The pattern seeker: How Marcus du Sautoy finds mathematics in everything—from Shakespeare to football

This conviction guides him as he moves between worlds—from lecturing on zeta functions at Oxford to 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, a subject often framed in terms of threat, du Sautoy offered a correction. “I wouldn’t call it artificial intelligence,” he said. “I think it’s an alternative intelligence.” He sees AI not as a rival to human creativity but as a lens that focuses light where our own vision blurs. “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, the polite, socially necessary kind that don’t reach the eyes. “Humans are very easily taken in by someone smiling,” he said. “But the AI is able to pick out, through its learning, those little tells.” For du Sautoy, this is not a parlor trick; it is a form of translation. He imagines augmented-reality glasses that could help autistic people navigate social cues. “That’s not replacing humanity,” he said. “It’s extending it.”

Still, he believes there is a boundary. “The really important difference, I think, is embodiment,” he reflected. “AI at the moment is very unembodied. It’s 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 said. “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 with a twist: 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.”

To illustrate, he invoked 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 said. “The creativity is in the composer making a choice.” For him, a mathematical breakthrough must be “new, surprising, and has value.” He added, “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, like the Riemann Hypothesis, which has resisted proof for more than a century and a half. He finds a peculiar beauty in its stubbornness. “I think actually if everything was too easy, it would be boring,” he said.

He recalled the film Good Will Hunting, in which Matt Damon plays a janitor who solves impossible problems effortlessly. “By the end of the film, does he choose to become a mathematician? No, because it’s too easy for him,” du Sautoy said. “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.”

He explained the hypothesis in terms that felt almost tactile. “Prime numbers are the most fundamental numbers. They are the indivisible numbers. They are like the atoms of arithmetic.” The Riemann Hypothesis, he said, 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 said. “We find a symmetrical face more beautiful than an asymmetrical face.”

He described 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 not a cultural accident but a mathematical truth embedded in nature. “Mathematics is the language of nature,” he said. “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 said, laughing. 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 drew to a close, du Sautoy ventured into metaphysical territory. He recalled the famous saying “If there is a God, He must be a mathematician,” and offered 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 said. “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 said. “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 was a generous one. “Although many people say, ‘Oh, I’m not a mathematician,’ I think actually we’re all mathematicians at heart,” he said. “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.”