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Simon, We've Got Your Number
Interview by Tim Teeman
Times
Simon Singh achieves the impossible and makes
maths interesting for the numerically
challenged.
Oh dear. En route to
Simon Singh's mews home, my pit-of-stomach dread of
maths - fractions, long division, impenetrable
formulae - resurfaces. This is an old, primal fear
and not Singh's fault. He has done his utmost to
soothe the nerves of maths-haters (arithmo-phobes?)
like myself.
His new Radio 4 show,
Another Five Numbers,
is a lively series of 15-minute journeys around
numbers and their social and scientific history and
significance - four, for example, is the only
number with the same number of letters as the number
itself, but also, apparently, the least colours you
need to draw a map without the neighbouring
countries sharing the same hue.
Singh, a bear of a man dressed in retro
Hawaiian shirt and boffin-issue circular specs, is a
zealous advocate for maths and science. His first
book, Fermat's Last Theorem,
(1997) was an
international bestseller, shifting 200,000 paperback
copies in Britain alone. It told the amazing story
of how a Princeton academic, Andrew Wiles, finally
proved the 17th-century mathematician Pierre de
Fermat's 300-year-old theorem - that while the
square of a number can be broken down into two other
numbers squared, the same is not true of cubes, or
any higher power.
Besides the number crunching, this was also a
brilliant drama, starting with Fermat's tantalising
jotting next to his theory: "I have a truly
marvellous demonstration of this proposition which
this margin is too narrow to contain." With
considerable verve, Singh charted how generations of
ambitious thinkers had resorted to theft,
transvestism, even duelling, in their efforts to
prove Fermat's theorem.
Wiles became obsessed by Fermat at the age of
nine. At the same age, Singh declared his intention
to become a nuclear physicist. His family had been
farmers in the Punjab, though his grandparents had
moved to Somerset in the 1930's. (He is researching
their history to find out why.) "My parents left
India with virtually nothing", he says. "They couldn't
speak English, they had no idea how they would
survive in England and they were leaving behind
everything they owned and everybody they knew. The
journey that they made, and the success that they
achieved in a new county, will surpass anything
that I will ever achieve. When I saw the sacrifices
they made, then there was a real responsibility to
do well."
Despite initial pressure from his parents to
enter the business, he was "cut some slack" to
study. His teachers at secondary school - Mr
Stephens (maths), Mr Mynett (physics) - "loved to see
students get excited about the things they got
excited about and they knew enough about their
subject to stretch those kids that were bright."
His father, meanwhile, showed him "how things
worked." He jumps up from the sofa and returns with
something his father made, a "dozel", a little stick
with grooves on it with a mini-windmill on its
tip. He uses a second stick to rub against it, and
on my say-so (the magic word is "hooey"), the
windmill goes into reverse. This isn't magic,
apparently - it's simply a question of where you
position your fingers. As a boy, Singh was
transfixed by TV scientists such as Magnus Pyke and
Heinz Wolff exclaiming vividly over "videos of what
the Universe was like, why the sky is blue, why you
shut your eyes when you sneeze".
After A levels in mathmatics, physics and
chemistry, Singh studied physics at Imperial
College, London, then for a PhD in particle physics
at Cambridge and at the European Centre for Particle
Physics in Geneva. It was there, aged 26, that he
decided to leave academia.
"It would have been great to have made some
fantastic discovery. There can't be anything more
wonderful for a scientist than to be the first
person to know the answer to a problem. But I
realised the people around me were pioneers and I
wasn't." His voice falters. "I just wasn't smart
enough and I was around people who were." Later, he says
"It was a time when I'd given up hope. You suddenly
realised that you're not going to be getting your
Nobel Prize, that you're not going to be making the
greatest discovery, that you're not going to be
published in Nature.
"
"From the age of ten, I had wanted to be a
scientist. Perhaps this compounded my depression
when I realised I wasn't smart enough to be a great
scientist."
But having taught for a year in an Indian
school, he knew he was good at conveying complicated
ideas. "I had this skill that's fairly useless in
science, where you are promoted or ditched on the quality
of your research. I could communicate."
IN 1990 he joined the BBC and for six years
made films for Horizon
and Tomorrow's World.
He was
approached to direct a film about Fermat while
considering a career change; it was a huge success,
winning a Bafta, and Singh wrote a book telling the
whole story. He watched with mounting incredulity
its rise "from eight to five to three then one" in
the book charts.
"There is this huge constituency of people
who are curious about the world," he says. "It was
great to hear from people saying 'I hated maths at
school but I loved your book'." In the wake of books
such as Fermat
and Longitude,
popular
science became
a growth genre. "I tried to do what I had done when
making TV - to tell a story and to explain
some science," he says. "When you make telly, you
bear in mind that there is a wide audience, without
a background in science, so you make the programme
gripping and explain the science clearly."
