Speaker spotlight: Professor Marcus du Sautoy

Who started the myth that maths and art don't get along?

It was CP Snow's famous lecture The Two Cultures delivered in 1959 that highlighted the divide that had emerged between the world of science and the arts. But it wasn't always the case. In medieval time the quadrivium expected scholars to study a range of subjects including mathematics, music, geometry and astronomy. Increasing specialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth century contributed to the necessity to choose a side. The modern education system which silos subjects is probably the main contributor to people not recognising the huge connections between the arts and the sciences.

What's your favourite "that's actually maths!" moment in art or music?

Most people recognise William Shakespeare as the greatest wordsmith of all time but I was very excited to discover he was quite a number nerd too. We all know that his verse comes in iambic pentameter, 10 syllables. But that's not always the case. The most famous line of Shakespeare "To be or not to be that is the question" has 11 syllables, a prime number. Shakespeare is using the indivisibility and dissonance of 11 to wake us up and take notice. When ever magic is afoot, the number of syllables goes down to 7, another prime. Numbers are a code for Shakespeare.

Are we hard-wired to love patterns, or do we just learn to?

I believe the human brain has evolved to be very sensitive to recognising patterns. Those who could spot patterns survived in our evolutionary journey. For example if you are in the chaos of the jungle and you spot something with symmetry, that's likely to be an animal that you can eat or which might eat you. The brain that spots symmetry survives. Patterns help us to make predictions into the future and that is key to planning our strategy for survival.

Is randomness a rebel, or a secret mathematical rule?

One definition I give of mathematics is that it is the study of structure. So you might regard randomness as anti-thetical to the world of mathematics. But countering this belief was the breakthrough that mathematicians like Fermat and Pascal made in the seventeenth century. They developed a mathematics of randomness which revealed that there are patterns even in random data that give away that they are random. It is interesting to see how artists themselves have used randomness as a tool in their work to take them in new directions.

What do people miss when they say, "I'm just not a maths person"?

It is my belief that everyone has a maths brain. Our species evolved to be very sensitive to patterns and I would define mathematics as the science of pattern. My new book Blueprints: how mathematics shapes creativity aims to reveal that there is mathematics bubbling beneath many of the things that people love, from music to poetry, from visual art to architecture. If you can understand something of that hidden language beneath these disciplines then it gives you another way to appreciate the art.

If maths vanished overnight, what would artists panic about first?

One of the theses of my book is that the structures that artists and mathematicians enjoy exploring are often structures that first are realised in the natural world. Indeed, I would go even further. The reason that we are seeing so much mathematics when we explore the natural world is that the universe is really just a physicalised piece of mathematics. So, if maths vanished overnight, the universe would vanish with it and then it won't just be artists that will be panicking about its disappearance.