Have you been watching the Last Dance?
Matt Parker: I have. I have.
Brandy Haran: On Netflix?
Matt Parker: I've seen it all. It's great. It's really good. Uh… fun side fact I'd learnt, so in.. NBA obvious you can have any numbers up… I think you can have double zero right up to like ninety-nine…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Matt Parker: But in college ball in the States, you're not allowed to have any digits in any of your team numbers greater than five. So someone can wear…
Brandy Haran: Ohh.
Matt Parker: …like shirt fifty-four…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: But you can't wear shirt sixteen. 'Cause one of the digits is greater than five.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Matt Parker: And so, everything you have to be able to sign with a single hand for each digit.
Brandy Haran: Why is that?
Matt Parker: Just so that the ump… the refs can… um…
Brandy Haran: Oh, make a signals.
Matt Parker: Sign the number when… they yeah.
Brandy Haran: Okay. So that fouls on number twenty-three and you can hold up a two and a three.
Matt Parker: Yeah, and you go two and three, yeah.
Brandy Haran: I do have an extra bonus point question.
Matt Parker: Oh?
Brandy Haran: In a game in 1990…
Matt Parker: Mhm?
Brandy Haran: Michael Jordan's twenty-three… uh… top was stolen.
Matt Parker: Oh?
Brandy Haran: So he had to wear a different number and in that game he scored forty-nine points, which is the Chicago Bulls record for a player wearing that number.
He only wore it once.
Matt Parker: What was the number.
Brandy Haran: What was the number he wore in that game. It was nameless, there was no name obviously on the top.
Matt Parker: It was like just a spare top.
Brandy Haran: It was a spare top with a number on it.
Matt Parker: Someone stole… I didn't know that happened. Well my guess is probably not right but I was gonna guess thirteen.
Brandy Haran: Hmm?
Matt Parker: And that's only because… also playing for the Bulls in the second three-peat was a player called Luke Longley, who was their…
Brandy Haran: Oh yeah.
Matt Parker: …kind of off the bench center.
Brandy Haran: Perth lad.
Matt Parker: Who came from Perth, WA.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: And so the entire time we've been watching the Last Dance, every time Luke Longley's on screen…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: …every time, I bump Lucy and I'm like, that guy's from Perth.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Like without fail.
Brandy Haran: (laughs(
Matt Parker: And she has tolerated that so, good on her.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Alright. You were close.
Matt Parker: Oh. Close.
Brandy Haran: My clue was gonna be you could derive this number from the… uh… the other two numbers.
Matt Parker: Oh what he wore like… thirty-two or something.
Brandy Haran: Twelve.
Matt Parker: Twelve!
Brandy Haran: The difference. The difference.
Matt Parker: Oh the difference!
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Huh.
Brandy Haran: Actually no, that's not the difference.
Matt Parker: That's not the difference. 'Cause he picked half, so twenty-two would be the difference, yeah.
Brandy Haran: So my clue would have been really pointless.
Matt Parker: Well that's about borderline… well I was gonna say bordering on misleading but that's…(laughs)
Brandy Haran: Glad I didn't use it. (laughs)
Matt Parker: Take that out of the edit.
Brandy Haran: No, no, I'll leave it in.
Matt Parker: Oh, oh that's very good of you.
Brandy Haran: Okay, cricket. I know you're not as into cricket as me.
Matt Parker: Oh…
Brandy Haran: But, I thought this was interesting anyway, so I'll give it to you. What is the lowest score never scored by an individual batsman in a game of test cricket?
Matt Parker: Oh that's really interesting.
Brandy Haran: So if yeah, I thought you'd find that interesting. So for people who don't know in cricket, players go out and score individual scores that get added on to the total team score and to give you some idea of scale, if you score fifty runs in an individual innings, the crowd will applaud and you raise your bat.
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: If you score a hundred runs in an individual innings…
Matt Parker: Oh, the old century.
Brandy Haran: A century, that's a really big deal. You get a standing ovation and… and you can go beyond that… so… I think the highest score ever in a game of test cricket by an individual is four hundred.
Matt Parker: Wow!
Brandy Haran: Yeah by Brian Lara. But what is… but obviously the higher scores are very very rare. Uh… what is the lowest score that has never been scored by an individual batsman, as in that's where he stopped. Obviously batman have gone beyond this score.
Matt Parker: Yes, but that's the lowest unique…
Brandy Haran: Yep.
Matt Parker: …score. Okay… so…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: This is actually, this a thing called the Coupon Collector's Problem.
Brandy Haran: Right?
Matt Parker: Where… you've gotta collect like every possible value but you get them assigned at random.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Matt Parker: And so this a related one, of what's the smallest unique one that's come in.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Oh it's gonna be… I would be amazed… is this just like in test cricket or this is like…
Brandy Haran: Just test cricket.
Matt Parker: Just test cricket.
Brandy Haran: Just test cricket which is this highest elite form of the game.
Matt Parker: Well, obviously. None of this one dayer rubbish, so… um…
Brandy Haran: And I hope this is still correct, I tried to… I tried to ascertain how recently this was correct and…
Matt Parker: I'm… gonna guess it's between a hundred and a hundred and fifty some… or maybe it's higher than that. I'm gonna guess a hundred and twenty-seven. I feel like I'm low balling it.
Brandy Haran: You're definitely… you're low balling it. (buzzer) It's two hundred and twenty-nine.
Matt Parker: Wow. I was off by a hundred and two.
Brandy Haran: No individual has ever ended their innings on two hundred and twenty-nine. That's the lowest.
Matt Parker: Huh.
Brandy Haran: Here's a bonus point question.
Matt Parker: Mhm?
Brandy Haran: What's the most common score?
Matt Parker: Oh wow. Uh. Thirty-seven.
Brandy Haran: No. (buzzer) You should've thought more about that. It's actually, you could kind of like logic your way to it.
Matt Parker: What it's like… it's fifty or a hundred 'cause they get pulled off once they've achieved a milestone?
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Well that would be…
Matt Parker: Or is it…
Brandy Haran: That would be quite a way to bring up the milestone.
Matt Parker: Or is it zero because everyone just gets bowled out and…
Brandy Haran: That would have been correct.
Matt Parker: Ahh! Zero!
Brandy Haran: Zero.
Matt Parker: I should've…
Brandy Haran: Zero.
Matt Parker: You're right, you're absolutely right.
Brandy Haran: A duck. How many have times have teams from Perth won the AFL premiership? This is the highest… uh… honor that can be won in Australian football in the national competition.
Matt Parker: Oh my goodness. How many times.
Brandy Haran: It's like the NFL of Australia. How many times have teams from Perth won the crown?
Matt Parker: Won the final.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Okay so the Dockers… who I nominally support…
Brandy Haran: This is Fremantle.
Matt Parker: …have made it to the final… Freo Dockers, yep, they've made it to the final.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: 'Cause I had to get up at some outrageous hour of the morning to go into London to a pub to watch it.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Yep.
Matt Parker: Um.
Brandy Haran: Watch them lose.
Matt Parker: Watch the (groans) oh god… it was just… wait was that against Port Power? Who was that against?
Brandy Haran: Was it? I don't know.
Matt Parker: I don't think it was.
Brandy Haran: From Adelaide? I don't think it was.
Matt Parker: Yeah, I don't think it was. So anyway, so… this just shows you how much I know about it and how closely I do follow the Dockers.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: So however… the Eagles, the other team from Perth…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: Have won.
Brandy Haran: The West Coast Eagles. The West Coast Eagles.
Matt Parker: That's them, I think they won their first one in the early Nineties.
Probably around '91, '92ish, and I reckon…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: …they've won it a handful of times. So I think probably… it's probably gonna be between three and seven. I'm… going to guess four.
(pause)
Brandy Haran: Correct! (dings)
Matt Parker: Really!
Brandy Haran: Yes!
Matt Parker: I knew if I kept guessing at random I would get one eventually. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Here's the final section. This the final section.
Matt Parker: Yeah?
Brandy Haran: These are Australian questions, but with bit of a Matt twist.
Matt Parker: Okay.
Brandy Haran: But they all center around Australia.
Matt Parker: I'm intrigued!
Brandy Haran: Question thirty-three. Adelaide's Rundle Mall, which is famed for it's stainless steel sculpture…
Matt Parker: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: The Mall's Balls.
Matt Parker: Oh I was hoping that was the question! 'Cause I was like, it's gonna be the Mall's Balls! No.
Brandy Haran: I know you like the Mall's Balls. Famous stainless steel sculpture in the middle of Rundle Mall. My question is, what is the sculpture's official name?
Matt Parker: Oh.
Brandy Haran: It's official name. It's nicknamed the Mall's Balls, and I think there's a chance you'll just guess it, which is why I'm asking it.
Matt Parker: It's probably… like… um… Spherical or something like that. Um… I'm gonna go Spherical. That was my first instinct.
Brandy Haran: I'm gonna give you half a point. (dings)
Matt Parker: What is it like Spheres?
Brandy Haran: The Spheres.
Matt Parker: Ugh.
Brandy Haran: The Spheres.
Matt Parker: The Spheres.
Brandy Haran: But Spherical I'll give you half.
Matt Parker: Thank you.
Brandy Haran: Alright next question, thirty-four. What are the highest and lowest points in Austrlia? And what are there altitudes to within… a hundred meters.
Matt Parker: Oh wow. So… the highest is… I believe Mt. Kosciuszko (dings)
Brandy Haran: Hmm?
Matt Parker: And the…
Brandy Haran: So you get one point for the name.
Matt Parker: And the lowest is gonna be… how low below sea level do I reckon… I mean what's low, is it like a salt plain in WA or something… is that the lowest?
Or is it somewhere in the middle which is super low. Or is it just Adelaide.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs) I'm gonna… (sighs) ah.
Brandy Haran: You know I'm not gonna give you a Western Australia place over a South Australian place but yeah. (laughs)
Matt Parker: Good point, good point. Um… I don't… I'm gonna… it's gonna be somewhere inland and I'm just gonna be guessing at random… I'm gonna go Kalgoorlie.
Brandy Haran: I thought you might know that.
Matt Parker: No.
Brandy Haran: I thought you might know it.
Matt Parker: No.
Brandy Haran: It's not as famous as I thought.
Matt Parker: Well can I still guess. I bet it is on the order of like… a hundred meters below sea level…
Brandy Haran: Right?
Matt Parker: And I bet Kosciuszko… I don't even know how tall… wait… aircraft fly at about thirty, forty-thousand… ten thousand… it's it like fifteen hundred meters above sea level, Kosciuszko? (buzzer) For guess.
Brandy Haran: So the lowest point is Lake Eyre.
Matt Parker: Oh!
Brandy Haran: And it's minus fifteen meters.
Matt Parker: Oh.
Brandy Haran: Which because of the hundred meters I gave you means I do have to give you the point. (dings)
Matt Parker: Hey! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: One point there.
Matt Parker: Excellent.
Brandy Haran: Mt. Kosciuszko, correct, but your altitude was off.
Matt Parker: Oh.
Brandy Haran: It's two thousand two hundred and twenty-eight meters.
Matt Parker: Oh wow, that's more than I expected.
Brandy Haran: And I will give you an extra bonus point…
Matt Parker: Mhm?
Brandy Haran: …if you can spell Kosciuszko.
Matt Parker: (groans) I'd have a better chance Eyre.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Uh… C O… Kosci… os… I've just written in front of me C O S S I O S C O. (buzzer)
Brandy Haran: Wow you're a long way off there.
Matt Parker: Oh what is it.
Brandy Haran: It starts with a K.
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: It's K O S C I U S Zed K O.
Matt Parker: Oh my goodness.
Brandy Haran: Who was Kosciuszko? I think he must've been Polish or something, he was an explorer, wasn't he?
Matt Parker: He must've been.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: There's an urban legend, and I've not fact checked, I think I did try to fact check this but I couldn't confirm it. That they had named a mountain, Mt.
Kosciuszko 'cause it was the tallest one in the Australia, but then one day they realized they got it wrong and the one next to it was actually taller, and instead of redoing all the, you know, text books and everything, they just swapped the names around. So that Kosciuszko stayed the tallest mountain.
Brandy Haran: Oh so… it wasn't supposed to be the tallest mountain in Australia but…
Matt Parker: Well the people and everyone thought Kosciuszko was the tallest and turns out it wasn't so they just renamed the taller one Kosciuszko.
Brandy Haran: Oh, right. Okay.
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: They swapped the names, right.
Matt Parker: Yeah, exactly, but I've not been able to verify that, so I… I'm afraid it might be an urban legend but if anyone can confirm that let me know.
Brandy Haran: Alright, well… final question of the quiz, Matt. Question thirty-five.
Matt Parker: I'm ready.
Brandy Haran: How many Australians have won the Fields Medal?
Matt Parker: How many Australians have won the Fields Medal? Well… Terry Tao has won the Fields Medal.
Brandy Haran: Yes.
Matt Parker: I feel like… there could be up to one Australian who's won it and I've not remembered that. So I reckon the answer's one, two, or three. But… oh… I'm gonna say, two, just to give myself… the room to… to factor in the unknown unknown. Two.
Brandy Haran: Correct. (doings)
Matt Parker: (gasps) Yes! Error bars for the win!
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Matt Parker: Who was the other one?
Brandy Haran: The other, which… I thought you'd might get because they're West Australian.
Matt Parker: Really?
Brandy Haran: Perth.
Matt Parker: No.
Brandy Haran: Akshay Venkatesh.
Matt Parker: Huh.
Brandy Haran: Who was born in India but at the age of two moved to Austrlia.
Matt Parker: Oh he went to UWA… yeah.
Brandy Haran: And he was Australian National and went to University West Australia.
Matt Parker: Yeah! That is ringing a bell.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Matt Parker: There you go, huh.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Better add up our score here, eh?
Matt Parker: Now I stopped paying… I stopped writing it down a while ago so I'm hoping you've got a total there for me.
Brandy Haran: I'm gonna total it.
Matt Parker: It's just as well.
Brandy Haran: Here we go. Let me do it live. One… plus four. (four dings) Five… six… (paper shuffling) (more dings) seven, eight. (papers shuffle and dings as Brady calculates the final score) Nine… ten… eleven…
Matt Parker: If people… at home just adding up their own scores as well… that'd be great, and uh… feel free to tweet them at me.
Brandy Haran: Yeah… eleven and a half. (more dings) Twelve and a half.
Matt Parker: This is like a real role reversal for us, Brady.
Brandy Haran: (dings and papers shuffle) Nineteen and a half. Yeah? Twenty and half.
Matt Parker: I'm the one waiting around while you'll doing a whole bunch of… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: …tedious calculations. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (dings) twenty-two and a half. Yeah and you're firing, talking at me while I'm trying to concentrate, it is a role reversal.
Matt Parker: Yeah! Yeah! How's it feel! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Twenty-three and a half (laughs).
Matt Parker: Yeah explain what you're doing while you're doing it! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. (dings) Oh what's the page doing there. Uh… (dings as Brady counts out score) Twenty-eight. Thirty. Thirty-one. I think it's Thirty-one. If it's something different I'll update people another time.
Matt Parker: And how many, how many questions were there?
Brandy Haran: Um… there were thirty-five but like there were different points. Lots of questions had multiple points so that's…
Matt Parker: Oh yeah, but… I mean… that's on average, you know, nearly a point per question, yeah.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. I think you did alright. I think you did alright. How did you feel about it?
Matt Parker: I enjoyed it.
Brandy Haran: You enjoyed it?
Matt Parker: I feel like by not having memorized the Parker Square I just made that slightly worse for myself, but other than that I had a fantastic time. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Like what will be your takeaway? Is there anything you're gonna takeaway from this? Things you feel like you need to learn more about or things you sort of feel like are weaknesses in your… in your knowledge? Besides the names and birthdates of your best mates?
Matt Parker: A lot of areas for improvement, yes. Um…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Matt Parker: Obviously I've gotta read my wife's thesis. That seems to be very important.
Brandy Haran: Yeah? (laughs)
Matt Parker: And my sport knowledge is both… uh… narrow and shallow so that's good to know.
Brandy Haran: Oh yeah. The sport was the section that you did better in than I expected.
Matt Parker: Oh okay. Okay.
Brandy Haran: 'Cause you got the… you got the West Coast Eagles four premierships.
Matt Parker: Yep.
Brandy Haran: You got the Michael Jordan stuff. You got the Super Bowl. The sport was your strongest section.
Matt Parker: Oh wow.
Brandy Haran: I think I made it too easy.
Matt Parker: I think you underestimated my… ability to know or at least estimate ridiculous bits of sporting knowledge.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Well, thank you for playing.
Matt Parker: My pleasure. Are you subjecting other people to this?
Brandy Haran: (pause) No. No. This was just…
Matt Parker: Oh it's just for me? Oh wow I feel…
Brandy Haran: It was a Parker Quiz! It was just for you.
Matt Parker: I feel special.
Brandy Haran: Well, how am I gonna do other… this quiz with other people like I can't ask them what like you know…
Matt Parker: Well you could…
Brandy Haran: Steve Mould's middle name is.
Matt Parker: Well you could craft a whole new quiz for someone else, I dunno.
Brandy Haran: Well yeah I could do a whole new quiz, yeah. I might do that. But I'm not gonna give other people the Parker Quiz.
Matt Parker: No, no, obviously, are you gonna give the Grime Quiz or something that's what I was (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Oh alright, yeah. I'm not gonna ask James Grime what Lucy Greene's…
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …PhD thesis was called.
Matt Parker: He's probably do better than me at the Parker Quiz. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Matt did not know this quiz was coming, people.
Matt Parker: No.
Brandy Haran: I completely sprung this on him, which…
Matt Parker: Blind.
Brandy Haran: …felt… which I felt really bad about when he told me he'd done five quizzes in one weekend.
Matt Parker: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Matt Parker: Yep! Clearly practice does not make perfect.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, you didn't help me with that intro there where you just started talking about how much…
Matt Parker: How much I hate quizzes! (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …you hate doing quizzes. (laughs)
Matt Parker: Yeah that's probably not the lead in you were expecting.
Brandy Haran: Matt, enjoy the rest of lockdown.
Matt Parker: Yes.
Brandy Haran: Hopefully we'll talk… we might do something like this again sometime or…
Matt Parker: We should, we should.
