Marcus du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University.
You’ve no idea how daunting I find that. I struggled with maths at school. I’m virtually functionally innumerate. My arithmetic is limited to the number of digits I have on display. If I were forced to count to twenty-one in public I’d be risking a night in the cells.
Since 2008 Marcus du Sautoy has also been Simyoni Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.
I think that’s a wonderful thing to be, I really do. I think he’s got his work cut out for him at the moment though, to be frank.
When Marcus du Sautoy is asked if he has a religion his reply is: “It’s the Arsenal”.
We all have our crosses to bear. 1969 League Cup Final, let’s leave it there.
The subject of his talk at the Swindon Festival of Literature was his latest book: “What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge”. To paraphrase the well known metaphysical philosopher Donald Rumsfeld – as Du Sautoy did during the talk – what are the scientific “known unknowns” and are they ever knowable? Is there a limit to what we can every truly predict, deconstruct and understand?
In his attempt to try to answer this question he picked the brains of experts in fields from quantum physics and cosmology, to sensory perception and neuroscience. Some apparently reacted angrily to the suggestion that there might be realms unreachable in their field of excellence. Du Sautoy himself, being a mathematician, a domain that welcomes more certainties than most, had to step out of his comfort zone and consider if there are reaches to which the human brain cannot stretch. The result was the book and this lecture gave us a taste of what he discovered.
Communicating science to the public is a role that Marcus du Sautoy really was born to. He’s an arch-communicator in every sense of the phrase. He has a real knack for making complicated concepts interesting and accessible. On the Art Centre stage he demonstrates all the focused energy and comic timing of a seasoned stand-up comic. His good-humoured energy was all the more impressive considering he’d travelled from Istanbul to Swindon especially to give this talk. That’s dedication.
But are there things we cannot know? I think Du Sautoy’s conclusion is that there may be questions that we will never satisfactorily answer, but that should never deter scientists from trying to answer them. A lot of a scientific sweat is spent on scrabbling in the dark. Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life fruitlessly trying to combine gravity and electromagnetism into a single elegant theory. What drove him, and drives many questing scientists, is that maybe one day their tireless wrestling with a Known-Unknown will result them unexpectedly discovering an Unknown-Unknown and then the Known-Unknown will become a Known-Known.
That’s the ‘Rumsfeld’s Theory of Scientific Endeavour’, anyway.
Marcus du Sautoy’s books – including What We Cannot Know, The Number Mysteries and The Music of the Primes – are available from all good book retailers and online ones as well via robotic drone.
