YouSaid · the spoken record

Marcus du Sautoy

lines on the record: 51
first: 2008-12-07
most recent: 2008-12-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“My lucky might have spotted a pattern, hopefully I've made you into a mathematician in this program, and there's a pattern running through all my music, which is the trumpet, I think. The trumpet is very strong. And so I'm going to take my trumpet with me because I don't get enough time to play it at the moment. I'd love to just be able to sit on my desert island, play along to this music.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the glass bead game by Herman Hess. This is a book I read when I was a student. It's all about this sort of futuristic game which sort of tries to combine mathematics, music, philosophy into one sort of activity. I think that's what I've been trying to do in my life, play the glass speed game, so it's a book which really I love.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I heard somebody else bring Mahabarata that you're allowed a religious text and I love that because I think I would be performing that because the way Peter Brook did it I'd love to perform that one so if I can take that one I'll do that”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Alexander's feast by Handel, and this is a piece I played the trumpet in actually when I was a student. It's a magical piece of music. And I've actually chosen an early music version of this because I love the kind of grittiness of this recording.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. Actually, I've got no worries about being on this desert island because I really enjoy just being on my own thinking about mathematics, all these other things crowding in. So I think I'd be okay out there.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if I had to have chosen another profession it would have been the theatre, and every now and again when math is going really badly I download this application form to the cop mime theatre in Paris, which is where complicated aided all their stuff. And I have filled it out a few times, but you have to know French quite well, I think, to do the course, and that was sort of like, I should have learned French after all. Yeah, that has been my dream.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's really hard work doing mathematics, so you can only do about two hours of it a day. I mean, you do require intense concentration to actually sustain yourself in this world. And actually your subconscious is an incredibly important part of doing mathematics. So you'll sow the seeds in those two intense hours of work, and then the ideas will come when you're kicking a football around or making a train journey or something like that. So subconscious work is really important for a mathematician. So you need lots of relaxation.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Shostakovich, who I have always loved since I was a kid, but I love him even more when I discovered, in fact, he's a great football fan, which I am as well, and he used to break off from doing his musical compositions to go and see matches on a Saturday, so I thought this is the man for me. He even wrote a piece which is football sonata that I think is a really useless piece of music. It was one of his own duds, so I haven't chosen that, but I've chosen the Stringlet number H, which would be really delicate piece of music.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get wrong at school a little bit. But actually, I think that's the point that religion is actually very much a cultural thing. It's a tribal thing. And my wife's Israeli, she's Jewish, she's moved to London. It's very important for her to keep her community and culture alive. And I think for most people, that's the primary role of religion. You know, for me, my religion is arsenal or football. That binds me together in a community. And so I think for me it isn't inconsistent to send my son to a Jewish school because I think he's getting a sort of cultural framework and he's sharp enough to ask the questions about the ideas of God and religion.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you are an atheist. I am an atheist, but I work very closely with religious scientists, so the person I went to visit in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He's an Orthodox Jewless on the West Bank. He practices his religion and does fantastic mathematics.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it was quite a fierce battle to end up with this job, but I think they've gone for a great choice, personally. I mean, partly because of my subject. I think we've gone from one end of the spectrum, which is evolutionary biology, sort of to the other end, which is mathematics, this very hard core subject. But I think mathematics is a great choice for this chair because mathematics does underpin all of the other sciences.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, and this is a moment when Bluebeard opens the fourth door and he opens it onto this secret garden, and that is, I think what my teacher did for me when he took me round the back of the maths block, and he said, you know, find out what maths is really about. And he opened this door. And by God, Bartok got exactly right what it feels like to suddenly see mathematics for what it really is.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, one of the problems with trying to communicate ideas of mathematics to the general public is that I think they want to understand it in one go. You can't teach somebody a musical instrument in three minutes, but you can give them a feel. So you can play somebody a piece of music and give them a feel for that world, and this is what you'll get access to. And I think that's what I'm trying to do very often. I can't give complete understanding of the things that I do, but maybe I can give them a taste.