Brandy Haran: …do a video over Zoom sometime or…
Matt Parker: We keep saying we should do more remotely stuff. Yeah.
Brandy Haran: …you know… yeah. We have been talking about doing a remote video but we just haven't found the time yet.
Matt Parker: One day, one day. Thank you for keeping… keeping me entertained for an afternoon. This has been good fun.
Brandy Haran: That was alright, it was very good and there'll be lots of links in the notes to lots of the stuff we spoke about, you know, Matt's books and shows and Lucy's PhD.
Matt Parker: (laughs) All the important things that have come out of this household.
Brandy Haran: All the important… and most importantly Parker Square t-shirts.
Matt Parker: Obvious… Obs.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
(gentle synth music fades in)
⁂
Brady Haran: To be honest I'm like a massive sports fan.
John Urschel: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: So when I sit here and think about oh all the things I'd love to talk about there's loads and loads of football stuff but I have to remember this is for my Numberphile audience and most of them aren't sports fans. (laughs)
John Urschel: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: So I gotta like reign it in.
John Urschel: Right you gotta control yourself.
(gentle intro music)
Brandy Haran: Today's guest is a mathematician currently completing his PhD at MIT. But call up John Urschel's CV and there are a few lines that… well, might catch your eye. That's because he played three seasons as a professional footballer in the NFL. Lining up in forty games for the Baltimore Ravens. And before that he was star college footballer at Penn State. But throughout his athletic career John's continued with mathematical study and research (music continues) and after retiring from the NFL at the ripe old age of twenty-six he's now focused full-time on mathematics.
(music fades out)
Brandy Haran: If I went back in time and met you as a kid…
John Urschel: Yes?
Brandy Haran: What are you like?
John Urschel: Let's see, I love puzzles.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
John Urschel: I love horror movies. I know this is pretty random but…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
John Urschel: Yeah these are the two things I really enjoy. You wouldn't think I was an athlete.
Brandy Haran: No?
John Urschel: You wouldn't think I was, you know, a social butterfly let's say but I was just really into, especially puzzles, man. That was my thing. Board games.
Brandy Haran: So you weren't a big guy? Because obviously you're a big guy now anyone who looks at you would think oh well that's guy's obviously a footballer.
John Urschel: Well I was a big guy but I was also pretty overweight when I was little.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
John Urschel: So I didn't really look the athlete part.
Brandy Haran: So if I had met you I would be more likely to think that you're a future mathematician than a future footballer?
John Urschel: Oh, absolutely. I want you to know that like from elementary school all the way through like middle school, if you had met me you would have been like future mathematician but I don't know about the football.
Brandy Haran: What happened, what changed?
John Urschel: I got in shape. I lost a lot of weight, I started exercising. I started looking at what all the other kids were doing and I thought, wow I should really try this whole conformity thing out and so I just started playing sports. I started doing things that other kids were doing because well I was sort of quiet. I was soft spoken. I didn't really sort of naturally get along with other kids so I thought let me just fit in and do what the other kids are doing. And the other kids were playing sports.
Brandy Haran: So John I think it's bit of a cliche or bit of a trope that if a kid is really smart but you know all kids want to be sport starts, don't they, that's like a dream. And they have some aspiration to play professional sport they'll often get like a guiding hand from a teacher saying you know it's really important that you use your talents academically because sport is such a gamble and you wanna have a good job when you grow. Were you getting that, as you got more into football but were clearly a pretty good student were your teacher's saying hey John, I don't think football's the way to go. You're so good at puzzle and maths maybe this is the way to go?
John Urschel: No… you know I didn't really get any sort of guiding hand, I would say from teachers. My teachers, especially in the sciences, they very much let me be with some small exceptions. You know they saw I was very very strong, I would get, you know ninety-nines and one hundreds.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
John Urschel: And I was just someone they wouldn't have to worry about. I would say my mother… I'm not sure guiding hand is the right word. More like forcefully sort of keeping me in line. She was always making sure I was staying on top of my academics.
Brandy Haran: So as you went through college and obviously you were like a really good college footballer. We you staying on top of your academics because you loved it or because this was like your insurance policy if you, you know, broke your leg or something?
John Urschel: Oh by the time, let's say, I was done with my first year at university…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
John Urschel: I was fully in love with mathematics. And at this point I only care about like… learning more math. I started doing math research and yeah… this was all that concerned me. I wasn't too concerned about grades, I wasn't concerned about, you know, getting a good job or any of these things. I just wanted to learn more about math.
Brandy Haran: Was it hard to have the head space for both? To keep on top of football at the level you wanted to be and… be like, you know, doing research and learning all this new stuff in the world of math?
John Urschel: They both took up a lot of time, I mean, man, when you're an American football player in the States and you're sort of going to university at the same time, like playing college football is really a full-time job.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
John Urschel: And so fitting in the classes and fitting in the study, it's tough but… I mean this is what I did for fun, so like you know, I would get done with practice, you know, eat dinner… I would just go home and hang out and I'd read a math book, like this is what I did to decompress.
Brandy Haran: What about like your teammates and stuff like that?
John Urschel: Yeah I'm gonna level with you, like, none of my other teammates were, you know, reading math books to decompress but you know, some guys liked to read books at the end of the day. Most guys like, you know, playing video games or watching TV. These are the more typical things you do after practice.
Brandy Haran: So was the math something you would wear like on your sleeve and be proud of and like hey I'm the football math guy and like that makes me a novelty and interesting or was it something you kind of kept a bit quiet?
John Urschel: I would say neither. I mean it's not something I ever hid. It's not something… I mean I was… ever since sort of like college I've always been proud of my mathematics but at the same time you know I'm just one of the guys, so it's not something I'm championing, but… it's also not something that I'm hiding.
Brandy Haran: This might be a stupid question but did you ever feel like your kind of mathy puzzley brain ever brought anything to your football?
John Urschel: You know, a little bit. I feel like I pick up the playbook pretty quickly.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
John Urschel: Like I learn the plays decently quickly and I feel like it helps me sort of like think through my decision making on the football field in a sort of more rigorous way.
Brandy Haran: Did football ever bring anything to your math?
John Urschel: It definitely brings a little bit of competitive drive and…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
John Urschel: I think more than anything American Football it really taught me how to be resilient. How to work hard. I mean these sort of stereotypical characteristics that show you how to be successful at something. Football was the thing that really gave me that.
Brandy Haran: So at college do you ever feel like you came to a crossroads? Like as it became clear that the NFL was possible and you could take football to the next level. Did it ever feel like a choice? Oh I'm gonna have to give up the math to take football to the next level, or did you always think you could keep both balls in the air at once?
John Urschel: I knew I was going to have to put one on the back burner for sure. I mean in college I managed to do both and you know… certainly math took away some time that I could have spent sort of doing more training for football and football definitely took away time that I could have spent learning more math and sort of doing new things. When it became time for me to play in the NFL… for sort of at least the first season I played in the league, I did put math sort of on the backseat because it was just you know… professional football just took up so much time.
Brandy Haran: Have you ever felt like, you know, you didn't quite reach the level you could have in football because of math or you aren't quite where you could be as a mathematician because of football? Like is there any regret there or anything?
John Urschel: (pause) No, I think I went just about as high in football as I could go, I mean, I'll tell you sort of any day of the week, I definitely have way more talent in math than I did in football.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
John Urschel: And, you know, I had to work really really hard in football to sort of get to where I was and I think I really peaked out right around, you know, about as good as I could do and then math I mean… I think it's a little too early to tell. I definitely have't sort of had the time to put in sort of as much time into math as I would like. I mean I think I'm still doing decently well for myself but… football took away a lot of time and now as soon as I retire I have a child.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
John Urschel: And she's taking up a lot of time as well.
Brandy Haran: So I'm imagining a lot of people listening won't be particular familiar with American Football.
John Urschel: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: You were an offensive lineman.
John Urschel: Yes.
Brandy Haran: Which as I understand it, from the bit I watch, is kind of part battering ram, part kind of blocker, obstacle sort of thing. It doesn't strike me as like… the position on the field you were first to go to look for the intellectual, the mathematician… is that unfair?
John Urschel: Yeah! That's actually incredibly unfair because well… if you use for instance standardized testing of intelligence that's perhaps used in the NFL…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
John Urschel: When you're entering… it turns out that the smartest… I believe the two smartest positions on the field, once we remove kickers and such, this is another discussion, but once we remove the kickers, it's the quarterbacks and it's the interior offensive lineman.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
John Urschel: Are the two smartest positions, and… it makes sense because as an offensive lineman, although your description of our sort of functions is correct, one thing that offensive lineman have to do is we have to make a lot of cerebral decisions. We have to do a lot of decision making, in the same way that a quarterback has to make a lot of decisions.
Brandy Haran: What kind of decision are you making as an offensive lineman?
John Urschel: So deciding how we're going to block a play. Deciding like what are plays going to look like, how we're gonna scheme it out, who blocks who, and what sort of blocking scheme we should use. And this is highly dependent on once we get to the line… what we see in front of us.
Brandy Haran: So it's not just prescribed from on high and you're just…
John Urschel: No.
Brandy Haran: Following orders… there's a lot of fast decision making?
John Urschel: Yes, there's a lot of fast paced decision making that sort of falls on us because it's really hard for the coaches to tell you exactly what to do in like every situation. You have to make a lot of decision on your own and you have to be adept at recognizing what the defense is doing.
Brandy Haran: Can I ask you another sporty question, then?
John Urschel: Yeah! Absolutely.
Brandy Haran: I've watched a lot of American Football on TV, or a reasonable amount for a guy in England. What's playing in the game and being out there on the line like compared to watching it on TV? If you wanted to help me understand what the difference is between being an actual player and being just like some chump watching it on TV… how would you do it?
John Urschel: Yeah I would tell you, one, everyone's a lot bigger than they look on TV. This is the one thing everyone says to me when they watch, you know, people on TV and then they see them in person. Everyone's bigger than when you see them on TV. And on TV I think you don't quite realize like… how loud and how hard the hits are.
Brandy Haran: Right.
John Urschel: Yeah because on TV this doesn't really get conveyed to you. Whereas if you see it in person, you get a very different sort of feeling. I mean you hear it. You see it and you hear it.
Brandy Haran: That brings us to probably something I know you get asked about a lot, when we talk about the hits and the violence of football.
John Urschel: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: And you're this smart guy, with this brain that's this incredible asset to you. There's been all this publicity about head injury and the violence of football.
John Urschel: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: What was your thinking about that? As this becomes a bigger and bigger issue and you're a mathematician and you're thinking, you know, maybe my future down the line's gonna be using my brain and there's all this publicity about how these hits might be doing some damage to my brain. What's going on here? Is this playing a role in your retirement? Or is there pressure coming on you or…?
John Urschel: It's not something that now that I'm retired that I'm particularly concerned about. I mean I've retired pretty healthy. I had very few head injuries. I think it's sort of common sense that sort of okay playing American Football, it can't help your brain.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
John Urschel: You know, it can only hurt it. But I mean this is the case in sort of a number of sports although American Football's to a great degree than let's say European Football, or let's say wrestling or other sports. But this is definitely something that I think football's been trying to address recently. I mean the NFL has been trying to do a lot of rule changes to deal with this and also look into sort of better technology for helmets but (sighs) yeah it's a tough question and it's something that I think everyone who sort of, you know, plays football or wants to play football just wants to be aware of.
Brandy Haran: John I feel like you're a special case though. I mean you're almost like a super talented pianist risking their fingers, you're not just like another player you're a guy who has like this brain which could play and hopefully will play a big part in your future. Are you getting any extra pressure? Are any mathematicians you're working with saying to you, hey John I think you got a bit of talent here, you sure you want to be banging your head every weekend? Or was that never a discussion?
John Urschel: Oh! Yeah, yeah, no. Of course I've gotten extra pressure like through college all the way through the pros from family, from friends. Yeah, from fellow academics. Even some football players always ask me, like, are you sure you wanna be out here? (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
John Urschel: No I mean I love playing football. It was something I really enjoyed doing especially at the college level. I dunno it felt like time to retire, I started enjoying my time at MIT more and more and you start thinking more and more about longevity.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
John Urschel: You know, I wanna be able to do math into my sixties and seventies. Like you go around these math departments like MIT and you see these older professors and they're just still chugging along very happy to be, you know, involved with math and… I wanna be, you know, functioning, hang out with my daughter, hang out with my grandkids, still be able to walk around, you know my knees still work, my hip still works, my shoulders are okay. I was blessed to sort of retire and be more or less, I mean, compared to most NFL retirees, very healthy.
Brandy Haran: I don't know how much trash talk there is between players in the NFL. I would have imagined there's quite a lot, like trying to get in each other's head during a game.
John Urschel: Uh, yeah there's some but not as much as you would think, I would imagine.
Brandy Haran: I was wondering whether or not your opponents like got in you head about mathematic stuff. Did they like research your enough to know that this could be an Achilles' heel or was that not something you ever heard out on the field?
John Urschel: I've only heard this out on the field like on select occasions and it's only when I'm like playing against like friends of mine.
Brandy Haran: Right.
John Urschel: It's happened that like, you know, I'm playing a friend of mine and before the ball snaps someone asks me what two times two is.
Brandy Haran: You didn't have like big like (chuckles) defensive guys saying look out for that pretty little math brain of yours, you're about to take a hit.
John Urschel: No, no such thing.
Brandy Haran: Ahh. They missed an opportunity there I reckon.
John Urschel: They missed their chance.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
John Urschel: Yeah, now I know what you have done.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) For sure I would have been right into that, although to be fair I don't think you would have been too riled if you had me on the other side of the line. (laughs)
John Urschel: Yeah I'm sure how well that strategy would have turned out.
Brandy Haran: John I notice you wear number sixty-four, are you gonna give me anything mathy here or is that nothing?
John Urschel: I wish I could. It was a complete coincidence. It was the number I was given when I first got to uni.
Brandy Haran: And let me ask you this then, I'm gonna give you a choice here.
John Urschel: Okay.
Brandy Haran: Fields Medal, or Super Bowl winner's ring?
John Urschel: Fields Medal.
Brandy Haran: What if sweeten deal and say Field's Medal, or Super Bowl Ring with first ever offensive lineman to win MVP in the game?
John Urschel: Field's Medal, man! Fields Medal.
Brandy Haran: Wow. I'd thought you think about that more. (laughs)
John Urschel: No, no. Fields Medal. I mean Fields Medal says I've really contributed something, whereas I really enjoyed football and, you know, I loved it but you know… I'm not making anything.
Brandy Haran: But what about this whole thing about the camaraderie and the team and all that matters is working as a team towards winning something and like you've dedicated lots of your years to football.
John Urschel: Mhm.
Brandy Haran: And to reach the pinnacle of that would be something?
John Urschel: No it would definitely be something. I mean… okay if you sort of gave me other choices like if it was… Super Bowl Champion versus lesser things than you know. There are many instances where I'd choose Super Bowl Champion but…
Brandy Haran: Alright, yeah…
John Urschel: Yeah, you throw out a Fields Medal. I mean, you know, c'mon man, you're hitting me something heavy here.
Brandy Haran: I gave you too good an option, I should have… I couldn't think of a lesser award that would have been a fair contest so, I'll know for next time.
(violin music)
Brandy Haran: What's it been like going from being this guy who's on TV and in stadiums and people are screaming and like, you know, you're the big guy in the room when you walk in 'cause your a football star and people want your autograph and stuff to being… a PhD student? Which like, you know, is considered (chuckles) the lower ranks of life in the university?
John Urschel: Oh it's been amazing. I'm someone who really enjoys peace and quiet. I really enjoy keeping to myself. I mean I always have even when I was very very little and that hasn't changed. I enjoy not being bothered.
Brandy Haran: Do you think you're having an authentic PhD experience? Because you're always gonna be that guy who, oh see that guy over there, the really big one? He played in the NFL, like he's bit of a big deal. You're never just gonna be the normal mathematician, are you? You're always gonna have that novelty about you.
John Urschel: Yeah I've come to sort of just accept the fact that I'm never going to be a normal PhD student. I'm never going to be like just a normal math professor and I recognize this and this is something I'm comfortable with. The hope is let's say the reasons why I'm never going to be a normal PhD student is, you know, largely related to these football things but even, you know, being a regular professor or mathematician… I hope there will be reasons for this perhaps not football, though.
Brandy Haran: Do you think… you're gonna have to work that bit harder to get legitimacy amongst your peers when you move up to that professor level? 'Cause mathematics is like any field of endeavor there's like jealously and politics and that. Can you imagine that a lot of other mathematicians may think oh yeah okay he's Mr. Football, as you really got it where it counts mathematically? Like do you feel that you're gonna have to go a little bit harder to… prove yourself because of that?
John Urschel: Yeah, I definitely feel that pressure and that's something that's real and that's something I think about and I always try to think about where my priorities are because… okay I'm retired from football and now I have extra time and I think about how much of my extra time do I put fully back into math? How much do I put into my daughter, which is being a good father and being a present father is extremely important to me. And how much of it do I put into math outreach, which is something that is becoming incredibly important to me. And I think just an important thing in general. It's a tough question.
Brandy Haran: Why is math outreach important to you?
John Urschel: The reason why it's important to me, first of all, math education is not sort of equal in all places and okay… I mean… education's never going to be equal, equal everywhere but… (sighs) the amount of inequality we see at least I'd say in the States between sort of… people who have a great access to education and high quality teachers and great resources… versus people who are born into a household in some community where perhaps… he or she doesn't have the same resources, doesn't have the same quality of teachers and also doesn't have the same social culture around them that encourages education, that encourages studying and academics as a way to improve your sort of lot in life. We see that… your ability to say, you know, become something isn't just about how smart you are, how talented you are, how are you're willing to work. It turns out it has a good amount to do with where you're born. That's something that's quite sad to me. If you look at all the top American born mathematicians, very few of them are African American and it's not because like mathematics doesn't like African Americans or that somehow all the sort of genius… brilliant math minds in the United States being born are being born white and in good households. It's that there's a lot of smart, intelligent minds being born to the United States that are being lost for some reason or another. And I think that this is just an important problem, and it's something that's important to me because I've noticed that when I meet mathematicians who don't come from what I would consider a standard mathematical background, it's always this repeating story of a student studying something and they have one professor or one mentor who takes an interest in them and this is the reason they go into mathematics. And while these are beautiful stories… what you should really take away every time you hear a story like that is that… without that one professor, without that one person, this story would never happen. And it's sort of very conditional on, you know, someone going above and beyond and that's not the normal story. Normally these people sort of… fall through the cracks, I would say.