"I did not want my readers to become
frustrated with the mathematics. My general plan was
to tell the story and sprinkle the maths along the
way. The great thing about Fermat's Last Theorem,
is
that it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and a
plot twist, and heroes and villains. But you have to
include the concepts. I want readers to have that
'Ah!' moment, when they suddenly realise why prime
numbers are so important or why there must be an
infinite number of primes or what a proof by
contradiction is."
And fame? He dismisses it with a nod to a
video of The Office.
"I'm not Ricky Gervais; most
people don't know who I am. But, as a massive
Queen fan, it was great to hear Brian May had bought
a copy."
Given the success of Fermat
and his next
opus, The Code Book
(2000),
it comes as a shock when
he reveals his third will also be his final
book. "And that will be news to my agent too," he
laughs. "But it's time to do something else."
It will be the story of cosmology. "When my
grandfather was born no one knew where the Universe
came from and now in a couple of generations we are
at the stage where scientists can talk of the Big
Bang. I think that's absolutely gobsmacking. But
writing takes so much out of your life. I'm not sure
whether books are the best way to communicate ideas,
compared to TV or teaching. I want to do other
things, other projects."
Singh is a man with a mission. Disgusted at
the lack of qualified teachers in many schools, he
is overseeing a scheme placing maths and science
graduates in schools to teach "and act as role models and
inspiration" to pupils.
"I've got the time and some clout now," he
says. "Successive governments have done the
shoddiest job imaginable in getting science teachers
into classrooms. The numeracy strategy is doing well
and some parts of the primary school maths
curriculum are working, but it must be fairer.
Here's an opportunity for the Education Minister to prove
himself."
He is genuinely angry. "If you get a degree
in science, you get hoiked off into the dot-com
industry or software development. Being a science
teacher is the best job in the world, but if you're
being overworked, disrespected and getting better
job offers, what are you going to do?" Singh's
advocacy is all-consuming. "Maths and science are
beautiful. They are part of our culture, like music,
poetry or theatre. Also, we need scientists and
mathematicians to help to energise the economy. If
we do not have enough computer scientists,
engineers, geneticists and inventors, UK plc goes
down the plughole."
"Most importantly, our lives are increasingly
influenced by scientific and technological
issues. In an age when there will be difficult
decisions to be made about issues like cloning and stem cells, we need
to be informed. Otherwise, as a society, we'll make stupid decisions."
He is angry that parents rejected the majority scientific view of the
MMR jab - that it was safe. But he can't be surprised, I say, that
there is a mistrust of science given its perceived loftiness and
abuses.
"Science cannot be the absolute
authority on
anything," he replies,
"but at the end of the day the scientific, rational approach to giving
an answer is better than the emotional, anecdotal approach. Science is
not perfect, but it's the best type of unbiased knowledge we have."
IS it all work with Singh? His living-room
is essentially an office,
with few personal possessions. Shelves are stacked with box files,
books for research and the odd video (
The Office, Scream, Alan Partridge
). He is, he
says, socially phobic, turning down invitations
to parties and only comfortable one-on-one with close friends. Yes, he
assents, that is odd considering how comfortable he is on stage or in
front of the camera.
He is 38 and unmarried, though he has been in
love. "I am ready to
settle down and have a wife and children," he says quietly. "The
challenge for me is to find the right person. I just don't understand
how people have both a home life and work life. I just don't know it
would work. But it would.
If I had a family, I would want it to be
like my own childhood. Growing up in Somerset in a small town, a rural
community, people living near each other, kids staying up late to play
football. I'm ready for it now."
Meanwhile, he is planning a battery of
lectures about
cosmology. "Explaining a great idea is like telling a really good
joke," he says. "I hope you enjoy it and you go away and tell somebody
else about it." He leans forward. "Did you know you can measure the
speed of light using a microwave oven and melted marshmallows," he
says, "and that if you suspend a grape from a piece of cotton in the
microwave, the water in the grape boils, and sends out a little jet of
steam so you have a jet-propelled grape."
He pulls out a plastic "witch stick",
resembling a mini fluorescent
banana. He spins it in one direction, then notes that it won't spin in
the other.
"The equations tell you why it does what it
does. But I need an
understanding that transcends equations, where you say 'Ahh that's
why'.
I don't have one."
With the revelation that the great Simon
Singh can't work out how a
little plastic thing rotates, my pit-of-stomach dread of maths and
science lifts considerably.
Published in The Times (London) newspaper
in April, 2003.
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