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many people say that they don't have the brain to do mathematics. Oh, I hate mathematics, can't do mathematics. And I totally disagree with that. I think we're evolutionary programmed to do mathematics. It's how we survived. The fact that we can judge distances in the forest jungle or whatever, that you can pick out things with symmetry, that you can count things. Say there's more of us than there are of them. We can attack them. Those who could count survived, but”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think prime numbers because they really go to the heart of what mathematics is about. I mean, I say a mathematician is a pattern searcher. That's what I'm trying to do. I try and look for patterns. And the primes come out somehow the ultimate challenge. If you look at a sequence of primes, these indivisible numbers two, three, five, seven, eleven, they don't seem to have any patterns in them at all, so they're kind of like the ultimate challenge for the mathematician. And symmetry as well with symmetry is the language of nature in some ways. That's what I'd sort of discovered in my exploration. It's a language that nature uses in chemistry, biology, physics. So for me, if I get access to the possible symmetries that are out there, I'm getting access to really deep eternal truths.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we do go on these kind of nerdy mathematical sort of holidays sometimes where I drag them around and show them the way I see the world. Yeah, my son kind of raises his eyebrows. He knows that I'm sort of starting to go mathematical on him, but he grins and bears”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh Messian, this is the tarangala. The Messian is somebody who loved doing mathematics And told I got a fellowship in All Souls College, which was a really major moment in life. I remember trying to sing this theme as I was going down, I was living in Brixton at the time. So I was walking down to the tube, trying to sing this theme. I think people thought I was such a total nutter.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, exactly. Identical twins. So that's nothing to do with the mathematics. That was sort of chance, I think. But I think it is rather cute.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, partly we've been told about these girls who were in an orphanage there, and it was taking too much time. My wife just said, look, come on, let's go out and look after these girls there. I'm tired of seeing them grow up in JPEGs that were being sent. So again, it's my sort of my wife's go get mentality. My son went to school out there, and school's so much more fun out there. He just ran a farm and did woodwork and things. He'd just come out of this horrible year where they do their exams at the age of seven or something ridiculous like that. And so he just really blossomed there as well. But Guatemala is a wonderful place. I feel like we've adopted two girls from Guatemala and a country as well. We went back there this summer actually to take them back for the first time.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was also travelling because actually just before I went to Israel, I traveled in Guatemala with my sister, and I fell in love with a country then. And so when we were looking to adopt children to expand our family, we met a lot of people who had adopted children from Guatemala, and all the children seemed to be so happy. So we went out and we lived in Guatemala for seven months”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's right. She's not a mathematician at all. She was working at Petzille, the Art College. We were flatmates together in Jerusalem. She's an incredibly vibrant woman, somebody who just loves life very strong. I think that's why she survived the terrible experience. She's somebody who just gets on with life and does things. And I just fell in love with her.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, after I did my PhD there was one guy in Jerusalem that I really wanted to go and work with'cause I could just read his papers and feel like this is somebody who speaks my language. You know, I wanted to travel because I wanted to be in the foreign office like my mum to be a spy, but now, you know, instead of this spy's language, I don't see speaking this mathematical language to all these people.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another Britain, actually, yes, this is a Midsummer Night's Dream, one of the favourite plays that I did at university was Midsummer Night's Dream in Maudlin Deer Park, which is magical, and I played flute the Bellows Mender, which is a really fun partner. I love this operatic version of the play. I really enjoy doing at university.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's for me it is a meditative world that just wanting to let everything else go and just be in a place That you're happy. So it is an escapism for me quite often, and a spirituality as well. I mean, for me, I get my spiritual buzz out of the amazing eternity of this world as well. There's something very special for me about this world.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I wouldn't want to have just a flat boring life and this was part of just life's experience and it wasn't incredibly intense experience.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Low allowance is a terrifying thing because they kept her quite drugged to keep her stable. And then they took the drugs off. And I was expecting it almost to be like a switch. And for several days, she didn't come round. And I was thinking, oh gosh, you know, so many things have gone wrong. Well, what's the next thing that is going to go wrong? But, you know, then she did come around. But of course, we were in very different places then because I was on an emotional high that I had my wife back, but then she was on this kind of terrible low because she then was aware of everything that had happened. You know, the way I make sense of it is, you know, life deals you these sets of cards and you have to deal with it. And it is an emotional roller coaster ride.