Brandy Haran: It's not scalable to have these occasional saviors come and pluck someone from their…
John Urschel: Exactly and so I'm a case of… you know… strong mathematician, seeing me in a random class he taught and really deciding this kid has real talent, he is going to be a mathematician and I am going to show him, first of all what a mathematician does and how beautiful it is.
Brandy Haran: So you did have one of those people, John? I was imagining like football was your savior and the opportunities that football gave you took you there. But you also still had that one off mentor, did you?
John Urschel: Yes! So, it's not like a savior in a traditional sense. I mean okay, I'm at university, my life is going to be fine. I was, you know, majoring in engineering, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life and okay I eventually switched even to a math major but I had no clue what I was gonna do with my math major. I thought (sighs) you know I like math classes, I'll take a few of them, maybe I'll get a Masters in engineering or a Masters in economics or finance and then, you know, I'll go get a job. But, you know, I took this course in analysis from this professor and he could have just, you know, taught the class, given the exams, graded it and then just moved on with his life, 'cause you know he has important research to do.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
John Urschel: But, instead you know, he saw me in this class and he thought, wow, this kid has a real potential to be a good mathematician and he saw that in me and he decided to take it upon himself. It's not like I went to this guy and said hey, are there any extra things I could do, are there any sort of things you could have for me. He sought me out after class and told me to come visit him in his office. And he gave me a math book to read and he walked me through things that I could read and then he proposed that, you know, I try to do math research. And he thought that I would be quite good at it. And he mentored me through the entire process and before I met this guy, Vadim Kaloshin, before I interacted with him, I had no clue what the profession of mathematician even was.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
John Urschel: I'm gonna level with you. I was taking some college math classes and I think I'm not the exception. There's tons and tons of even college students who take math classes and have no clue what it is their math professors do. And have no clue what a mathematician even is.
Brandy Haran: That whole research culture's quite hidden from the students, isn't it?
They just see them as someone who's teaching them.
John Urschel: Yeah. I didn't even know what the word mathematician was. It's very dependent on your upbringing I think.
Brandy Haran: Do you think you've got something to contribute there then in letting people know what mathematicians are?
John Urschel: Yes, I think it's an important thing. Am I the best person for the job?
Certainly not, but for right or wrong I'm in a sphere of influence because I played American Football. This sphere of influence is especially prevalent in the United States where sports are extremely popular and American Football is the most popular sport and I have a responsibility to sort of use my platform to show people first of all, what is a mathematician. Second of all, why is math important to you as a person. Why is it important to you, if you want to go into a scientific field? Why is it important to you if you wanna even just be a writer? And third, I need to sort of be a role model because I recognize that like I was saying before there are so many brilliant minds that are sort of just being lost and falling through the cracks. I have a responsibility to sort of be a visible African American mathematician because it's hard for someone to want to grow up to be something when one, they don't know that something is and you know even lesser so but two, if you see that profession and you don't see anyone in that profession that let's say even looks like you. For a young person that can really be a discouraging thing.
Brandy Haran: It's an incredibly complicated issue, though, I wouldn't even know where to start talking about. But do you think the problem for talented young African American mathematicians is… mainly coming from on high or is it like a culture problem amongst themselves where it's just not an aspiration yet?
John Urschel: Both.
Brandy Haran: Right.
John Urschel: Both certainly play a part because so often in… and I shouldn't just say African American but in sort of poorer socio-economic areas, often sports are put on some pedestal as a way out. As a way to sort of better your life, or better yourself when in reality okay… this might just be my opinion. I think the greatest gift you can give someone is education. This is the most powerful tool to help someone improve their situation or lot in life but it isn't necessarily viewed like that in all places.
Brandy Haran: Do you ever wonder about your role as that messenger because obviously as you say you've been given this megaphone because of your athletic ability. You've been given the opportunity to speak to these people but at the same time it kind of undermines your argument because people can say well it's easy for you to say John, you're like athletically talented and huge and you got to play for the Baltimore Ravens and who are you to tell me to go and learn in school when you're like living some impossible dream.
John Urschel: Yeah, no I mean that's completely… it's completely reasonable. I have this sort of…
Brandy Haran: I'm not blaming you for being lucky. (laughs)
John Urschel: No (chuckles) it's true I have this podium. I was extremely lucky, not all people are as lucky as me, I'll say. Also I have plenty of teammates that I've played with who (sighs) finished playing and all of sudden their bank accounts start running out. They don't have a college degree. They have injuries or issues from playing and it's tough. And these are the people who made it to the NFL.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
John Urschel: Let alone the people who didn't even get there. So I'm saying… okay your dream is the NFL. You get there. You play in the NFL for let's say a year or two, the median career length in the NFL is three years, and now all of sudden you're out and you don't have any education to fall back on, in general this is recipe for disaster.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: So let me ask you perhaps one of the most difficult questions you could be asked, can you explain to us what your area of research is in an accessible way?
John Urschel: Oh… this, this I can do. So first of all, know that I get this question all the time, and now I'm getting this question to a math audience, so this… this is gravy. Okay, so my research in a nutshell is as follows. I do research in graph theory, which is effectively looking at properties of discrete networks in some sense.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
John Urschel: I do research in numerical analysis, which is looking at performing some sort of computations on a computer, that can't be performed let's say by hand with a piece of paper.
Brandy Haran: Yep.
John Urschel: And you know trying to find approximate solutions to things that can't be solved analytically, often. And then third I do a lot of work in sort of more classical machine learning. Like I do work related to unsupervised learning and clustering problems.
Brandy Haran: So in your field, we were talking about the Fields Medal earlier, if you're gonna win the Fields Medal and I think you've only got 13 years or so left.
What's the holy grail? What's the thing that someone like you could crack that would make you big man on campus?
John Urschel: That's a good question. First of all, I'm not winning a Fields Medal.
Brandy Haran: No? (laughs) Alright.
John Urschel: Not winning a Fields Medal.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) okay.
John Urschel: But there's a lot of interesting problems in all those fields. I'll just name a few…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
John Urschel: Just to give the audience to things that they can look into. Like in Graph Theory one of the biggest open problems is this so-called Graph Reconstruction Conjecture. Which simply asks, okay given that you have some graph and now you get to see the sub-graph induced by sort of like all the vertices but one…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
John Urschel: For every single subset of that order, can you reconstruct the original graph back. So that's a big sort of open problem that should be easy but is not. In Numerical Analysis, at least in sort of the area I work in, one of the most interesting open questions is can you solve the equation A X equals B. The linear equation A X equals B where A is let's say like a symmetric diagonally dominate matrix. Can you solve this in linear time?
Brandy Haran: Okay.
John Urschel: This is an important open question. In sort of unsupervised machine learning it's much harder to sort of define very important open questions but I also do a lot of work in quantization and so an open problem that's sort of quite related to sphere packing is something call Gershell-Shin* Conjecture which comes from information theory and this is a big open problem. So… I named a few I suppose.
Brandy Haran: When you look forward in your career, like ten, twenty years or so and you think about what's ahead, what excites you the most? Like is it the papers you'll publish? Is it the possible PhD students you'll supervise? What's the thing you look forward to that just makes you think, oh I can't wait, I can't wait to get there?
John Urschel: Just spending day after day, month after month, year after year, working on some really hard problems.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
John Urschel: And just loving it. Just loving the struggle.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) it's such a different life to a footballer, isn't it?
John Urschel: Yeah, yeah. I mean failure is just viewed so differently in football and math, I'd say.
Brandy Haran: I heard you talking about that at a talk you gave, last weekend. I thought that was really interesting. Like failure is just not an option in football and yet it's a really positive thing in mathematics.
John Urschel: Yeah, of course. I mean listen if you're a mathematician and you're trying to solve problems and you very rarely fail to solve something… you are really not pushing yourself that hard in my opinion.
Brandy Haran: And what about failure in football?
John Urschel: Yeah if you're failing a lot in football then you have some problems. It's quite the opposite.
Brandy Haran: Let me quickly ask you about chess. 'Cause anyone who reads about you knows you're into chess. You gave a talk about it recently at the National Math Festival.
John Urschel: Yeah, yeah. I welcome chess questions.
Brandy Haran: I have no specific questions, just where you into that from when you were young? Did you get into that later, or…?
John Urschel: Yeah that's a great question. I didn't really get into chess until like I was a junior in college I would say. I was pretty late to the game and even then I was sort of very casually into it. I didn't start taking chess seriously until maybe like… three or four or five years ago. You know it's a hobby of mine. I very rarely play chess.
Brandy Haran: Right.
John Urschel: It's a hobby I quite enjoy. I hope to enjoy doing it for quite a while.
Brandy Haran: You have no aspirations though, like your competitive side hasn't infiltrated chess, you're happy just doing it for fun? You don't wanna be like a certain level or a certain ranking or number or something?
John Urschel: Oh well… now that you mention it.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
John Urschel: Okay, I have a hobby, I enjoy it. I don't wanna be awful at it, you know what I mean? I've really toned my competitiveness down but I can only tone it down so much so like, yeah with respect to chess, like I'll probably become something called a National Master.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
John Urschel: It's a title of Master sort of… on the sort of ladder of Master titles.
Brandy Haran: Well that sounds pretty cool being able to call yourself and kind of Master, sounds pretty cool.
John Urschel: Yeah, yeah. That would be like just something for myself so that I can tell myself, well John you're not that awful at chess.
Brandy Haran: So you've written a book?
John Urschel: Yeah I wrote a book. That's true.
Brandy Haran: I have not read it yet. I haven't managed to get my hands on a copy, 'cause as we record it's not even released yet but by the time people are listening to this it will be released and something they can get their hands on. Mind and Matter, is that the title?
John Urschel: Yes, that's correct. A Life in Math and Football.
Brandy Haran: Why is it called Mind and Matter?
John Urschel: The Mind and Matter, it's a reference to Schrodinger, you know if you look at sort of the works of Schrodinger he wrote something called Mind and Matter.
Brandy Haran: Oh so you've just stolen the name then, basically?
John Urschel: (chuckles) Yeah, I've pretty much just stolen it. Although I have to admit that I'm not the only person who's stolen it because a friend of mine actually stole the Instagram handle Mindandmatter.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
John Urschel: so like, there's a lot of theft to go around. I want you to know.
Brandy Haran: I see you've cowritten the book. You have a coauthor.
John Urschel: Yeah. That's my partner.
Brandy Haran: It is. Louisa Thomas and she's a writer?
John Urschel: It's a family affair, she's quite a good writer. She's written a number of books.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
John Urschel: Mostly historical non-fiction.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. So how does the writing process work when you write a book with your partner? What does that look like?
John Urschel: The way it looks like is she makes all of the narrative sound really really good, way better than I sounded in the first place and I take care of all the math.
Brandy Haran: You're handling the math and you're just splat everything on a page and then she just has pulled it into like… a narrative shape or?
John Urschel: She makes me sound more eloquent than I originally was.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) You sound pretty eloquent. Do you ever disagree? What happens when you disagree, like?
John Urschel: Thing is we don't disagree because I know she knows what sounds best.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
John Urschel: And she knows I know how to convey math.
Brandy Haran: Cool. Alright.
John Urschel: Yeah and so we both agreed we know when the other person is the expert.
Brandy Haran: Okay. How would you describe the book for people who are gonna read it? Are they gonna get lots of math? Are they gonna get lots of football? I have no idea what to expect.
John Urschel: Yeah, they're gonna get about half math, half football. It's a memoir, it's about sort of my life. For math fans first of all, the chapters even tell you what is in which chapter. So if you are not an American Football fan, let me tell you, you can just skip the football chapters. It's very clear sort of…
Brandy Haran: (laughs) yeah.
John Urschel: What the topic of each chapter is and I'll focus on the math part because of the audience. I would say it's just my journey with mathematics from being like a little kid all the way through sort of my PhD at MIT and while you know I'm doing any serious math, I'm teaching you calculus, I'm introducing you to a lot of mathematical ideas that I believe are quite interesting and that I personally interacted with as I grew up. And you'll see them and you'll interact with as I did.
Brandy Haran: So someone reading this, I mean obviously you want them to come away with multiple things but are you wanting them to come away having learned math, or just like to be inspired or just learn a bit more about who you are? What would you describe the main purpose of this book? Why are you putting it out there in the world?
John Urschel: I would like you as the reader, okay perhaps you already like math in which case I want you to enjoy the book, but for a broader audience I want reader's to come away with an appreciation of math that perhaps they didn't have before, especially given sort of their experiences in school or their current experiences in school. I want them to walk away with a new found appreciation for math that perhaps a lot of the readers got because they were coming for some football.
Brandy Haran: Nice. Just sneaking a bit of a medicine in the dog food.
John Urschel: Yeah, except, yeah you try to sneak it in and all of a sudden the dog food is just like completely covered by medicine.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) And the medicine starts tasting pretty good.
John Urschel: Yeah, exactly.
(gentle music)
John Urschel: People often talk about the wonder of the things I've done, like the wonder of doing American Football and math but sometimes I like to try to stress that there's really no secret for just hard work.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
John Urschel: Like there's really no substitute. There's no like secret formula. It's just I hope that you really love the things that you do and you work really hard at them and that's like for someone who wants to be, you know, successful at something or successful at multiple things, that's really all the advice I can give you. There's no secret.
Brandy Haran: Can I get you on the record with one last deal as well?
John Urschel: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: If I make my way over to MIT sometime and bring over some brown paper you think you'll talk me through a bit of mathematics for a couple of videos as well?
John Urschel: Absolutely I would love to.
Brandy Haran: Alright then. Well, seeing you've agreed to that I will for one more time tell people that they must check out Mind and Matter, by John Urschel and Louisa Thomas, it's gonna be worth a read. I will include links like in all the usual places and stuff like that for people who want to check it out but I wanna say… thanks so much for your time, John and it's been really interesting.
John Urschel: Yeah, thanks for having me.
(gentle music fades in)
Brandy Haran: For more about John's work at MIT and a bit more about his football career too, I'll include some links in the show notes and of course I'll also link to his book, Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football. It's got a really great cover. There's a big burly John pictured on the front but he's covered in chalk and standing in front of a blackboard. (music continues) The Numberphile podcast is made possible by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, that's in Berkeley, California. And this episode was supported by the audio engineering company Meyer Sound, who are also based in Berkeley. You can find out more about both MSRI and Meyer Sound via links also in the show notes. My name's Brady Haran, I'll be back again soon with another podcast and our next guest is someone who's been requested by our listeners very often, so stay tuned for that one. In the meantime you can watch all our Numberphile videos, support us on Patreon, maybe check out merchandise like t-shirts and mugs and posters and stuff by going to our webpage, that's Numberphile.com. Thanks so much for your time and hope to catch you again soon.
(music fades out)
⁂
[ Fame and Admiration ]
Summary: Fields Medallist Sir Timothy Gowers discusses his career - and the role of ‘begrudging admiration’ in mathematics.
Brady Haran: Ready to open your heart to me?
(gentle music fades in)
Timothy Gower: Well, we’ll see. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
(music fades up)
Brandy Haran: Today’s guest is the English mathematician Sir Timothy Gowers. (music continues) Among his numerous accolades is the Fields Medal he won in 1998.
Well, it’s a medal he pretty much hasn’t seen since by the sounds of it, but we’ll come to that later. (music continues) I visited Professor Gowers at his office in Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.
(music fades down)
Brandy Haran: Where are you from actually? Where were you born? (music continues) You sound very English.
(music fades out)
Timothy Gower: I am… pretty English.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Timothy Gower: I was born in a town called Marlborough in Wiltshire and grew up in London.
Brandy Haran: Did you grow up with mathy people like were your parents mathematical?
Timothy Gower: They were musicians but my father was always interested in maths and did maths up to… A level.
Brandy Haran: And were you like one of these prodigy boy… were you like… was it obvious you were gonna be a mathematician?
Timothy Gower: Um, I was… quite… uhh… I think it was sort of… when I was quite young, and I sort of picked up music quickly, so… (groans) that was quite a big thing. And at school I was one of the good ones, but not sort of far and away the best person at school. Particularly in maths…
Brandy Haran: Right?
Timothy Gower: …but in general I was sort of reasonably good all around there and… maths was always gonna be in the mix somewhere.
Brandy Haran: Did you want it to be in the mix, like if I’d spoken to you as a boy and said what do you want to grow up? What would the answer’ve been?
Timothy Gower: When I was really young I think I wanted to be a doctor because there were doctors in my family, but I think I wanted to be a doctor with a beard, and I don’t know exactly why that…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: …detail was… so I’m actually neither.
Brandy Haran: Professor Gowers is clean shaven for those who don’t know what he looks like.
Timothy Gower: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Very well clean shaven.
Timothy Gower: I suppose I did have a PhD so I was a sort of doctor for a while.
Brandy Haran: A doctor with a beard? Did you doctor had a beard? Like where did that get into your head?
Timothy Gower: I don’t know. I think maybe some… there may have been an ancestor. My mother’s father was part of a long line of doctors in Marlborough actually. So that may have had something to do with it. I’m not quite sure. Anyway, my father was a composer and I think I had some aspirations in that direction at a certain age, but (sighs) maths was not by… not as by a very long way but certainly I think I would say usually my favorite subject at school and I think that was partly because of less learning to do, you just… once you understood something… course I realized later that that was only… up to a certain point…
Brandy Haran: Yeah. (laughs)
Timothy Gower: …then after that point there’s a lot of learning to do in maths.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Timothy Gower: …but… (pauses)
Brandy Haran: But it was like a path of least resistance at that point?
Timothy Gower: There’s a bit of that, yeah, so I feel that there’s… there’s a slight sort of element of laziness to my… liking of mathematics.
Brandy Haran: Well did you like music, or was that because your parents were musical?
Timothy Gower: I very much liked music.
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Timothy Gower: And… music was a big part of my childhood and I sang for example as a chorister in King’s College Choir, here in Cambridge, which was a… left its mark somehow. And I learnt the violin and the piano and…
Brandy Haran: You’re still musical now?
