In the dusty, book-filled tumult of the Jaipur Literature Festival, where the air thrums with the rhythms of poetry and politics, one might not expect to find a mathematician holding court. But there he was: Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, looking perfectly at ease, and speaking in stories rather than arcane equations.
In a corner away from the main stages, he explains why he prefers to think of mathematics as the hidden architecture of creativity itself. “When Shakespeare has the Three Witches cast Macbeth’s lot,” he says, “he uses something very weird to do it: not simply ‘eye of newt and toe of frog,’ but the number seven. And when Hamlet claims, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question,’ Shakespeare reaches for eleven.”
In his forthcoming book, Blueprints, he argues that such choices reveal a deep, intuitive collaboration between art and mathematics. “Creativity is inseparable from mathematics,” he says. “The relationship runs both ways.”
This conviction guides him as he moves between lecturing on zeta functions at Oxford and discussing choreography with dancers in Birmingham. His mission is to reveal the patterns that connect them.
The alternative intelligence
Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, is the author of Blue Prints. (Courtesy: Marcus du Sautoy)
When the conversation turned to Artificial Intelligence, which most people perceive as a threat, du Sautoy offers a different perspective. “I wouldn’t call it artificial intelligence,” he said. “I think it’s an alternative intelligence. It gives us the chance to see things that perhaps we as humans are missing.”
He described an experiment from M I T involving the detection of false smiles that are socially necessary but don’t really reach the eyes. “Humans are very easily taken in by someone smiling,” he says. “But the AI is able to pick out, through its learning, those little tells.” For du Sautoy, this is a form of translation. He imagines augmented-reality glasses that could help autistic people navigate social cues. “That’s not replacing humanity,” he says. “It’s extending it.”
Still, he believes there is a boundary. “The really important difference, I think, is embodiment,” he says. “AI at the moment is very unembodied. It is learning from virtual-world digital data. And a lot of our intelligence comes from our engagement through embodiment. That is where AI is going to always fall down.”
Finding the door for mathphobes
Du Sautoy is perhaps best known as a translator, someone who can speak the language of mathematics in the vernacular of everyday life. How does a person so involved in the complexities of Mathematics, simplify it for the layman? “Understanding what not to say is more important than understanding what you should say,” he says. “If you give too many details, you’re going to lose people. For me, the importance is storytelling.”
The key, he believes, is to start with what people already love. “I try to show them the things that they love and then to reveal that actually there’s a lot of mathematics in the things that you love.” He calls this “finding the door.” It might be music, cricket, kolam, or classical dance. “Nature is full of mathematics,” he said. “So many people love music, but then to illustrate that music has a lot of mathematics bubbling inside it. I think that then starts to break down the barriers and the fear.”
The Library of Babel and the mathematician’s choice
One of the oldest questions in philosophy is whether mathematics is invented or discovered. Du Sautoy’s answer leans toward discovery, but adds that the creativity lies in the choosing. “There is certainly a feeling of creativity,” he said. “But once [an idea is] there, there’s a feeling like, no, that was always there for us to discover.” He sees the mathematician not as an inventor but as a curator of truths. “They all exist before humans are around,” he said. “But creativity is about the choices we make.”
He invokes Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Library of Babel,” which describes a library containing every possible book. “It’s got everything, but actually it’s got nothing because no writer has made a choice,” du Sautoy says. “The creativity is in the composer making a choice.” For him, a mathematical breakthrough must be “new, surprising, and has value,” he says, adding, “Surprise and value are very subjective. And surprise is about emotions.”
The allure of the unsolved
No conversation with du Sautoy would be complete without touching on the great unsolved problems, such as the Riemann Hypothesis, which has resisted proof for more than a century and a half. He finds beauty in its stubbornness. “I think actually if everything was too easy, it would be boring,” he says, recalling the film Good Will Hunting, in which Matt Damon plays a janitor who solves impossible problems. “By the end of the film, does he choose to become a mathematician? No, because it’s too easy for him,” du Sautoy says. “The challenge of something like the Riemann Hypothesis being difficult, what gives it magic and what will make it so much more exciting when we prove it? Because of the journey we’ve been on.”
“Prime numbers are the most fundamental numbers. They are the indivisible numbers. They are like the atoms of arithmetic.” The Riemann Hypothesis, he says, is about a profound negative. “The fact that we think there is no pattern at the heart of these numbers, and that’s very difficult to prove.”
The mathematics of a smile
Why do we find symmetry beautiful? Du Sautoy traces our preferences back to evolutionary mathematics. “One very simple example is the idea of symmetry,” he says. “We find a symmetrical face more beautiful than an asymmetrical face.”
He describes bees drawn to symmetrical flowers, and the human brain attuned to symmetry as a signal of health and vitality. “Why are we drawn to a face with symmetry? Because symmetry is very hard to make. So that’s an indication of good genetic heritage, good upbringing.”
In his view, this is a mathematical truth embedded in nature. “Mathematics is the language of nature,” he says. “It’s showing us the significant things.”
Du Sautoy’s instinct to see mathematics everywhere extends well beyond the arts. Football, he says, is rich with mathematical thinking, from patterns of play to group behaviour. “I play for a football team in East London, and we were doing incredibly badly,” he says. “I decided to change our kit. We all now play in prime number shirts.” He wears number 17. “It transformed our season,” he said. “We got promoted to the Super Sunday League Division One.”
“There is a lot of mathematics in football,” he says. Even when players are unaware of it, the game is full of pattern recognition, probability and collective calculation.
A world of structures
As our conversation draws to a close, du Sautoy ventures into metaphysical territory. He recalls the famous saying “If there is a God, He must be a mathematician,” and offers an inversion. “I would reverse that and say, you know what? The God that you’re all looking up for, that is the reason we have all of this, is mathematics.” For him, mathematics does not require a creator; it simply is, the set of all possible structures. “Mathematics doesn’t need a moment of creation,” he says. “It is the structures that can possibly exist. And what we’re seeing is a physicalised version of the mathematical structures that are possible.”
This perspective liberates mathematics from the confines of the physical world. “Mathematics is incredibly abstract; it doesn’t need physicality,” he says. “That’s why mathematics is much closer to literature than physics is, because we can create worlds that don’t really exist but have a kind of logical consistency to them.”
We are all mathematicians
Du Sautoy’s final thought is a generous one. “Although many people say, ‘Oh, I’m not a mathematician,’ I think actually we’re all mathematicians at heart,” he says. “The human brain has evolved to navigate the world in a mathematical way, because pattern searching, which is what mathematics is about, is how we navigate the chaos around us.”
Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, is the author of Blue Prints. (Courtesy: Marcus du Sautoy) 
Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, is the author of Blue Prints. (Courtesy: Marcus du Sautoy)
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