‘S o, do you believe in God?’ That is the Nth
time today I’ve been asked that, where N is starting to be quite a big number. I was bracing myself for the God question after it was announced this week that I will be succeeding Richard Dawkins, the evangelical atheist, to become the next Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science in Oxford. Given Dawkins’s often controversial stand on issues of religion, I knew the question was inevitable.
I sympathise with Dawkins’s battle. It is after all his science, evolutionary biology, that the Intelligent Design movement is targeting. Mathematics is more immune from such attacks. The power of proof means that the results mathematicians produce are indisputable. I guess that is one of the reasons why I was drawn to the subject. No one can question Euclid’s proof that there are infinitely many primes. There is no chance that someone can suddenly turn round and say, ‘Hold on. You got it wrong. This is the last prime.’ In the interviews I’ve been doing since the announcement of the appointment, I am keen to shift the debate back to the importance and excitement of science and its impact on society.
That’s not to say that religion doesn’t impact on my professional life. I work quite closely with an orthodox Jewish mathematician in Israel. I was always intrigued how he can be so rational and logical during our collaboration in the week and yet on Shabbat believe that the universe is only 5,768 years old. I wondered whether he tried to rationalise this with some strange equation which stretched the first few years out over a huge expanse of time. But he wasn’t interested in such games. For him, his religion is as much a tribal, cultural thing as an explanation for the origins of the universe. It still baffles me how he can compartmentalise his life in this way. But I guess everyone has their irrational sides. So do I believe in God? Yes, and his name is Arsène Wenger. My church is the Emirates and my irrational religion is the Arsenal.
After shouting my head off at the Emirates, I wasn’t sure I was going to have any voice left next morning to talk with John Humphrys on the Today programme. I must admit that I was quite impressed that he didn’t ask me the God question, although I did get the ‘what’s the point of maths?’ one instead. I was holed up in one of Today’s mobile studios outside my home. When the satellite went down two minutes before I was due on air, I realised again why I chose maths from all the other sciences. Despite all the theory being right, things just go wrong when you’re doing experiments. That was certainly my experience at school. John and I always have good sparring matches but I was a bit stumped when he said, ‘Impress me with a bit of maths then!’ I decided to turn the tables and ask him a question: ‘If a temple was built in 50 Bc and burned down 75 years later, in what year did it get destroyed?’ Just as I hoped, he fell for my trap. ‘No, not 25 AD but 26 AD.’ There was no year zero. Zero was only invented in the 7th century AD by the Indian mathematicians. As I came off air I Got a phone call this week from friends in Guatemala who we stayed with during the summer. The father of the family, Pablo, is an artist but is fascinated by science, so we spent many hours talking about the mysteries of prime numbers. Every morning he would greet me with a fine cup of Guatemalan coffee and another theory for how Nature chose the primes that he’d concocted during the night. Guatemala is a beautiful country but extremely violent. It was still a shock to learn on the phone that Pablo and his family had been attacked in their home last week by a gang of armed robbers.
When one of them held a gun to Pablo’s head, instead of his life flashing before him, all he could think about was the fact that his latest theory about the primes was about to be blown away and lost to the world before he could explain his ideas to me. It reminded me of the story of how Archimedes was interrupted in mid-theorem by a Roman soldier. Archimedes pleaded with the soldier to at least let him finish his calculations before he ran him through — ‘How can I leave this work in such an imperfect state?’ — but the soldier apparently was not prepared to wait for the QED at the end of proof and hacked Archimedes down in mid-theorem. Pablo fortunately was luckier than Archimedes.
My TV series The Story of Maths came to an end this week. Rather sad. It has been a long journey, beginning in October 2005 when I first started talking to the BBC about the idea of charting the history of where mathematics came from. The response to the series has been great, although I have been rather worried by a suggestion in several newspapers that I am a Simon Pegg lookalike. I’m not sure the Hot Fuzz of mathematics is quite what I was hoping for.
One of my favourite bits was the pilgrimage to Gwalior in India to see a tiny little temple hanging off the side of the mountain fort. The temple was large enough to fit one presenter and a cameraman in. Inscribed on the walls of the temple is the first known example of the number zero which caused John Humphrys so many problems. The temple is one of the holy sites of the mathematical world. But it wasn’t just the temple that I fell in love with. The town of Gwalior is a mathematician’s paradise. I have never seen so many posters advertising maths lessons. Everywhere you looked there was another billboard offering to take you on the path to numerical nirvana. But my favourite was a Mr Pramod Kushwah’s hoarding that declared ‘Maths ... one more reason to believe.’ Not sure Dawkins would have approved.
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