Timothy Gower: Yes I don’t not very actively but… not completely inactively.
Brandy Haran: Do you still sing?
Timothy Gower: No that stopped… when I got to about the age of eighteen my broken voice wasn’t something that really should be inflicted on the world.
Brandy Haran: Okay. (laughs) At what point then in your school years did the switch happen where it was like, okay, I’m gonna be a mathematician, I’m gonna take this further?
Timothy Gower: Well quite late, because I certainly… basically at each stage of my… childhood and early adulthood there would be… I’d be doing something. I’d be doing A levels or a degree or a PhD and there would be something just over the horizon which would be the next stage and at each stage I wanted to get to the next stage so by… when I was doing O levels as we did then I wanted to do A levels in mathematics, and when I did A levels in mathematics I wanted to do a degree and when I was doing to degree I wanted to do a PhD, and when I was doing a PhD I wanted to get a research fellowship afterwards. And each stage…
Brandy Haran: But…
Timothy Gower: …I cleared the hurdle, so to speak.
Brandy Haran: But at O levels you presumably you did English at O levels as well?
Timothy Gower: Oh yes, so it was…
Brandy Haran: So there was a…
Timothy Gower: …the full range.
Brandy Haran: So there was a next stage for English as well? You could’ve done A levels English, you could’ve a degree in English.
Timothy Gower: Right.
Brandy Haran: Why was math the one you wanted to jump the next hurdle of?
Timothy Gower: Well at that point it was because what I was (hesitates) said I mean… actually I… think I could have enjoyed English but I think it maybe it wasn’t just a sort… the fact that in maths you didn’t have to do much learning… it was also that and maybe this is a… yeah… the tasks were sort of more (sighs) well-defined. So at school… nowadays I really enjoy writing, effectively essay writing in the form of blog posts and things like that, but at school I really didn’t like it because… the task was somehow… if we take something like a history essay that we were told to, you know, we’re given a title and had to write it, but writing a history essay meant looking at one source, which would be a textbook and… sort of rewriting a small chunk of it in our own words and not trying not to stick too closely to the textbook but not deviating too ridiculously from it and it was a silly exercise.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: Nobody had really stopped to say, what a good essay was and one didn’t have something, I mean I find writing… an essay is a whole lot easier if you have something you want to say in the first place, whereas if your churning out an essay as part of your school work you’ve been told what to say and so it’s not something that’s coming within that you’re keen to explain to people. So I didn’t enjoy the humanities in the way that if I went back now as an adult, perhaps I would, so that was another reason for… the tasks that one had to do in maths were much more clearly defined and… but also I think another aspect of it was the… (pauses) genuine intellectual excitement of… things like… learning calculus, I remember when I first did that and a whole lot of problems that would’ve seemed completely impossible… suddenly became possible and when I saw a car accelerate somehow my whole perception of that would be completely different once I knew about derivatives and integrals and I remember, I really remember feeling that the world had become a clearer place (laugh) after I learnt calculus and that was very exciting.
Brandy Haran: A lot of people I’ve spoken to who are mathematical have spoken about how when they first got to university that’s when they got excited about mathematics because they started learning about the creative side of it and proofs and all these new things they could do. It sounds like that came a bit earlier for you though? Like, just knowing the power of the tools was what excited you, not even the creative side of it yet.
Timothy Gower: Yes that’s sort of true but also I did have various extremely enlightened and interesting teachers. And in particular when I was a teenager I had a teacher, he was called Norman Routledge who didn’t just teach us the tools and so to speak, the boring stuff, even if some of the boring stuff is very interesting, but also… gave us problems that had twists and required creativity and things. And also towards the end of my school days, the Maths Olympiad became quite an important thing and those were definitely problems where you needed a bit of creativity.
Brandy Haran: How did you do in the Maths Olympiad? I forgot that you’d done that.
Timothy Gower: I made the British team in... uh… 1981.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: We went to Washington DC. Uhh…
Brandy Haran: How’d you do?
Timothy Gower: I got a gold medal.
Brandy Haran: Gold medal!
Timothy Gower: It was an interesting one actually, I actually got… full marks but that sounds better than it was because… they were introducing a whole lot of new countries and I think they made the questions a bit easier.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: And so rather a lot of people, I think about twenty-five people got full marks so it wasn’t…
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: …it’s not what it would’ve been in another year.
Brandy Haran: There’s also this… I don’t know much about the Maths Olympiad, but the little bit I do know is they then have these extra medals they give for students that come up with like unexpected proofs and solution.
Timothy Gower: Right. Yeah I didn’t get one of those.
Brandy Haran: (tsks) Ahh.
Timothy Gower: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Nevermind. You’ve made up for it since.
Timothy Gower: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Have you still got the gold medal? Do they give you an actual medal… like?
Timothy Gower: I… actually can’t remember. I remember they gave us a… programmable calculator. Which was quite a nice thing to get.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Timothy Gower: Which I had for a while until it… eventually died.
Brandy Haran: Right. (laughs) Did you keep it anyway, like as a memento on a shelf? Or did you toss it in the bin?
Timothy Gower: It’s not something I would’ve thrown away… I have a sorting that’s intermediate between keeping and not keeping which is putting in a place, a storage place, in the house that’s full of (laughs) a lot.
Brandy Haran: Right. (chuckles)
Timothy Gower: So I think it must be there somewhere but I have no idea where exactly.
Brandy Haran: That’s my one day, I’m gonna go with you and find that.
Timothy Gower: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) That’s on my list now. (laughs) So Math Olympiad, so you were clearly very good at mathematics.
Timothy Gower: At some point my father said to me, that… one thing that you can do… he’d been interested because he’d saw that I was interested in maths, he talked to one or two people he had met who… and said what kind of careers are there in maths and…
Brandy Haran: He wasn’t shepherding you towards music? ‘Cause I mean you say…
Timothy Gower: No, no, no.
Brandy Haran: …your father was like not just a composer was he? He was like quite a successful one?
Timothy Gower: Yes he was quite… well known in certain circles so to speak.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. But he wasn’t pushing you towards music? He was fine with…
Timothy Gower: Not at all, no, I think he took the attitude that many musicians would take which was that if someone has a… a real calling that they can’t not be a musician then but they better be a musician but… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah… (laughs)
Timothy Gower: In a way I was… by doing maths I was following a path that he would in another life perhaps have liked to follow himself so I think I was in a way doing something that he was… I’m not saying I felt pressure in that direction either but…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Timothy Gower: You know, I was… it’d please him that I went in that direction.
Brandy Haran: As in mathematics or as in just like academia and doctorate…
Timothy Gower: No not so much academia, in fact he… himself could’ve been an academic musician, ‘cause he did very well at academically when he was at university and it was fairly clear that he could’ve taken that path but he decided to take the riskier path of leaving and trying to make it as a composer… which…
Brandy Haran: So anyway, he planted the seed, you know, you could go into academia, you could be a…
Timothy Gower: Actually it was almost the opposite so he was saying that from the people he’d talked to… (pause) he got the impression that it was very good to do mathematics because it’s always much easier to turn away from mathematics at some point to go back into mathematics and so however much of an applied type thing you want to do. Sort of… if you stay pure for a long time then at some point you can move out from that so it was a good… it was keeping one’s options open.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: But he just mentioned at that point that one option if you carry on with maths, so to speak forever, is being… going into academia, but that’s an extremely hard thing and you have to be so to speak right at the top and so… I assumed at that stage when I was at school that I had no chance of that or that was very unlikely but when the Olympiad thing happened that was a sort of semi-objective measure and I sort of realized that at least it was something that might be a possibility. But I would say even at that point… I didn’t really have much conception of what it was to be a mathematician as a job.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: What was research was like. If somebody had said to me at that stage, what is research in maths? I couldn’t… there’s a question that people often ask, how can you do research in maths, surely it’s all been worked out a hundred years ago and… once one is a mathematician one realizes that… that’s just so far from being the right way of looking at things and that every time you solve a problem you accidentally create five more problems and… the subject is just completely inexhaustible.
(gentle violin music)
Brandy Haran: Where did you go to university then? Where did you…
Timothy Gower: At Cambridge.
Brandy Haran: Right?
Timothy Gower: So… and… uh… but even as a beginning undergraduate I didn’t really have much of an idea of what… mathematical research could be like, in fact possibly not even starting a PhD, ‘cause a PhD one has this… slightly… one feels a bit daunted that… how could… I, who’ve only just graduated, possibly solve a problem that these brilliant mathematicians over the last few decades have not manage to solve?
Brandy Haran: Why did you do it then? Why did you start a PhD? If you…
Timothy Gower: Because… I could sort of see empirically that people did go into PhDs and did solve problems. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Okay, right.
Timothy Gower: Get their PhDs.
Brandy Haran: You think if they can do it, I can do it?
Timothy Gower: Well, that I have a chance of being able to do it.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Timothy Gower: It’s just that I couldn’t really see how it might be possible and I suppose the things… the two things that I didn’t appreciate as much as I, you know… at the time where one, just how much the subject expands and so there are… all the time it expands, and so there’re always problems that… they may be quite hard but just because they’re open problems it doesn’t mean that all sorts of top mathematicians have worked on them, sometimes they’re just haven’t… people haven’t got ‘round to those problems or they’re questions that arise naturally out of a paper but… it doesn’t, you know, maybe one or two people’ve thought about it but… and then the second thing I suppose I appreciate now particularly when I get to my stage is… my career stage, is just how much… the experienced mathematicians, how much… how many demands there are on their time which maybe stop them doing a certain amount… a certain kind of thought. There’s a certain sort of thought that you can do as a young mathematician with lots of time which is just really worrying away at something for ages and ages and being completely focused on that thing and sometimes that’s what’s needed to solve a problem you just need somebody who will worry away at it until eventually the difficulties… get chipped away and they finally end up with a solution and sometimes the time investment that’s need… and the single mindedness that’s needed for that is something that you just don’t really have the opportunity for later in the career so there was also sort of a young persons problem, and I think older people are more likely, it’s not… obviously this is over simplifying a lot and there are exceptions to everything but older people will tend to look a bit more for something that’s a bit of a quicker gain given the experience that they’ve built up over their career.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: So that ends up… often solving things that younger people might’ve found difficult but it’s a different style of question which leaves open the other style of question (laughs) that the younger person can…
Brandy Haran: But I mean professor, you’re clearly quite a humble person but it would be pretty hard to deny you’ve become quite accomplished as a mathematician and won all these awards and have all these honors so obviously you’re like a top top mathematician. At what point in your career as a younger mathematician like at university did people start saying to you, Tim I think you could be really good at this, I think you could, you know, I think you could be one of the really good ones. What point were you getting that some kind of stuff said to you? As an undergraduate or does it happen when you become a PhD?
Timothy Gower: Definite… no not as an undergraduate and I think I didn’t… as an undergraduate… stand out as somebody who was obviously destined for… an academic career. When I finished my PhD I got a research fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge. That is… probably… as for most for people that will be…
Brandy Haran: A pretty big deal?
Timothy Gower: More or less a guarantee of a career in academia unless you just don’t do anything during your fellowship.
Brandy Haran: Yeah (laughs)
Timothy Gower: So at that point I had sort of got it made in a certain way. In the sense that my career prospects were looking good.
Brandy Haran: Can you give us some idea about your area of research that you were doing at this point?
Timothy Gower: Well I started out in an area known as the geometry of Banach spaces. So a Banach space is… it’s a bit like a generalization of three dimensional space to infinite dimensions. It doesn’t… it actually they don’t have to be infinite dimensional but large finite or infinite dimensional. But there’s also a twist which is that in three dimensions if you want to work out the distance between two points the most common way of doing it is to look at the… just add up the squares of the differences of their coordinates and take the square root, so that’s using Pythagoras’ Theorem. But that’s only one form of distance, maybe there’s something… a distance that people often like to talk about in two dimensions actually called a Manhattan metric, so if you’re going from one part of Manhattan to another, the distance as the crow flies would be… the one you calculate using Pythagoras but the distance that actually matters is the one where you have to always go horizontally or vertically because that’s just ‘cause of the grid plan of Manhattan.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: And in general… there turn out to be many different sensible ways of putting a distance onto a high dimensional space. If you then look at the set of points that are of distance one from the origin, it turns out that you get a convex body, a shape that is convex, so that means any two points if you look at the line segment… any two points in the body, the line segment must lie entirely within the bodies, there are no sort of dimples on the side.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: That would allow a segment to pass out and then back in again.
Brandy Haran: Like a sphere in three dimensional space?
Timothy Gower: So a sphere is a good example of a convex body and so is a cube… but… something like a torus would not be convex or a sort of dart shape in two dimensions… anyway is not convex. So because of this correspondence between notions of distance on space and convex bodies you get… that’s why the word geometry comes in, so the geometry… there’s a study of these Banach spaces, these notions of distance on high dimension space, has a geometrical aspect. It’s called the geometry of Banach spaces. So I worked in that. It’s also a branch of a… wider part of mathematics called functional analysis. So I was an analyst, but of a somewhat combinatorial kind and then over the years I moved more into that combinatorial side became accentuated and then… the analysis became lessened. I’ve sort of gone from a combinatorial flavored analyst to an analysis flavored combinatorialist. (laugh) I think that would be the way I would… describe my research interests. So combinatorics I’ve always liked because maybe you’d say it’s the branch of maths that’s closest to Maths Olympiads you have (laughs) sort of… problems that can be… where the question can be understood very quickly and easily but finding the solution is hard and requires a lot of ingenuity.
Brandy Haran: When you started your degree, obviously you had the whole buffet of mathematics before you, what pushed you in that direction? Was it a person?
Was it just an enjoyment… a natural affinity for the subject? Why did you end up these Banach spaces?
Timothy Gower: Well it’s… funnily enough it’s a continuation of the instinct that drove me into maths in the first place. Well, it’s two things. So you asked briefly whether it was a inspiring person and the answer was yes, there was a person called Béla Bollobás who became my research supervisor and had been my director of studies as an undergraduate who’s a very charismatic and brilliant mathematician and… I had a friend, a good friend, Imre Leader who was his student and really clearly enjoyed it. And that was what… what Bollobás was doing at that point. He’s a combinatorialist but he was also working in Banach spaces at that time. So that’s one reason, a particularly influential person. But another reason was that there are some branches of mathematics where you have to learn a whole lot of machinery and really get very up on the literature before you can realistically do serious research, a good example of that would be algebraic number theory, the branch of maths that goes into the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem for example. Combinatorics is slightly the other extreme, you can just dive in and start trying to solve the problem straight away.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: There are bits of machinery and useful tools, definitely, like in any branch of maths but you don’t have to master them all in advance you can just pick them up as you need them. So I found that quite appealing. The same sort of laziness thing (laughs) I just wanted to get on and…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Timothy Gower: I’d had enough after what we call part three mathematics where that was the amount of learning I had to do there was just huge and I just wanted to… stop all that and just think about problems and try and solve problems and just at that point I really wanted to solve just any unsolved problem. The idea of being the first person to solve a problem was just so thrilling.
Brandy Haran: That was… you had a hunger for that, like a hunger for that kind of side of…?
Timothy Gower: Yeah, the sort of… yes… I suppose if you ask my why, that’s an interesting one. Um… part of it was a genuine interest in the subject. But there was also this idea of sort of wanting to be the person who solved such and such a problem.
Brandy Haran: So is that almost like… like a fame or an ego like a...
Timothy Gower: No, I think… I have to admit I think there is that side to it.
Brandy Haran: There is a degree of wanting to be… the person who did it, the person who found it? Like the Neil Armstrong or the…
Timothy Gower: Yes I’d… I think that… wanting to get a certain amount of… fame and admiration… well as somebody once put it, begrudging admiration of a handful peers or something (laughs)…
Brandy Haran: Right. (laughs)
Timothy Gower: Anyway… is a very important motivation for many mathematicians.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Timothy Gower: Whether they admit it or not, I don’t… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Timothy Gower: And it’s an interesting aspect of the subject that has its problematic side. So I’ve often felt that the most efficient way of doing mathematics might well to be… be to be far more cooperative and to… share one’s ideas as soon as one has them and so on but then you have that balance that against taking away one of the power drivers, I mean… you’ve gotta have something that’s gonna make people prepared to put in the effort…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Timothy Gower: To solve a hard maths problem, which will then be understood by virtually nobody in the world. (laughs) So…
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Yeah.
Timothy Gower: I think unfortunately this sort of ego boosting side of things is an essential part of the discipline.
Brandy Haran: It’s part of the compensation package.
Timothy Gower: (laughs) Something like that yes.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. So that kind of model of the… the Andrew Wiles hiding in the attic and not telling any what he’s doing for fifteen years or something has its merits because otherwise that work just wouldn’t get done in the first place.
Timothy Gower: Yes it does. I mean I feel that though… I feel uneasy about that story being… it is fantastic that it happened but… it’s some… romantic stories in mathematics is a danger that they can be a little bit harmful because they’re really very very untypical and I would never… any research student of mine, I would say don’t… what ever you do (laughs)…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: …go into an attic for seven years without telling anyone what you’re working. It’s just… it was a massive risk that paid off for Andrew Wiles. He must’ve I suppose… sensed that… he had a reasonable chance of success but… I think for everyone of those you can find…
Brandy Haran: A wasted life. (laughs)
Timothy Gower: There are examples, I won’t mention any names but there are examples of people who just decided they wanted to do something a bit like that and it didn’t end well.
Brandy Haran: Do you remember your first flag planting Neil Armstrong moment? The first time you felt like you’d found something new and significant? Your first big moment like that?
Timothy Gower: Um… it came gradually, so the first time I did anything new… I don’t remember the precise moment but the thing that I did was just a little tweak to an existing argument that… improved the… answer at the end. Improved the bound, but not to the best bound you could possibly get and… I remember presenting it out at a seminar where one of the experts in the area was present who didn’t seem, you know, it’s sort of, okay. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) You didn’t get the response you were hoping for?
Timothy Gower: Yeah but in a way that spurred me on a little bit and so I worried away. I mean I did what I was talking about, worried away at that particular problem and eventually did get, by a much more complicated argument, an almost best possible answer for that particular problem.
Brandy Haran: Did that person then get impressed?