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“life making sense of the world this should be science I realize kind of how primitive the other sciences are because they didn't manage to produce any explanation for this it was totally frustrating but that is what science is about trying to find answers to things like that”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh well, we went back and forward to the hospital. I mean, I have this awful that corridor to the intensive care unit. I mean, that is the road to health for me. I can't think about that. And it was really tough because I didn't know whether she was going to survive. So what do I tell Tom Eric? So, you know, I had to tell him that you build a child up. The child thinks he's going to get a brother. And so I had to tell him that, you know, something went wrong and we don't know what went wrong, but that his brother died. And then I wasn't quite sure to tell him about his mother at that point because I didn't know either. And I think he's an amazing boy. And he's been through a lot, as I have as well, but”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“out of this and felt like I got my wife back. The solace of mathematics, I'm afraid I did that classic male thing of just burying myself in a world of security and something where things don't blow up like that.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes it was like a bomb going off. We have had a son already, Tom Ayre, and we were expecting a second son. My wife said I haven't felt the baby move for a day and it was right at term and I said we'll just go along and check it will be all right but it wasn't all right and the baby had died and we had to go through this awful thing of delivering a dead baby what an awful thing to happen and then it just everything got rashly worse and worse when my wife then delivered the baby then she went into this kind of free fall she was bleeding out the hospital whisked her off and the last thing she said to me was I'm dying. And frankly she was and beyond the next hour I didn't know what was happening to her and it was just terribly frightening and that's one of those totally logical moments which nothing made sense at all in my life and for about two weeks she was in intensive care in a coma and then she”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, this is actually goes back to the Wagner that I got immersed in I've chosen Wagner's Parceval. I love the way he sort of is constructing some huge mathematical proof, I think, with all these themes, leitmotifs, which he interweaves in as complex a way and sort of gets this resolution at the end of the six hours.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not really. In some sense I kind of mucked up my first year actually because I was doing far too much music and theatre and I actually got a second in my exam. So the first time I never actually got the top mark. But in my third year I then realized that's when I kind of went on my desert island and realized, okay, my dream is to become a mathematician. And if I'm going to do that, I have to get a first at the end of this. So I think I'm quite good at just going from one thing to another and just totally dedicating myself 100%. I think it's almost that autistic or blinkered thing. I can really blink her out everything else and just spend time doing one thing.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was extraordinary. I mean, you know, when I got this phone call from Waddham saying, yeah, we'd like to take you and we're going to give you a major scholarship. I was just totally emotional. But what really surprised me was I phoned my dad up, who is quite a controlled guy. You know, I could hear on the phone, he sort of collapsed, and he raced home. And he just came through the door and he burst into tears. And I didn't quite realize how much this meant also to the rest of my family.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you know, I was a goody two shoes in school. It was a punk generation. Some of my friends were coming with just weird hairdoos, but I think there is certainly a quite conventional side to me going to Oxford becoming a professor in Oxford. That is something I dreamt about.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, partly again it was music because when I was playing in the youth orchestra in Oxfordshire we would do our concerts there. We did some wonderful concerts in colleges in Maudlin Chapel. I remember doing some singing there, a case, what an amazing world it was for the students there. And also my grandfather had been to Waddham and so that sort of gave me that aspiration as well.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess they gave me a wonderful environment, like a fertile soil, which that seed grew out of. My parents took me along to Wagner Opera's six hour operas at the age of thirteen, but I'd love them. I wasn't dragged there. I quite like being slightly different as well. I like the fact that everyone else seemed to be into pop music at this time, but what did it for me was classical music.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I didn't think so at the time, but I see in retrospect I think probably is a similar brain area that does that. This piece actually we went to visit my grandparents and when they retired to Aubora and they took me up to the Red House, which is where Britain was, and the librarian brought out this piece of music, the score for it, and I hadn't heard it before. It's an absolutely magical piece you get these just solo trumpet lines individually, and then they're all played together in this amazing cacophony, which you realize how amazing Britain is at weaving these themes together.