The reason why we do maths is because it’s like poetry. It’s about patterns, and that really turned me on. It made me feel that maths was in tune with the other things I liked doing. Marcus du Sautoy Read Quote
The best mobile phone had the best mathematician. They know how to fit a huge amount of data into a small amount of space. How to do things efficiently, how to do them cleverly. Marcus du Sautoy Read Quote
The point is with good maths skills you have just wonderful opportunities and if you don’t have good maths skills, there are just so many things that you won’t be able to do. Marcus du Sautoy Read Quote
It’s my belief that you can take everyone down a logical path if you take them slowly enough, and the trouble is that mathematical brains can get scrambled a little bit on the way. You get a bad teacher, it messes you up for the rest of the journey. Marcus du Sautoy Read Quote
I think science is a foreign land for many people, so I think of my role as an ambassador’s job. Marcus du Sautoy Read Quote
It’s important to me that no one can say I’m not pumping out high-level research. Marcus du Sautoy Read Quote
If I’m flying to China, I can sit and think about a problem. Other scientists have to go to the lab. I’m always thinking about maths, even when I’m doing other things. A lot of the time you’re going up blind alleys and it’s very frustrating, but then you have a sudden rush of ideas. You can live off that for quite some time. Marcus du Sautoy Read Quote
Rather than opera, football is more like ballet or a chess game. You can really see it in a team like Arsenal, especially when Dennis Bergkamp was playing. He seemed to be able to read the game like a chessboard and knew where a player would be several seconds later and put the ball there for him. Marcus du Sautoy Read Quote
You know, I’m not terribly fast at my times tables, because that’s not what I think mathematics is about. Marcus du Sautoy Read Quote