Timothy Gower: Uhh… I don’t know. I think he… well he certainly would’ve been likely to have been more… more interested but… I don’t… but somebody, there was another mathematician who was very supportive to me at that stage of my career, who definitely liked this result. So that was helpful. But there’s… another thing that I recall… I mean, it was the first… the thing that I really think of as important first was not so much the first… serious piece of work that I did. It was the first time I solved a problem that was something that I’d kind of seen… (pauses) at some point and dreamt about so to speak, I mean I’ve… as it were… (sighs) as a young… (pause) a young child seeing Fermat’s Last Theorem and thinking it would be amazing to solve that, it was a bit like that except it was local to this area. There were a couple of problems…
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: …that were… big problems in the area that were mentioned as open problems in a… one of the basic textbooks in the area.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: Lovely problems. And… I suddenly at some point realized that I had an idea that gave me a serious chance of solving it as I worked on it absolutely flat out (clears throat) over one summer.
Brandy Haran: What was it called?
Timothy Gower: It was called the Unconditional Basic Sequence Problem. So I solved that with a… complicated counter example.
Brandy Haran: So this wasn’t a proof, this was almost just like a… this is different to a proof?
Timothy Gower: It was a solution to a problem, and the problem said, is such and such always the case… does every Banach space have such and such a property.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Timothy Gower: And the answer was no, here’s a horrible Banach space that does not have that property.
Brandy Haran: So you have kind of proven something, by counter example?
Timothy Gower: Yes you have, yes. No, no, that’s…
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah, right.
Timothy Gower: …it’s just… not… maybe sometimes counter examples slightly sort of close off an area and sort of had a little bit of that, although there were some positive outcomes of it as well. But anyway, the story was complicated because not long after I did it… I heard… that another mathematician had also done it. Actually very slightly after me but definitely independently of me, and I was so shocked when I first heard that that I realized I just couldn’t do anything… so I went to the cinema, it’s the middle of afternoon (laughs) I went to the cinema instead and watched Terminator 2.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: It’s a good movie.
Timothy Gower: Yeah. It sort of…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: …took my mind off it for a… couple of hours and then I came out again, boom, it was back in my mind again.
Brandy Haran: Why did that worry you though? You knew you’d done it, and you’d done it marginally first, so why was this such a blow to you?
Timothy Gower: Well in retrospective it shouldn’t’ve been but just at… the time… I sort… it felt like losing half the…
Brandy Haran: Oh right.
Timothy Gower: …half the credit for this thing and…
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Timothy Gower: …not being the person but it was all sort of… actually what happened was we then wrote up a paper together and then there was a follow up paper that was… had some other results and I now realize that when this happens, which happens quite often, when someone solves a problem and somebody else solves it independently, you don’t actually… people sort of say, wow, you’ve solved the problem. Even if it’s not independent, even if two people solve it jointly, I feel that they get individually about as much credit as if they (laughs) solved it…
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: …individually but at the time I was just sort too inexperienced… but I was… the shock and disappointment passed reasonably quickly.
Brandy Haran: After Terminator 2 basically. Put’s everything in perspective when you see the world being annihilated. (laughs)
Timothy Gower: That definitely helped but it was immediately afterward. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: But then I sort of went on and did other things as well and… so that is also a bit like if you… a relationship breakup, there’s nothing like another relationship (laughs) to help.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Yeah.
Timothy Gower: So it was a bit like that with research as well. So I’ve subsequently, I mean everybody, I mean every mathematical career has disappointments in it of this kind, not necessarily precisely that kind but maybe a problem that you’ve been working on for a long time gets solved by someone else and… or… yeah well there are the various different ways but… (swallows) you sort of get used to that as being… part of… mathematical life… and just… the solution to it is just to pick up… pick yourself up and… keep going and do something else instead and…
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: So you won the Fields Medal and I know the Fields Medal is awarded for like a body of work, almost, like a consistent. Is there kind of one thing, was there a pinup thing? Like what would the thing that they chip into your tombstone or something? What was your big one?
Timothy Gower: I think in my case it was not just one big one, it is for some people, for me it’s more like a big three or four things. So there was the counter example I’ve just talked about in Banach spaces and then there was also a theorem in Banach spaces that proved… solved positively a question that Banach had himself asked, which was I suppose one of my headline results. And then there was also…
Brandy Haran: Did you get your name on it? Is it called the Gowers Theorem or anything or…?
Timothy Gower: Not really, that’s not referred to in that way but there is something related to it called the Gowers Dichotomy which was part of the proof.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Timothy Gower: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: That’ll do.
Timothy Gower: Sometimes no, though anyway.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Timothy Gower: And that’s quite in a way that’s quite a nice one.
Brandy Haran: You’ve got your own dichotomy, not many…
Timothy Gower: Exactly, yeah.
Brandy Haran: …people’ve got that. Everyone’s got a theorem. (chuckles) You’ve got a dichotomy.
Timothy Gower: Yeah, if someone gets a trichotomy then I’ll be envious but…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: (laughs) And then… but around about the time that I got it, the Fields Medal, I was… had started my move towards more combinatorial things and in particular a branch that’s now known as additive combinatorics. And so perhaps a bit oversold the results, if looking back now the thing which I’d be remembered for most out of those… results would be for a new proof of a result called Szemerédi’s Theorem. It may sound a bit strange that finding a new proof of an existing theorem should be a thing that stands up but it did do something that hadn’t been done before, it gave, a sensible quantitive bound for this particular theorem, which hadn’t been done before, but also that the methods that went into it had been quite influential and lead to other developments. So and then that sometimes happens that a… that… a proof can be more important than the result that it proves and I think that’s a little bit the case here, that… the ideas that went into the proof are more… the theorem is not something that you’d necessarily… occasionally it can be directly applied to another problem but that’s less usual than the ingredients that went into the proof being applied to another problem.
Brandy Haran: Do you remember how you found out that you’d won the Fields Medal?
Timothy Gower: Uh… yes I do. I was summoned by my then head of department, John Coates, and so was someone else in my department. So he said can you come and see me and so we both went it.
Brandy Haran: What did you think it was? Did you think you were in trouble? You’d been raiding the stationary cupboard? (chuckles( Timothy Gower: I’m wasn’t quite sure although… (pause) John Coates had encouraged me to apply for a chair in the department way before I would’ve thought it was reasonable to apply for a chair. So it was already an exciting time, and I got it, I knew by that stage that I’d got the chair which came as a big surprise. A named chair it was… and I thought I was much too… young in my career for that even to sort of… (pauses)
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Timothy Gower: …not to sort of insult the department (laughs) to imply…
Brandy Haran: So you knew you weren’t in trouble ‘cause you were in the good books at the moment.
Timothy Gower: Yes.
Brandy Haran: Yeah? (laughs)
Timothy Gower: And then he said… well I’ve got some good news that you’ve both… got… the Fields Medal. So this was completely out of… it was very unusual for… (pause) I’m not sure whether it’s happened before that two people from the same department have got them at the same time. So because there were two of us it sort of didn’t feel… I didn’t think… I’m trying to remember I don’t think I suspected that he was about to say.
Brandy Haran: Oh okay.
Timothy Gower: And I don’t think I knew that he would have any idea about it anyway.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, like the only people I’ve spoken to about it, found out directly from the… that they’d won the Fields Medal, but you found out kind of like… second hand?
Timothy Gower: Well… it wasn’t totally second hand. I mean he was on the committee.
Brandy Haran: Oh, okay. (chuckles) Right.
Timothy Gower: As I subsequently learned.
Brandy Haran: So it was sort of part of his job to tell you, as well?
Timothy Gower: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: How did you feel? You’re sharing credit again. You’re having to share it with someone else.
Timothy Gower: No, no, that was okay.
Brandy Haran: That was okay. (laughs)
Timothy Gower: That was… actually in some ways I think that was quite good because then, one thing we had to keep a lid on it until the International Congress which was several months later.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: Yeah, I can’t remember it was probably January or February that I was told and then August when finally it became public.
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: But I think partly because it was two of us and the sort of level of… celebration and fuss that was made, once it did become public within Cambridge and within Trinity, he was also at Trinity, was perhaps greater than it would’ve been if it had just been one person.
Brandy Haran: Yeah. Yeah. Who was that by the way? Who…
Timothy Gower: Richard Borchards.
Brandy Haran: Right?
Timothy Gower: Who’s at… at uh… Berkeley.
Brandy Haran: Where is your Fields Medal? You don’t know do you? For sure? (laughs)
Timothy Gower: Well, I kind of… I’m know to within of ninety percent… certainty.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: So I… at the time I was a bit worried about keeping something that’s quite chunky and made of solid gold to sort of keeping it in a drawer somewhere in case the house got burgled or whatever.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: So I decided to get a safe deposit box at my… local bank. And… uh… I’ve put it in there and I haven’t seen it since. I haven’t sort of checked and the bank has moved branch.
Brandy Haran: Right? (laughs)
Timothy Gower: So I did get a bit worried about it a few years ago, but I wrote to them and asked, you know, I haven’t really heard anything about this safe deposit box so I thought that I… got charged a certain amount per year, I’ve not really seen anything connected with it on my bank statement…
Brandy Haran: Right.
Timothy Gower: …for a long time.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: I’m a bit anxious. And they said, oh well no if it was in the safe deposit box there it would’ve been moved to this branch so really there’s nothing to worry about.
Brandy Haran: But you haven’t gone and had a look to see?
Timothy Gower: But I haven’t actually got ‘round to… yeah.
Brandy Haran: When did you last see it with your eyes?
Timothy Gower: I suppose it must be about… uh… getting on for twenty years ago. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Oh! For goodness sake. That’s the other… when we go and find your calculator, we’re also gonna go and get the medal. (laughs)
Timothy Gower: Yeah, well, maybe we should.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: That’s your next Numberphile video. (laughs) To dig up the relics. We’re go on an Indiana Jones adventure. (laughs)
Timothy Gower: That would be exciting, yes.
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Timothy Gower: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) So among, well, you know, you’ve obviously won all sorts of things and but another honor you’ve got that I’m a little bit fascinated with is a Knighthood. Because you are… Sir… are you Sir Timothy? Or is it Tim?
Timothy Gower: Sir Timothy I suppose.
Brandy Haran: Sir Timothy. So… who did the sword for you? Who knighted you?
Timothy Gower: Oh I had… I got the Queen.
Brandy Haran: Oh! Yes!
Timothy Gower: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: That’s like the… well done. (laughs)
Timothy Gower: Hit the jackpot there.
Brandy Haran: Yeah amazing. What was that like? What did she say to you? Or are you allowed to say what the Queen says to you?
Timothy Gower: I’m allowed to, whether I can remember it’s…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: …only it’s that… you know if you’ve got your gong for… training horses or something then the Queen’s sort of very happy but…
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Twenty minute conversation then.
Timothy Gower: If you turn up as a mathematician…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: You can see the look of sort of terror on her face, what on earth am I going to say?
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: And… so, well I don’t know whether I broke protocol but I thought… she did look as though she was worrying about what she could possibly say so I thought I might… help her out a little bit so I said… I don’t know exactly how I put it but… roughly it boiled down to, we last met when you came to Cambridge to open… um… the new maths faculty there. And so she looked sort of (laughs) relieved and said yes and something like… is it going well or something? (laughs)
Brandy Haran: So you broke the ice for her?
Timothy Gower: Yeah. Before… once it’s happened protocol then dictates that you aren’t allowed to turn your back on the Queen, so you have to walk backwards away from her before turning and going… returning to your seat so I sort of headed backwards and (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: For people who don’t understand my excitement by the way, when you get a Knighthood you can… it could be conferred upon you by the Monarch herself or it could be like you know Prince Charles or someone else, the Duke of Cambridge and… so… I always think getting the Monarch themself is like… top top level…
Timothy Gower: Yeah so…
Brandy Haran: So you were lucky. You’re the first person I’ve met with a Knighthood who also got the Monarch. Everyone else I’ve met got Prince Charles, so, well done. (laughs) Luck of the draw, or were you special?
Timothy Gower: No, no, I think I was just… I think Prince Charles was doing some of them around that time and I just…
Brandy Haran: Yeah?
Timothy Gower: I think well, I’ll be even luckier now, I think she does, the Queen does fewer and fewer of them as she gets older and older ‘cause she has to stand for a long time to do it and…
Brandy Haran: Yeah, yeah. Do these mean much to you? Do Fields Medals and Knighthoods and things like, you know, what do they… how do you feel about them?
Timothy Gower: Uh… the Fields Medal is a complicated one. I mean I think you can’t… unless you’re… um… a really… one hundred percent shoe-in for the Fields Medal which I wasn’t, but, if you’re somebody like… Peter Schulze recently, where everybody sort of knew for years that he was gonna get a Fields Medal. I think you feel a little bit of sort of imposter syndrome because… especially as one progresses you just see more and more younger mathematicians doing completely incredible things that you couldn’t’ve do yourself and you sort of… you feel more acutely that you’re just one person in a large community of very good people. So… in a way you start thinking well a Fields Medal doesn’t mean all that much. But… that’s something you can only… it’s much easier to say if you’ve got one. (laughs) So… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: I don’t really mean that. I mean I… it has meant, in a way, a huge amount that I sort of relax about whether I’m gonna be remembered after my death for any length of time. I’ll be on that list and that’s been… I think that does… um… change one’s…
Brandy Haran: Is that motivating? Or does it make you rest on your laurels?
Timothy Gower: No. Well that is a very… I mean you’ve may have… be aware that there was a some literature about that and somebody did a study of… the subsequent mathematical output of one, Fields Medalists and two, people who were for various reasons thought of as strong candidates for Fields Medals who didn’t get them.
Brandy Haran: Hmm?
Timothy Gower: There’s quite a strong effect that the people who didn’t quite get them have produced more papers and things than the people who did.
Brandy Haran: Were you part of that study? You must’ve been.
Timothy Gower: I suppose I was, yes.
Brandy Haran: Oh.
Timothy Gower: Um… I’ve never produced a huge number of papers, I mean I’ve been a rather… my total number of papers is not that… high for somebody of my age, but… one of the things that was suggested was that if people who’ve got Fields Medals feel freer to do slightly different things, it’s not that they become… stop working altogether, although maybe that does happen in some case. But that they just might have other projects in life and when they’re not any longer struggling for recognition in mathematics they can afford to do that. So in my case that has been… a… the case… a little bit. So for example I took on editing a book called the Princeton Companion to Mathematics, which was an absolutely massive task, it took, I would estimate half of my working time for about five years or something like that. So that was a big chunk to take up, but it was a project I believed in and possibly wouldn’t… I probably wouldn’t’ve actually been offered to chance to do it if I hadn’t… been a Fields Medalist but I also might well have thought I can’t do that, because my research is too important.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Timothy Gower: And my… I mean my research definitely did suffer while I was doing that to some extent. It freed me up… I’ve got interested in… Artificial Intelligence, and automatic theorem proving in mathematics which… are things that I’ve perhaps taken a bit more seriously and devoted more time to than I would have felt I could if I’d… not… somehow become fully established as a mathematician.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: Can I ask you what research looks like? I’m always fascinated by the idea of mathematicians doing research, you know, oh I’ve got a week, I’m just gonna do it, spend a week doing research. What does that look like? Do you sit at this table here with a piece of paper and a pencil? Do you go for a walk or ride a bike? Or do you like… like how do you… if you’ve got time set aside to have an idea (chuckles) how do you have an idea?
Timothy Gower: Mhm. It’s changed a bit over the years, so when I was… when I started out it was just paper and pen and then I would try and have ideas and (sighs) when I did have an idea I’d write them up using… pen and paper and only when I was done would I then… type it up because typing was so much less convenient. Now I use a screen much more and I also now almost all my research these days is in collaboration. Mainly with my research students so one thing that I like to do with research students is have a private blog where we all write posts with our ideas and comments on posts.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: Little just nuggets of thought. So actually that works quite well because say I’ve got… sometimes it’s quite nice to have a little time limit, so supposing I’ve got twenty minutes before lunch and I think, I’ve just got to do… make an iota of progress between and now and lunchtime, I can sort of look at the blog, what’s my thoughts just then. It doesn’t have to be solving or answering a question that… we’d been struggling with for months, it can be just one idea, maybe… (pauses) I think maybe the mysterious thing is when you read a solution to a problem it’s just all there as sort of one unit and everything seems to depend on everything else and so… you might ask, how can all that come into your head at once?
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: And the answer is it can’t come into your head at once, you have to break it down. And this breaking down process is quite an interesting one but the fundamental activity is, I would say to following… you’ve got a question, you don’t know what the answer is, you think there’s pretty well no hope of just seeing the answer to that question, so you ask another question and the other question will be something that is… something that you judge to be easier to answer and something that will shed light on the first question so once you’ve answered it, your task of answering the original question will have become just a little bit easier.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: And if you can do that enough. And that it may… this is an iterative process so your first question may be very hard, you may reduce it to an easier question or not necessarily reduce it but you may come up with an easier question that feels useful in that way, which again you can’t answer and if you can’t then, you try and find an even easier one.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Timothy Gower: And there are various different ways of generating easier questions so you might for example generalize the first question and see whether you really needed all the hypothesis.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: And then answer may be… actually the question becomes cleaner and easier to answer once you’ve generalized it. Or it might be that once you’ve generalized it, you find a counter example which tells you the hypothesis that you got rid of was in fact necessary and would form an integral part of any positive solution to the first question. Once you know that it’s sort of… your a bit better on the scent of how to answer the question because you know it’s somewhere along the line you’ve got to use such and such, so when you’re trying to solve a problem you’re sort of searching for the particular chain of reasoning that will lead to the solution and what you’re trying to do when finding it is not necessarily to find it straight off but just to narrow down the search for this chain of reasoning. So you say, well I don’t know how to prove it but I know that any argument that I’m gonna come up with that works is going to have to have these properties and… the more you can… get those properties… to narrow down the chain of… what the chain of reasoning can look like, the easier it becomes to find the chain of reasoning.
Brandy Haran: Does that mean, in your case at least like the best proofs and the great discoveries that you’ve been responsible for haven’t had a moment where you suddenly every… suddenly something switched and you were like, oh my goodness! Why didn’t I think of that before? Is it just like a series of… tiny versions of that and it all gets muddled or do they still sometimes have this moment where you’re walking across a bridge or standing in the shower and it’s like (gasps) something changes in your brain? It’s like, oh… that’s it, that’s the thing.