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second choice is actually related to my grandfather because it's a police by Benjamin Britton. This is the fanfare for St. Edmondsbury. It's a trumpet police, and I'm actually a trumpeter. When I started getting into maths, I actually started learning the trumpet at the same time.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I have a spark of genius, actually, I'm not sure I was a terribly clever boy. I think what I really love about my parents that they just said they wanted me to do my best. It didn't matter whether I didn't succeed just as long as I felt like I'd done my best. I just went through school kind of in a normal way, but just enjoyed doing maths, and it sort of grew more and more.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, my godmother is TS Eliot's wife, Valerie Elliot, so she would take me to cats and things like that, which is really amazing. And also there's a musical side to Faber and Faber. I don't think I ever met Britain, but certainly Peter Piers. I remember being at some party at their house and my hand was covered in some goo from some thing I picked up and I had to shake hands with Peter Pears and it was rather embarrassing because I left him with a hand of goo. So”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a really important role model for me. He was chairman of Faber, and he'd been to Oxford Waddam. He loved intellectual things, but he was a very humble man as well, and I just used to really look up to him as somebody who I aspired to be, you know, to be somebody who had this wonderful intellectual range and was somebody who seemed to be important.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it probably is. I mean, she's still amazingly energetic. I take my son down there. She plays computer games. She's flying birds now. It's a totally extraordinary. She's one of these people who just loves new things. So, yeah, I think my energy probably does come from her”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, she wasn't. She told YouTube. There you go. That's her playing. She said that they let her keep the black gun that every member of the foreign office is given and that it's hidden somewhere in the house. And so we used to spend all our time, me and my sister, trying to find where this black gun was. We could never find it. She signs with me.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was. Yeah, I had a really wonderful child. I mean, I had a mother who was very creative. She created stories with us. We did lots of little theatre games with our toys and stuff like that and had a father who was just wonderful as well. He was in the computer industry and kind of, I think, gave me the logical side of my brain. So I really see my parents as the two sides, they're very creative but very logical side.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, it's just extraordinary. Every time I listen to it, there's a moment when she swoops up. It's just amazing.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first one is Strauss's four last songs, the particular song is Fruling, and I've chosen a particular artist to sing it because she does it for me every time Lucia Pop. And I think music does something which mathematics, although it's a very emotional thing rarely does, this piece of music just does something to my body. Every time I hear it, the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and this is why I love music.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I do love Bach, but has a lot of mathematics in it. I mean, his student Mitzler used to say that his music was the process of sounding mathematics. And maybe that's why I react against it. I find it sometimes a little bit too predictable and too controlled, and as you'll see, I've got some fairly wild and uncontrolled pieces on our journey.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, actually up to that point I want to do languages because my mother had been in the foreign office and I thought she'd been a spy. I thought she was seven. And so I fancied about going into the foreign office as well and was choosing all the languages at school. And I got very frustrated with the very illogical side of languages, all these irregular verbs and strange spellings. And for me, this mathematical language, I realized was the perfect language, captured the world nature didn't have exceptions. I think that's when I got sucked into the mathematical world.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't smoking this garden. What happened at that point? I really wasn't interested in maths because I didn't really like learning my multiplication tables and wasn't particularly good at them, but I was really lucky to have a teacher at my comprehensive school who, about 12 or 13, picked me out in the middle of a class and said, okay, I want to see you after the lesson. And during the break, he took me around the back of the maths block. And then he took out his break time cigar and said, look, DeSoto, I think you should find out what maths is really about because it isn't what we're doing in the classroom. It's something much more exciting. And he recommended a few books for me which just really opened this world up for me. And I'm so thankful for him giving the key to that world. It's amazing.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does, but I think that's partly because people don't realise what mathematics is really about. We're about to hear a lot of music, and I think mathematics and music have a lot to do with each other. What I feel people think mathematics is, is just kind of scales and arpeggios, and what I was lucky to hear when I was at school was actually the real music of mathematics. And I think if you open that up to people, suddenly you see the emotional side.”
2008-12-07 · Desert Island Discs · Marcus du Sautoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source