Timothy Gower: I have had a few moments like that, it’s a sort of mixture but quite often… it’s … (pauses) been a case of needing… so… there are one or two examples where I think I’ve… I could pinpoint the moment where I went from feeling as though I really was quite a long way from having a solution to some sort of thing that maybe it’s… confident after that moment… that… once I’d dotted all the eyes and crossed all the tees I’d have a solution.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: Much more common is to need five or six… moments like that but smaller moments so you’ve done a lot of sort of reducing to easier questions which are quite hard and then you have a little sort of mini ah ha moment and solve one of those questions and then another one…
Brandy Haran: You can move back up to the higher question?
Timothy Gower: Yeah something like that. One of the great best compliments I ever had was… giving a talk on the result I mentioned earlier Szemerédi’s Theorem and a wonderful Hungarian mathematician called Imre Ruzsa came up after the talk and said that proof had three ideas. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: (laughs) Somehow it was a sort of a three idea proof, not just a one idea that…
Brandy Haran: Triple proof.
Timothy Gower: That…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: That unlocked the argument. (laughs)
Brandy Haran: (laughs) Nice. Just finally, ‘cause I’d… I know I don’t want to keep you all day. Well, I do want to keep you all day but I know I’m not allowed to. You talked about working on like AI and what machine learning and to do proofs, this is an area I find really interesting. Are computers gonna put mathematicians out of business? Is that realistic? Like you know, do you think it could get to the point where the computers are doing it?
Timothy Gower: I think it will. (pause) Um… I don’t know how long it will take. I think, although I could be wrong that… the current burst of activity in machine learning, while it’s amazing for certain applications, is not going to be the thing that… puts mathematicians out of business without a certain amount of input which would not be easy input. (chuckles)
Brandy Haran: Right?
Timothy Gower: Into really understanding the processes that go on when mathematicians do research. I… a sort of blind thing where you just train a network by showing it lots of proofs until it sort of suddenly starts spewing out proofs for itself.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: I don’t think that’s very likely to be the answer. So that’s not at all the way I’ve been… the type of thing I’ve been thinking… I’ve been really thinking about something that’s always interested me as a mathematician anyway, which is what is it that’s… I mean you’ve already asked about it. What is it that’s going when we do research? How do we find these needles in haystacks and…
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: And I think that… that’s a fascinating problem in itself and even if it doesn’t lead to a computer program that puts us out of business it’s a well worth thinking about.
Brandy Haran: But you think it will? Like… so you’re thinking it will just be a different kind of computer program. It will be a new… it will be like a paradigm change? It won’t just be more and more power to the sort of pattern recognition and…?
Timothy Gower: No, I think pattern recognition may well come in because there’s no doubt that mathematicians do use pattern recognition. I think it’ll be some kind of hybrid of… of… rule based logical thought, with quite a lot of non-determinism in it because… obviously we don’t just apply some simple algorithm but that with the sort advances that there’ve been in machine learning. If you talk to a mathematician about how they found something out, it’ll be a mixture of a very coherent narrative about, I was thinking about this and then I realized that such and such and that… thing that I’ve been trying couldn’t work but then if you tweaked like this it… those sorts of things but there are other things where you ask a mathematician well… what made you think that that result was likely to be true? And they say, well I don’t know. My just experience kind of told me that the statement like that had a good chance of being true, I’m not quite sure why.
Brandy Haran: My intuition.
Timothy Gower: There’s a certain intuition. Now I feel that the intuitive parts where… it’s rather hard to explain… how you felt the way you felt as a mathematician. Those parts might well be amenable to machine learning because… somehow it’s… that’s seems to be what machine learning is good at. It’s doing things that you do sort of instinctively and can’t really explain. So I can’t sort of explain to you how I know that a line drawing of a cat is of a cat.
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Timothy Gower: I can to some extent maybe a little bit, I say well it’s got a little pointy ear there but… I couldn’t sort give you a systematic procedure for distinguishing between cat pictures and dog pictures.
Brandy Haran: It’s funny to me that you say that that’s the thing the machines could do. ‘Cause I think most people who are… defensive about machine learning, that’s the thing they say the computers could never do. That’s the one thing we’ve got is that… is that kind of instinct that a computer could never replace that aspect of my humanity. But you seem to think that’s the thing the computers will do really well?
Timothy Gower: Well that… I mean I’m just… I’m saying… I think they’ll do the whole lot but I think that part, the sort of… instinctive judgements that we make, which aren’t completely illogical but I mean they’ve got a whole… they can be justified to some extent at some point you get when you try to justify things you start running into difficulties. You say, well I just… you know, I’ve seen things a bit like that and that kind of I’ve seen things a bit like that and this feels like one of those… that feels that is a sort of pattern recognition that is going. So I think machine learning would have a role to play… in those… so a big part of what you do when you do mathematics is what you might call probability judgements. If for example you… are trying to solve a problem and there’s an intermediate statement that would imply an answer to the problem that you want to answer. It’s not enough to say okay, well that would imply it, so I’m now gonna work flat out on the intermediate statement. There’s another thing you need which is some kind of judgement of whether the intermediate statement is likely to be true. Whether it’s likelier to be easier than the problem you started with. That sort of thing. Because otherwise you’re risking spending a lot of time and not getting anything for it.
Brandy Haran: Will I get a return on investment?
Timothy Gower: Yeah, exactly, so that is a huge part of… efficient research is judging the return that you’ll get on some kind of intellectual investment or time investment basically and so…
Brandy Haran: Do you think that separates some of the better mathematicians from the inferior ones or less successful ones?
Timothy Gower: I think it does, yes. I mean I think that sort of strategic… I do think… it really helps when you’re doing research to step outside yourself and say, am I making the best use of my time by doing this? It’s very tempting not to, it’s very tempting to… and I’ve succumbed this temptation the whole time… just to sort of get interested in something, you’re not quite sure why, it’s maybe not most important thing in the world but it becomes the most important thing in the world for you (chuckles) for a while or another temptation that it’s very easy to succumb to is just deciding… what you think the answer to a problem is and just more or less ignoring the possibility that it might go the other way because you just become emotionally attached and you want that problem to have a positive answer and not a counter example. As one example in my own career where I really was keen, had a really such a beautiful theorem and I never proved it and eventually some other people found a counter example. (sighs)
Brandy Haran: So you kind of dodge a bullet there?
Timothy Gower: I sort of did, yes, if they hadn’t found that counter example maybe I would’ve wasted a whole lot more time on it. But it wasn’t a total waste actually. It rarely is, but… I do think time management is an important part and I’ve just said… just talked about examples where I’ve on the face of it not managed my time but actually I think also there’s a sort of meta way of looking at things where not managing your time in a way that seems optimal can actually be good. So just getting a bit obsessed or emotionally attached with a problem can give you the motivation that you need in order to make progress with that problem whereas if you take on a more calculating approach to what was worth doing you might’ve thought, nah perhaps I’d better not.
Brandy Haran: I mean I even in my career I’ve always sometimes being successful means doing what the other person’s not willing to do, and that sometimes means those… things that appeal, like they won’t be good return on investment.
Timothy Gower: Yes, so now that’s particularly, I mean that is another consideration I think when you’re doing research. One of things you’ve… or… one of the very important judgements you have to make is not just, is this likely to be true? Is it likely to be easy to prove? But is this likely to be the way of solving the problem given that several clever people have thought about the problem and not solved it? If it’s a fairly standard thing, if the idea… if there’s no quirkiness to the idea… you have to have some plausible story as to why nobody solved a problem. Sometimes it’s just, it’s a problem you came up with yourself and it hasn’t been something that other people have thought about but if it’s something that other people have thought about, it actually helps this thing of narrowing down the search for what a proof could look like. It can be very helpful to say, it cannot be this because this is something that other people would’ve thought of if correct. This is a thing that cranks, mathematical cranks, don’t understand. They come up with some very simple proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem and they don’t realize that if it had looked like that, even slightly, and been correct, then it would’ve been discovered in the 17th century rather than… having to wait til the 21st century. But it applies also at a research level and I think sometimes an inexperienced research student may get excited about an approach that a more experienced mathematician will that, okay, it’s good to think about that and understand why it doesn’t work, but it’s not gonna work because if it did work… (laughs)
Brandy Haran: Yeah.
Timothy Gower: …then it would’ve been done already.
Brandy Haran: You don’t find many like huge gold nuggets just still sitting on the ground when you go to gold…
Timothy Gower: No, very occasionally happens and it’s again one of those things that if it does it’s slightly damaging…
Brandy Haran: Yeah? (laughs)
Timothy Gower: …in some ways because it encourages people to think that that’s typical when it’s not at all typical.
(gentle violin music)
Brandy Haran: What are you doing at the moment? What’s taking up like your time at the moment besides having me in your office and some posh dinner you’ve gotta go to tonight? Are you in a research mode at the moment or book mode or…?
Timothy Gower: Definitely research. Although… at the moment I’m feeling a sort of pressure that… it comes in waves but a pressure of things that are basically done but not yet properly written up.
Brandy Haran: That sounds like a good problem to have? It sounds like the hard parts done.
Timothy Gower: It is. It is, but it… uh… when you’ve got enough of them it can induce a sort of paralysis and one always wants rather than… particularly if they’ve been hanging around for a while, so it takes a while to get back into it enough to be able to work out how to change an old write up, that sort of thing.
Brandy Haran: So these are proofs or solutions or things that you and your collaborators have nailed down and you’ve just gotta write it up now in the correct format and get it published… is that…?
Timothy Gower: Yes, but sometimes when you’ve nailed it, it’s… it can look really quite… horrible and complicated and…
Brandy Haran: That’s a really frustrating thought for me that there… that sitting in all these… on all these desks and in all these drawers around math departments around the world is like stuff that’s gonna push the field forward and… no one knows about it just because it’s hard to write.
Timothy Gower: A few months ago I sat down and just… wrote a list of all the things that I’ve proved that I’ve not yet put out there…
Brandy Haran: Tell me the Riemann Hypothesis is one of those.
Timothy Gower: No, no, no, no, no, it’s not that sort of thing.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: There’s… but if I were to write up everything I know, everything I’ve done, what would there be and it was slightly depressing because there are things there that I quite like but I just kind of know in my heart of hearts they’re not ever gonna get done because… there are other more important things that still need writing up. Particularly ones with research students where it matters a lot to them obviously.
Brandy Haran: Hmm.
Timothy Gower: When one’s writing up it’s usually it’s a fairly thought provoking process and one always… it’s always much more fun to be thinking about solving problems than just writing up things that one did sometime ago. Anyway so I’m in a phase like that, I need to do something about it and clear my backlog a bit and…
Brandy Haran: Well, Professor, if that’s not my cue to end this interview and leave…
Timothy Gower: (laughs)
Brandy Haran: …I don’t know what is. (laughs) So, thank you.
Timothy Gower: (laughs) Not at all.
(gentle string music fades in)
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
(music continues)
Brandy Haran: Did you ever grow a beard?
Timothy Gower: Uh, no basically, actually this summer… just for fun I decided not to shave for a week or so.
Brandy Haran: How’d it go?
Timothy Gower: It didn’t get…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: A week wasn’t enough for it to become…
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: …more than sort of designer stubble really.
Brandy Haran: Right.
(music fades in)
Timothy Gower: It was… it was interesting but I… it’s not…
(music continues)
Brandy Haran: It’s not your look?
(music continues)
Timothy Gower: I don’t think so.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Timothy Gower: (laughs)
(music fades up)
Brandy Haran: Well that’s all for today, we’ll include some links relevant to the show in the usual places. (music continues) Also as usual our thanks to the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute for supporting the podcast and thanks to the audio engineering company Meyer Sound, in Berkeley, California, for supporting this episode. (music continues) I’m Brady Haran, you’ve been listening to the Numberphile podcast and we’ll see you again soon for another episode.
(music fades up and continues until fading out)
⁂
[ Fermat’s Last Theorem ]
Brady Haran: So Ken do I have to call you Mr. President?
Ken Ribet: Well, you can if you want.
Brandy Haran: Do people call you Mr. President?
Ken Ribet: Uh… sometimes jokingly.
Brandy Haran: What honorific is used when you’re like at meetings and that?
Ken Ribet: I kind of live in Berkeley which is known for it’s informality, so I’m very happy if people call me Ken, but I’ve been called Dr. Ribet and Mr. Ribet and Professor Ribet and Professor Ken and everything else.
Brandy Haran: But like at AMS Board meetings when you’re wearing your president hat is there something that they have to call you when they’re like addressing the chair and that? Is there a proper honorific or…?
(gentle piano music fades in)
Ken Ribet: Oh no, I have a gavel. And… basically we’re all friends.
(music contines)
Brandy Haran: Do you ever bang (banging noise) the gavel then? Have you ever had to like bang it or call something to order?
(music continues)
Ken Ribet: Umm… basically not.
(music fades up)
Brandy Haran: I’m Brady Haran and this is the Numberphile podcast, today our guest is Ken Ribet. He’s a math professor at the University of California Berkeley. In the world of mathematics Ken’s probably best known for his work on Fermat’s Last Theorem. But hang on, I hear you ask, didn’t Andrew Wiles prove Fermat’s Last Theorem? (music continues) Well, yes, but this proof was a huge jigsaw puzzle with earlier contributions. And one of the penultimate puzzle pieces was put in place by Ken. (music continues) Today he’s gonna tell us about it and what it was like to be in the actual room when Wiles proof was finally revealed. But first, in case you can’t tell, I am a little bit fascinated by Ken’s current role leading the American Mathematical Society, the AMS. (music continues)
(music fades out)
Brandy Haran: How did you become president? Is it just like an informal thing among mathematicians or is it a competition? Is it like a campaign?
Ken Ribet: Well, thirty years ago, forty years ago, I think each president would choose his successor. They were all males and at a certain point somebody to decide that it might be good to have an election. And I know the candidate who lost the first election, he was confident that he would just be elected without any question and his opponent actually campaigned by calling up some people and saying, hey, you know, I actually wanna do this so please vote for me. And he won. And there’s a nominating committee that meets at the joint meetings and also informally by email all the time. And they’re considering candidates for offices like the president and the vice presidents and so on. When they choose someone as a potential candidate they approach that person and ask him or her whether or not person will run and in my case I was very flattered and I said absolutely and I ran in an election, I had one opponent who is very much like me in a lot of respects. He’s from California, we have similar mathematical backgrounds, and I think both of us were viewed as very popular and very well known and there’s no campaigning in the sense of debates or (chuckles) you know calling your opponent, you know, Lying Ted, or something.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Ken Ribet: It’s still very collegial but I did make it known to my colleagues at Berkeley that I actually was going to be happy to serve. Very often if you see someone you know who’s a candidate for something you say, well, are we gonna do that person a favor by voting for the opponent, but I actually wanted to do it. And I was… very happy that I won.
Brandy Haran: Was it a landslide or was it a narrow one or…?
Ken Ribet: Well this is confidential but it wasn’t the sort of situation where we were having to look at hanging chads.
Brandy Haran: Okay.
Ken Ribet: But it was reasonably close.
Brandy Haran: What is the role of the president? You’ve already referred to presiding over meetings of the council and the behind the scenes thing. What else do you have to do? Do you have to go and like cut ribbons?
Ken Ribet: I do cut ribbons. There’s that. Every… annual meeting, the President of the American Math Society cuts a very large ribbon with an even larger pair of scissors to open the exhibits, the president presides over the joint prize session at the annual meeting. President comes to the congressional briefings in Washington DC, there are now two of them per year sponsored jointly by MSRI and the American Math Society.
Brandy Haran: Well let’s talk a bit about your background then, let’s go back in time a bit, ‘cause there’s so many things I wanna ask you. One of the first things I wanna ask you is about your surname. Ribet. Where is that from?
Ken Ribet: It’s from Eastern Poland. It’s from a town called Grajewo, which I’ve never visited. My grandfather was Ribetzky, and when he came to the United States in the early part of the 20th century, it was the fashion at Ellis Island to make everyone American. As American as possible, and so I became Ribet, which has become very useful to me in France and many of my colleagues they would phone up restaurants to make reservations and try to explain their last names and if the last name didn’t sound French, there’d be a lot of hesitation, trying to get the name right and so on.
Brandy Haran: So people do think it’s French sometimes. Ribet (RE-BAY) or something or…?
Ken Ribet: Yeah, well there are many many French Ribet (RE-BAY) and in fact on Facebook you can see there’re big clusters of them and there are people who’ve contacted me saying, my ancestors came from France through Cuba, were your ancestors in Cuba? No, Brandy Haran: Poland. There was the Ellis Island Corleone moment for your family where the name changes in just a few seconds.
Ken Ribet: Right.
Brandy Haran: Where were you born? In America?
Ken Ribet: So I was born in Brooklyn, New York. My parents were both born in New York City, and when I was three years old we moved to a place called Rockaway which is a part of Queens, but it’s a pretty remote part of Queens. Like they don’t even have a Starbucks nearby. (chuckles) To show you how remote it is. And recently it’s become very Brooklynized because it has surfing and so all the hipsters come from Brooklyn now on the weekends and many of them have actually moved to Rockaway. So for example the rock singer Patti Smith bought a house.
Brandy Haran: Were your parents… mathematical, academic type people?
Ken Ribet: My father was a CPA, an accountant and when I was a little boy he would always be adding numbers. Either by hand or with a small adding machine and I was fascinated by numbers and I would ask my dad to give me, you know, long addition problem and I think that’s what hooked me in.
Brandy Haran: This was the start was it?
Ken Ribet: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: At school, were you gifted at mathematics? Was that easy for you?
Ken Ribet: It was my best subject, yeah. So I was a pretty good student. Terrible athlete, complete nerd, but I was good at school in kind of all subjects and math was the easiest.
Brandy Haran: And was that the path you wanted? Like if I was to talk to the teenage Ken Ribet would he have said, ah I wanna be a mathematician one day?
Ken Ribet: I don’t think I knew that there was such a thing called a mathematician. I’ve told the story many times, but it started when I was a freshman at Brown, I went to my first mathematics course. It was a course in abstract linear algebra. And I loved the material and I was really taken with the professor and I, you know, looked at this guy, his name was Frank Stewart, and I said, I wanna be like that. This is what I wanna do. I had still no idea what it actually meant, you know, I didn’t know what Professors did, how they spent their time, you know, there’s this thing called research and committee work and reviewing and traveling. I had no idea what the game was, but I was very taken both with the content, with the mathematics, and also with this kind of freedom from the constraints of business.
Brandy Haran: What were you at Brown doing?
Ken Ribet: Well, so, I showed up as a freshman with some vague intent to try math and applied math and chemistry, I took one applied math course, it was a year long course, I didn’t like it very much, I never took a chemistry course so I went straight for math. I did math and broadcast radio. I was on the campus radio station.
Brandy Haran: Oh, well I’ll be watching your microphone technique with care then. You have to excuse my ignorance about the US college system then. You had been accepted and turned up on Brown to start your university career and it still wasn’t known what you were going to be studying?
Ken Ribet: That’s correct. In the US, when people come to college they are not really expected to declare their major until their third year and so there’s this idea that they can experiment and try different things. In fact it’s very common. I mean if you look at what people are majoring in on, say, the Berkeley campus. Well, they’re majoring in things like social relations in anthropology, you know, theater, it’s very rare to take a high school student and say whaddya wanna major in? And people will say anthropology. You know people talk about their core subjects. Maybe they’ll talk about computer science, but they won’t think, well I wanna be in geography.
Brandy Haran: So Ken if I was America’s most gifted mathematics student at high school and Berkeley wanted me for this reason and offered me a place, I could then say, ah thanks for my place at Berkeley but I’m not really interested in mathematics, I happen to be good at it but I wanna be an actor. And I could just do theater and never study a jot of mathematics?
Ken Ribet: Absolutely.
Brandy Haran: Alright.
Ken Ribet: Okay, I mean, the admissions boards, they choose people to try to sculpt the profile of their entering class and they have an idea of who’s coming in and they could be completely mistaken.
Brandy Haran: This is new information to me. You did follow this mathematical path and then you decided pretty early on, ah I wanna be like the role model professor and you did that eventually, did you?
Ken Ribet: I did. So I’m the rare example of somebody who set out on a path and just kept walking straight. I mean most people, you know, Yogi Berra said if you come to a fork in the road take it. I mean most people end up doing things that are completely unpredictable. And my thing, you know, I just kept going forward and there was no obstacle and I liked it more and more and here I am.
Brandy Haran: And then you started having a specialization in mathematics? What was the field of math that ensnared you?
Ken Ribet: So it’s a blend of number theory, which is the study of whole numbers and geometry, which, also pretty well understood what that is. So there is a kind of number theory slash algebraic geometry subject which has been coined Arithmetical Algebraic Geometry. So that was my subject and I came to it because I had some professors at Brown who were kind of very very forceful and they said you’re very good in math, read this paper. And these two people. Ken Ireland and Michael Rosen and they were fantastic. You know, they were doing interesting stuff, they were interested in things and they kind of kept pushing me in different directions. They told me where to go to graduate school, who to work with, what subjects were interesting. And it just meshed well with me.
Brandy Haran: So was it an aptitude or was it peer pressure?
Ken Ribet: Well so I think I was lucky in that I was pushed into a subject that I’m actually good at. I believe that people have very uneven aptitudes even within a subject like mathematics. You know, I may not have been very good at geometry, or probability or some other subject. I probably would’ve been okay because, you know, I was… kind of good and all around. But by luck I was pushed into a subject that really spoke to me and I was able to speak back after a while.
Brandy Haran: At this point is your ambition to be a teacher, like, you know, a professor in front of a class and inspiring mathematicians or are you wanting to be like a Gauss and an Euler and, you know, the person who’s making the discoveries and having the mathematical fame?
Ken Ribet: I think the mix is the best thing because, if you do several things and on a given day you’re not so good at one of them well you turn to the other whereas if you’re just focused on one thing, like for example suppose you have a sabbatical year and you’re at a math institute and you know that the entire year you’re going to be doing research, well at the end of a day if your pad of paper is still blank… you feel terrible. You haven’t done anything. Whereas if you start thinking about something and you kind of keep going in a circle and you’ve just come back to what you’ve done before, you say, well, you know, maybe it’s time to make up this week’s homework.
(gentle chime music)
Brandy Haran: We’re gonna come to Fermat’s Last Theorem shortly, in which you play obviously a huge role, but at this point when you’re just starting out in this field and you’re like, you know, you’re one of the new kids on the block, what was the holy grail problem of your topic? What was the thing that you would be lying in bed thinking, gosh if I could be the person to solve that, that would be amazing?
Ken Ribet: Well there are a lot of long term goals for the subject, one of them curiously is the theorem that was proved by Andrew Wiles with the help with Richard Taylor and Brian Conrad and so on. The Modularity of Elliptic Curves, that was a very well known conjecture that I first heard about as a first year graduate student at the time it was called Weil’s Conjecture after André Weil who wrote a paper related to it in 1968. This was kind of a holy grail but not in the sense that, you know, everyone’s trying to do it, it just basically colored the landscape.
Brandy Haran: But at that point was that not connected to Fermat’s Last Theorem?
Ken Ribet: Absolutely not. It had nothing to do with Fermat’s Last Theorem, the thing that I studied that was my thesis and a lot of my subsequent work, one topic is Galois representations and modular forms which came into the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. So when I was a graduate student there were countless courses and seminars on subjects like Iwasawa theory, Galois representations, modular forms, these are all things that came together, you know, twenty years later. Twenty-five years later, in the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Brandy Haran: Were these kind of like Riemann Hypothesis type things where there was already mathematics built on assumptions and you need to prove it for that to hold, or was it more just like something in the distance like a finish line?
Ken Ribet: Oh it’s a mix. I mean so certainly over time people became more and more confident that elliptic curves would end up being modular. They thought, you know, it was true but something we couldn’t prove, so they began kind of deriving consequences of it. So that if you derive a consequence of an unproved conjecture you have a theorem, you can state it in different ways. You can say assume all elliptic curves are modular then such and such is true. Another way to spin it, you can say that, all elliptic curves that happen to be modular have the following properties.
(gentle piano music)
Brandy Haran: Perhaps at this point we should deal with Fermat’s Last Theorem actually is. Now there are a few Numberphile videos about it. (music continues) You can go and check them out, I’ll put links down in the show notes. But let’s give it a go in audio form.
(music continues)
Brandy Haran: Now imagine in your head a pretty simple equation, and quite a famous one. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. (music continues) I’m sure you’re familiar with this one, you probably remember it from Pythagoras at school and the right angled triangles and the question is, what three positive integers, so whole numbers, can you put in the place of A, B, and C, so that the equation works? A squared plus B squared equals C squared. (music continues) And, well, in this case, there are lots of possible answers, in fact there are an infinite number of answers. For example, three, four, and five. Three squared plus four squared equals five squared. You could use five, twelve, and thirteen. You could use nine, forty, and forty-one. You could use thirty-three, fifty-six and sixty-five. There are all sorts of ways to crack this nut. (music continues) These are called Pythagorean Triples. But let’s up the ante a little bit. Let’s not square those numbers let’s cube them. Raise them to a power of three so now we have A cubed plus B cubed equals C cubed. Hmm. Are there three positive integers we can put in there that will make this equation work? You can give it a go if you want but don’t spend too long on it. (laughs) What about if we raise it to the fourth power? (music continues) A to the four plus B to the four equals C to the four? Or any number, any N. A to the Nth power plus B to the Nth power equals C to the Nth power. Are there numbers we can put in their place, positive integers, that will make this equation work? (music continues) Now back in 1637, a famous guy called Pierre De Fermat said, no. There’s not. And I’ve got a proof. He wrote in the margin of a book, he just hand scribbled, I’ve got a proof that you can’t do it with anything, except of course the squares. (music continues) But he said, I haven’t got room here in the margin to write the proof, I think, you know, I’ll come back to it at a later date. He never did, he never wrote the proof, no one ever saw it, and this became as Fermat’s Last Theorem. Was there are a proof that there were no positive integers that you could put in the places of A, B, and C with all these higher powers that would work? Was this impossible? (music continues) For hundreds of years, no one knew, they never found any, but there was no like rigorous proof. Now that finally changed when an Englishman named Andrew Wiles gave a famous lecture and revealed a proof. And suffice to say, you wouldn’t be writing this proof in the margin of a book. (music continues) It was really really complicated. Really advanced cutting edge new mathematics. So there’s Fermat’s Last Theorem, I hope you have some idea of what it is in your head. We’re gonna get back to it in a minute, but let’s get back to our discussion with Ken and find out where he’s at in the years leading up to this big moment. (music continues and fades out)
Ken Ribet: Well I personally was doing pretty well, although you know I had a deep sense of insecurity, you know, was this worth anything. I wrote a thesis at Harvard that I was kind of vaguely proud of and I wondered whether anyone’ll offer me a job.
Brandy Haran: What was the title of your thesis?
Ken Ribet: Galois Representations Attached to Abelian Varieties with Many Real Multiplications.
Brandy Haran: Catchy.
Ken Ribet: Okay, so that was the title and in fact my thesis, you know, I wondered whether it would even be published. It kind of sat on my desk for a year and a half and finally a mathematician named Serge Lang grabbed it and he said I’m sending it to the American Journal and I’m gonna tell the editor in chief to publish it. And he did that, and nothing happened for about two years. And finally I kind of inquired, you know, whatever happened to this and they asked and finally it just got published. You know, I was wondering if anyone would ever read it, but it turns out… it has lots of citations and people think it’s a good thing for background. I was waiting, you know, to hear whether any place would offer me a job and before I expected job offers to come I got a phone call from Princeton University asking me to come and be a basically a postdoc. So I was there for… it’s hard to count to the years because the third year that I was supposedly in Princeton, I got a fellowship to study in Paris. So that was my first year in Paris, and I actually taught at Princeton for a total of three years with this year in Paris kind of sandwiched between the second and third year.
Brandy Haran: You got to take that Ribet (RE-BAY) surname out for a test drive?
Ken Ribet: Yeah, in fact one of the first things I did was to take the Metro to the Impasse Ribet, which is a little alleyway, and I’ve certainly have photos of myself standing in front of the Impasse Ribet.
Brandy Haran: Excellent. And then what happened after that three years? Where were you next?
Ken Ribet: In the last year at Princeton I got a phone call from Berkeley saying, you know, how would you like to come out and join our faculty? So this was completely unexpected. I hadn’t applied to Berkeley but secretly, you know, when I thought about universities where I might go, Berkeley was probably at the top of the list, ‘cause it was one of the top three universities in terms of mathematics, the other two being Harvard and Princeton, and I had visited Berkeley once for a week on my way to a conference, I just thought it was paradise. So I tried my best to hide my enthusiasm when they phoned me up. I ultimately accepted an offer of associate professorship at Berkeley and promptly went to Paris again for a year. And so I first came to Berkeley kind of a year and a half after the initial phone call.
Brandy Haran: What was it about Berkeley, ‘cause the Ken I know, you’re Berkeley through and through, like you’re such a Berkeley guy to me, but like I guess then you were a real East Coast guy, so what was it about Berkeley that appealed to you?
Ken Ribet: Well it was kind of the light and kind of joy, the informality and Telegraph Avenue is full of people wearing tie-dye shirts and it was kind of like the Sixties was still going on.
Brandy Haran: But you’re an East Coast, wouldn’t you look at that, like shun that? Weren’t you… this Brooklyn guy who would think, oh those hippies over there?
Ken Ribet: Well, you know, I’m thinking of someone I know who works in San Diego who… applied for a job and in his interview he said, I’m a Californian trapped in the body of an Englishman. (chuckles) So maybe I was a Californian (laughs) trapped in the body of an East Coast person.
Brandy Haran: Okay that makes sense. Let’s jump forward then to Fermat’s Last Theorem. What did you do? How did you suddenly find yourself in this spotlight? This is before Wiles, before the proof.
Ken Ribet: This is before Wiles, so this is in the early to mid 1980s, there was this guy Gerhart Frey who keeps coming up in all the discussions of it and he was the first person that I knew of to try to think about the links between elliptic curves and solutions to Fermat’s Last Theorem. So at the time there was a lot of study about elliptic curves with various properties and if you had an elliptic curve with various properties… you could derive from that elliptic curve the solution to some equation, and there was a movement, one of the mathematicians was a Russian mathematician Demyanenko, where you tried to rule out certain kinds of elliptic curves by deriving from the existence of the elliptic curve a solution to an equation that didn’t have solutions. So that was the subject and it was going back and forth between elliptic curves and solutions and Frey somehow stumbled on this idea that if you had a solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem, this would give you an elliptic curve with extremely problematic properties. (pause) And he kind of went around telling people about this and he came to Berkeley and spoke to me and gave a talk and I was very unconvinced. I kind of really didn’t believe it. This was around 1982 or 1983 and over the next year or two he came to this idea that if elliptic curves were known to be modular it should be possible to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. And he wrote a manuscript that was like two or three pages with an outline of the assertion that the modularity of elliptic curves implies Fermat’s Last Theorem and he was well aware of the fact that his outline… was not at all complete. But he was hoping that people who were experts in the theory of modular curves, like me I guess, would fill in all the blanks and kind of make the thing okay. I was still completely unconvinced, I didn’t kind of know that he was right, but he gave lectures in Europe and a lot of European mathematicians in 1984 or ’85, that academic year, started thinking about his lectures and his little manuscript and thinking about ways to… justify this idea that the modularity of elliptic curves could imply Fermat’s Last Theorem. And one of the single things that happened was that Jean-Pierre Serre wrote down a longer manuscript, it was a letter to Jean-Francois Mestre, French mathematician, explaining that if you could only prove what Serre thought was a tiny little assertion, he called it Epsilon, meaning a small number, then you could actually justify what Frey had started to do.
Brandy Haran: So this was like a little screw, or just a little piece of the puzzle but it was really really important to hold it all together?
Ken Ribet: Yeah. So in other words Serre’s letter basically said, Frey looks like he’s right, you just have to prove this one extra thing. And this was in the summer of 1985 and I got a copy of the letter, we were all together at some conference in Northern California and I started thinking about this Epsilon and it was really right in the center of things that I understood.
Brandy Haran: Were you thinking about it, Ken, because it was like an itch in your brain and a curiosity or were you thinking greatness awaits if this can be solved?
Ken Ribet: Well, I thought that the connection with Fermat was kind of the icing on the cake, but I’m not one of these people who say, you know, I’ve kind of went to the library when I was a ten year old and read about Fermat’s Last Theorem and it was my great goal, it was a challenge, it was a mathematical challenge, it was right in my subject, it was something that I thought I could do, and I was responding to that challenge. The connection with Fermat made it, you know, even more important to think about.
Brandy Haran: Like any mathematician, you knew of Fermat’s Last Theorem, it was just like a famous thing but I’m not gonna ask you to explain it and the proof and the mathematics ‘cause I wouldn’t understand it and you can’t do it in a podcast. But how did you do? Where did you do? Did you do it lying in the bath? Were you walking along the bay? Did you just sit in your office with a notepad and a pencil? Where did you crack this nut?
Ken Ribet: Oh, so I thought about it off and on for a year. This was the academic year 1985, ’86, and I… you know was teaching Calculus and whenever I had a spare moment I thought a little bit about this problem and asked myself whether I had any special insight into that other people didn’t have and at the end of the teaching, so this would be in May 1986 I started thinking about the problem more seriously. I was on my way to Europe, so the first thing that I did was I went to Harvard for basically a week, so I had an office that I was able to use and I was also staying with my sister in Wellesley. I remember sitting in her kind of breakfast table in Wellesley thinking about this thing, and realizing that I knew something that I hadn’t realized before that I knew. That I had the beginning of some complicated argument that seemed to do a special case of it, so I got very excited, and then I flew to Europe, I was in Paris for a while and then I showed up at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn and in all these places I had my pad of paper and I would write the thing and by the time I got to Bonn, so after my arrival, this is probably around June 1st 1986, I realized that I could do what I thought was only a special case of the Epsilon Conjecture. So the Epsilon Conjecture, you try to understand something mathematically, you say, well what’s the first possible situation where you have to prove something. The simplest possible situation. So I kind of looked at the theorem in that case, and this was really right up my alley, it was this kind of thing that I studied many times before, in fact, I had studied Conjecture Epsilon and the special case kind of ten or fifteen years before and realized that I didn’t know how to do it and wondered whether it was true, but here I was thinking about the problem again and I realized that I could actually do something. So this was kind of very exciting to me and I kind of wrote the thing over and over again on different sheets of paper and I convinced myself that it was actually true and I started talking to people about it in Bonn and I might have given a lecture or two in Bonn and I also wrote a letter, a physical letter on paper, to Barry Mazer at Harvard and I mailed him the letter and I didn’t hear back. (laughs) And then there’s this famous story with the cappuccino in August of 1986 in Berkeley. There was the International Congress of Mathematicians, that happened to be in Berkeley, Barry Mazer was there and I said, hey, you know, I sent you this letter and I’m trying to work on the general case and you didn’t respond to the letter and Barry looked at me and he said, well of course, you know, you have done the general case, you just have to do something slightly different. So he thought he was just, you know, sprinkling some powder on it and telling me something that I should’ve realized long ago. So we went and had a coffee, at some cafe at the edge of campus, it’s now called Cafe Strada, and we sat there and as soon as he explained the thing in one or two sentences, what I had to do extra, I realized that there was gonna be no problem, that the thing was going to work.
Brandy Haran: Why did Barry not reply to your letter, to tell you that? Or did he think you already knew?
Ken Ribet: Oh, I don’t know. I mean maybe he was thinking about other things or he thought I already knew and I guess his attitude was, well Ken’ll figure it out by himself.
Brandy Haran: (laughs) What do you say to Barry about that now? Do you kick him and say why didn’t you tell me a year earlier?
Ken Ribet: Well I don’t think we’ve discussed this subject recently.
Brandy Haran: So when you publish this proof and it had all been set in stone, this sort of bridge or pathway to proving Fermat’s Last Theorem had been opened, but not yet passed through. Was that a big deal? Like were you a celebrity for a week? Was this, oh this is amazing or because the last piece, because the step onto Fermat hadn’t been made yet, was it still just an obscure mathematical paper in the scheme of things? Or was this like making waves?
Ken Ribet: No, it’d made a lot of waves. Not to the extent that Fermat’s Last Theorem itself made waves but it made waves within mathematics. So I was approached by journalist who wanted me to kind of talk about the proof for various popular and scientific magazines. Everyone knew about it in mathematics, that this thing had happened and there was also a certain amount of skepticism, is this proof gonna work out? You know, ‘cause I didn’t have a complete manuscript, it hadn’t been accepted for publication. I gave lectures, I explained all these things. And a lot of the proof was so convoluted to people that they thought it couldn’t possibly be correct. At least some people felt that way.
(gentle chime music)
Brandy Haran: You and others have helped open this door and shown this path, does this create like a mad scramble? Is there now a race? Is there a frenzy, now Fermat’s available? And are you in this race?
Ken Ribet: I thought that the assertion that needed to be proved, the modularity of elliptic curves, was completely beyond the techniques at that time. So I thought what I had done was to convince people that Fermat’s Last Theorem… was true morally because people believed in the modularity of elliptic curves but I had no expectation that anyone, you know, seven years later, would claim to prove that elliptic curves are modular.
Brandy Haran: A bit like the Riemann Hypothesis, everyone believes it’s true but no one seems to be able to prove it?
Ken Ribet: Right, so I thought this was a completely inaccessible problem.
Brandy Haran: Did people start trying though? Did it create this new buzz? This new field of endeavor?
Ken Ribet: Well… not that I was aware of. Now it turns out of course, Wiles went to his attic and worked on this thing quietly but apparently other people were having kind of similar ideas, you know, maybe there’s a way to do this.
Brandy Haran: Did you know Andrew Wiles? This guy in England?
Ken Ribet: Oh yeah. So I met him the first year… that I was in Paris… let’s think about this. This was 1975, ’76. So I was in Paris for the year and Wiles’ advisor, John Coates, would invite me to Cambridge basically he said, you know, whenever you’re tired of Paris and wanna spend a week in Cambridge, just come over, and we have a room for you, you give a lecture, we can pay some travel expensive, we’ll invited you to High Table, so I came to Cambridge, you know, maybe four or five times. Maybe even more during that year and Wiles was Coates’ student. And in fact the thing that I had done by the end of the year was something that also created a lot of interest in mathematics. I proved what’s now viewed as the converse to a Theorem of Herbrand. Jacques Herbrand. And I was lecturing on this in Cambridge and Wiles got very excited and one of his first papers was to take what I did and go beyond that. And then his most famous paper after that was a joint paper with Barry Mazer where they proved something called the Main Theorem of Iwasawa Theory and they did that by using techniques that were derived from mine.
Brandy Haran: So, part of the mythology of Andrew Wiles now is that he was obsessed with Fermat’s Last Theorem from boyhood. Did you know this? Would he always, every time you met him, would he talk to you about, oh how do you think we can solve Fermat’s Last Theorem or was this… did he keep this secret or like did you know this was one of the people in the world?
Ken Ribet: I had no knowledge of it. I mean, I take him at his word, and in fact what he says is that he was obsessed with Fermat and the… adults in the room told him, you know, don’t think bout that, here are some fruitful problems that you can think about, and he took their advice. But he did, at least by self report, have this special obsession.
Brandy Haran: So anyway, he does go up in the attic, well eventually he does crack this nut. How did you find out about this? You were kind of almost part of this too, not part of the work but you were very Johnny on the spot when this all emerged into light, weren’t you?
Ken Ribet: Well okay, so in June 1993 there was a conference in Cambridge and I was invited, I was one of the speakers. And at a typical conference you have, you know, a number of speakers, maybe four or five, six per day. And no one speaks more than once. And Wiles had told the organizers that he had something very special that he wanted to present and it would require three separate lectures on three consecutive days and he was booked for this and after the first and second lecture there was widespread speculation that he was gonna prove the modularity of a very wide class of elliptic curves and this would be enough to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Brandy Haran: But this wasn’t like the title of his talk, it was, cloaked in some secrecy was it?
Ken Ribet: Well, the title of his talk… I mean in fact I joke that both in my article and in Wiles’ article, Fermat’s equation appears in the introduction and never after that. I mean the both articles are about the technicalities of modular forms, modular curves, Galois representations, these are the tools that we’d all been working with and Wiles’ lectures had a title like that.
Brandy Haran: But it becomes clear that day three might be the big moment, and you cottoned on to this, didn’t you?
Ken Ribet: Yeah, in fact, someone kind of whispered to me that this was gonna happen after the second day. So it wasn’t a surprise to me because I actually had some knowledge, but even if I hadn’t, you know, I would’ve expected like that and there was a huge audience for his lecture. A lot of people had cameras, a lot of people brought their friends who were not in the subject and they said, you know, come to this lecture something historic is gonna happen.
Brandy Haran: What was it like being in that room?
Ken Ribet: It was joyful. It was electrifying. It was kind of a celebration. You know when I was a graduate student, my relatives would say to me, well what are you doing this for? What kind of subject is this. And I would say… well you know, basically what were trying to do ultimately is solve equations, ‘cause that’s something people could understand, and you know, it was wonderfully validating after all these years that we were actually solving an equation.
(pause)
Brandy Haran: You took a camera for which I am forever grateful because I think you got the photo.
Ken Ribet: I may have. I certainly had a film camera there and I took a number of photos and then there were some group photos that I appear in that were taken by other mathematicians who were there.
Brandy Haran: There’s one of him like at the blackboard.
Ken Ribet: I think I took a photo like that, yeah.
Brandy Haran: Yeah, he’s smiling and it’s like. He doesn’t seem like the world’s smiliest man and he’s got this like glow about him.
Ken Ribet: He did, he couldn’t suppress his pride.
Brandy Haran: And straight afterwards this was like all this buzz and attention and you kind of ended up having to be a bit of a spokesman, didn’t you?
Ken Ribet: Yeah… first of all, the staff at the Newton Institute knew in advance that something was gonna happen and they chilled cases of sparkling wine. Was actually Napa Valley sparkling wine.
Brandy Haran: Of course.
Ken Ribet: That was served after his lecture. And there was a lot of buzz and as soon as the lecture ended someone came up to Andrew and said, Gina Kolata from the New York Times is on the phone, would you speak to her. And Andrew turned to me and he said, Ken, you talk to her. (pause) So I went into an office, it was actually my office and I sat underneath my desk (laughs) in order to have some sound proofing ‘cause there was a lot of chatter in the hallways. And I spoke to her, you know, for maybe a half hour. And I outlined the whole thing and the next morning our names were on the front page of the New York Times, which is kind of remarkable, so like my parents, you know, got the New York Times delivered to their driveway and they open it up and there’s their son on the very front page and… there was this possibly unfortunate term that she used. She kind of referred to me as Andrew’s spokesman. So it was true that he asked me to speak for him in that context… but then somehow it became known in the press that I was the official spokesman for Andrew Wiles, so I was kind of like his press secretary or something.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Ken Ribet: And I got hundreds of inquiries from all sorts of publications and radio shows and TV shows and my attitude was I would speak to everyone and they asked me the same questions over and over again. You know, did Andrew Wiles prove Fermat’s Last Theorem? And I basically said, yes. And occasionally I would mention that I had done preliminary work but that rarely made the write ups.
Brandy Haran: No. (laughs)
Ken Ribet: It was all about Andrew Wiles.
Brandy Haran: There’s a whole Numberphile video about that though, Ken. (laughs)
Ken Ribet: Okay.
Brandy Haran: (laughs)
Ken Ribet: It was an interesting situation to kind of deal with the popular press. I’d never had this happen in my life before and I found that I was fairly good at it. I could explain things to people who didn’t know anything about mathematics and I thought it was a good use of my time.
Brandy Haran: The other famous part of this story of course is that there Wiles’ proof was then found to have a flaw. What was that like for you? Did that hang you out to dry?
Ken Ribet: It really did because first of all when Andrew first heard about the flaw in July of 1993, I guess he didn’t believe that it was all that serious. He thought it would just need a patching up. So, he must’ve been aware that I was out there, you know, beating his drum, but he never told me. So it took months before I found out how serious the problem was and I had been… kind of out there saying, you know, Andrew Wiles had proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. So, I’m glad that it worked out.
Brandy Haran: Right. (laughs) So just to patch up that story, Wiles worked with another mathematician, Taylor, and they did fix the problem. They brought it back from the brink and it all held?
Ken Ribet: Yeah, so Taylor and Wiles huddled together and they thought about various things and finally they, or Andrew or Richard… found the missing piece and they published that as a joint paper.
Brandy Haran: You talked about when you were working on Epsilon, you were giving lectures and you were writing letters. You wrote letters to Barry Mazer. It was this open book, wasn’t it? You were showing everyone how you were progressing and asking for help.
Ken Ribet: I was.
Brandy Haran: Andrew Wiles famously sort of didn’t do that. He kept it very secret and then he revealed everything at once in like a big grand reveal. Does that confuse you or does it delight you? How do you feel about these two different ways of doing mathematics?
Ken Ribet: (pause) Well I… certainly like my model better, but Andrew had a very good excuse which is that Fermat was such a kind of sought after thing that if he revealed that he was working on the problem, people would’ve rushed in. And it was very important to him to be the person to proved Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Brandy Haran: I’d keep it secret if I was close, I think but…
Ken Ribet: Yeah.
Brandy Haran: …then again, I’m not a mathematician. So you’ve played a great role in this amazing thing. Probably one of the greatest thing that’s happened in mathematics in the last, I dunno, hundred years or so, certainly? Where do you go from there? What do you do next? Even you, who like, you know, was a side player in it, it’s still like a big deal. It must be one of your crowning achievements? What do you do next?
Ken Ribet: Well there is an encore problem. There’s no question about that. And what I’ve done, if I look off to the side and say, you know, what has Ken Ribet done? Well, I’ve done a surprising amount of outreach and professional service. And I think that’s something that I’m pretty good at. I’ve done more research, I’ve had graduate students, I’ve solved problems, I’ve proved theorems but… I haven’t done anything as great as the contribution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Realistically I’m not looking for that, so I’m looking for some balance where I continue to contribute to research and also now I’m a pretty well known and well regarded sort of senior mathematician, so I do things at the National Academy of Sciences, I’m also kind of the Chair of the Class of Math and Physical Sciences at the moment. I work with the American Math Society. So I feel that I’m still contributing in different ways.
Brandy Haran: Do you think you can’t contribute in those other ways anymore? There’s this great cliche or this thing that’s said about, particularly in mathematics, that you know, your prime is leading up to about forty and after that you haven’t quite got it like you used to have it? Do you buy that, do you believe that?
Ken Ribet: Well there’s… you kind of maybe lose some speed but you have lots of wisdom and you can recognize situations that some people may not.
(gentle chimes)
Brandy Haran: Let me talk to you about photography and photos. ‘Cause you seem to love photos.
Ken Ribet: I do love photos.
Brandy Haran: And you’re always taking them. We’ve taken pictures even today there was like a fan here in the room that captured your eye and you wanted to take a photo of it. What is it about you and photography and photos? It’s just like a hobby?
Ken Ribet: It is a hobby, there’s no question about that, so when I first came to Berkeley, I had no camera, and I was as I said fascinated by the light and all the scenes in Berkeley so I bought my first camera.
Brandy Haran: What was it?
Ken Ribet: It was an Olympus OM-1. So this is a film camera, and it had no flash, and I went around and I took photos and I would get them developed in photography stores. So I’d come back, you know, with color photos, and then someone said to me, well you really like photography, why don’t you do black and white photography and go in a darkroom. And there is a darkroom on campus and the dark room is beautiful, had lots of equipment. There were courses you could take with accomplished Bay Area photographers. So I did all of that and I spent a lot of time in the darkroom and it became the thing that I would do at the end of a day of mathematics, you know, at five o’clock I would go in the dark room and I’d kind of emerge three hours later with lots of prints and lots of negatives and start thinking about dinner and with digital photography it became a lot easier, you can just snap pictures and post them in various places so it’s kind of a sideline.
Brandy Haran: Anyone who’s been on your website, in additional to all the mathematical content on there. There’s all sorts of little bits of trivia and interesting things and one of the sections I can’t stop looking at is the haircut section. Tell me about that.
Ken Ribet: Oh… well, so many years ago I started taking haircuts with one particular stylist who is no longer coming to Berkeley and we together hatched this idea of taking photos of the two of us at the end of every haircut. I kind of believe in the power of a sequence of photos. Even if one photo doesn’t reveal all that much, having a long sequence of similar photos again and again shows you kind of the arc of time and there are very details that appear and disappear. People walking past in the back, so I really like that, and I took a photo of every haircut and then when my stylist decided that it was no longer worth her time to drive to Berkeley from San Jose, the photos ended. And this was quite a few years ago.
Brandy Haran: The other thing, I mean, I follow you on Facebook, and the other thing I find interesting is, you have these really regular lunch meetings. Explain what they are.
Ken Ribet: When I was a student, both at Brown and at Harvard, there was some tradition that faculty members could have lunch and other meals if they wanted to with students and I found it really valuable to me to meet all sorts of people who would come and sit around with students. I remember for example meeting Yo-Yo Ma when he was freshman, he was at one of the tables and there were lots of public figures who would come in and sit with us and I thought that was really wonderful and when I came to Princeton I asked whether or not there was such a program and there was so I became a faculty fellow at various dining halls and when I came to Berkeley there was no such thing and I kind of wondered for a long time whether such a thing might crop up. And when I started teaching very large courses… that had formerly been small courses in the math department at one point we began teaching third year courses in large rooms, whereas before they’d only been taught in groups of twenty-five or thirty students. I thought you know, this might be a way to get to know the students and I would organize lunches in the dining halls. And I pitched this to the College of Letters and Sciences and they were all on board. They gave me a card so that I could get free lunches and I would see with the students and I found it was really valuable and they liked it and then somehow this morphed about five years ago into organizing breakfasts and lunches at the faculty club. And the faculty club likes it, they get lots of business, the students like being in the faculty club and I tell them they can come back anytime they want, they don’t need a faculty member, all they need is a credit card or a wallet and some of the students have taken me up on the suggestion and I think it’s a nice way to get to meet students informally and find out a little about their lives.
Brandy Haran: So you normally put like a post on Facebook, don’t you, and you basically say this week I’m gonna be here at this time, come along if you want, and then this handful of students will come and you’ll just hang out over a meal?
Ken Ribet: That’s right.
Brandy Haran: What do they normally want? Is there a pattern to what happens in the conversation or…?
Ken Ribet: It depends on the size of the group, so a small group they’ll ask me about myself and they’ll be a little bit uncomfortable, you know, it’s kind of intimidating to be with a faculty member and they’re addressing questions to me like, you know, how did I come to be a mathematician, what do I do in my spare time, what is it like… how long have you been at Berkeley. So those sometimes if I don’t know the students, can be, a little bit rough, but then there are bigger events where there’ll be you know, ten, twelve students and then what happens is they just talk to each other. And I’m there kind of almost like a fly on the wall. I mean some of them will talk to me but everybody’s much more relaxed and I find those to be the most successful.
Brandy Haran: And then coming back to your passion for photography, it seems like at the end of almost every one of these there’s like a group photo.
Ken Ribet: There’s a staff member at the faculty club, Jerry Fowler, who is a fantastic photographer, and he takes photos of the group. And he really gets the best expressions out of people. I think people warm up to him immediately.
Brandy Haran: So if you go like on your Facebook, almost every week there’ll be this… it’s almost like the exact same picture with a different cast of characters each time.
Ken Ribet: Right, you see the seasons changing, the colors of the leaves, some of the photos everyone’s wearing an overcoat, some of the photos people are in summer clothes.
Brandy Haran: You do seem to enjoy teaching more than a lot of other academics I know. Sometimes academics seem to treat it like it’s their chore. It’s the pound of flesh they have to pay to be allowed to be researchers but you seem to really delight in it.
Ken Ribet: Well, it’s a kind of communication. It’s a different skill. It’s a different activity. It’s not explaining technical math to people who are committed to mathematics. And I think everyone… on the Berkeley campus because it’s such a large public university, is committed to that kind of teaching, because someone who comes here and realizes that… there’s that kind of teaching almost every semester and doesn’t like it, will go elsewhere.
Brandy Haran: And what’s next for you then, as we come to the end of our chat? What’s your next big thing? I guess the next part of your presidency is a big part of your life at the moment?
Ken Ribet: As my presidency is coming toward an end, it ends on February 1st 2019.
Brandy Haran: And you’re term limited?
Ken Ribet: Well there’s never been a situation where someone has done it twice. My successor, Jill Pipher is a mathematician at Brown. After her there are two candidates who are now recruited for the next election. One of them will be Jill’s successor. On February 1st 2019 I will become the official Immediate Past President. So this is an actual title of the AMS. And for example as Immediate Past President I will be the representative of the American Math Society to a joint meeting with the Vietnamese Math Society next June.
Brandy Haran: You’re taking on almost like a deputy or a vice presidency type role when you’re the Immediate Past or…?
Ken Ribet: Yeah, so in every moment there are two presidents in the AMS. There’s the President and then there’s either the President Elect, who shadows the President, or there Immediate Past President, who helps out as needed. And after my one year as Immediate Past President, the next person who will’ve been elected will sign as President Elect.
Brandy Haran: And they you got any plans we should know about? Any… you’re not secretly working in an attic on another proof, are you?
Ken Ribet: Uhh… I’ll… I’ll stay mum as to my… my plans.
(gentle chimes echo)
Brandy Haran: (gentle music fades in) Thanks for listening. This episode was recorded in a small office overlooking the San Francisco Bay at the Mathematical Science Research Institute, which is in Berkeley, California. (music continues) I’m sorry you couldn’t enjoy the view with us. The episode was also sponsored by a company in Berkeley called Meyer Sound. They’re an audio engineering and manufacturing company. They’re not here to advertise or sell anything, they’re just supporting the show. But there’s always doing interesting things and love sharing their research going on in their labs. So if you wanna check them out, go to meyersound.com, there’s a link down in the show notes. (music continues) And we’ll be back again soon with another episode here on our Numberphile podcast.
(music continues and fades out)