Marcus du Sautoy is a professor of mathematics who loves to play games with Maths. Though initially he found math tough, once he discovered the magic of Math, there was no going back.
For most of us, a person good in mathematics would perhaps look like a nerd, wear high power spectacles and would constantly prefer company of books over humans. At least, that is the perception we have grown up with. However, Marcus Du Sautoy begs to differ. Marcus is a British mathematician, Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Fellow of New College, Oxford and the author of well-known books that dispel the myth and terror associated with mathematics. When I caught up with him for a tet-e-tat on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival this year, I realized mathematics was not just about numbers but also nature. Some excerpts from a freewheeling chat with the man who loves to play games with math.
What is it like to visit the Jaipur Literature Festival?
Oh! Its hectic but so much fun. I get to talk about everything. I have been to seven sessions and each session has been a different experience. Today was games, yesterday was parenting in the digital age, I have done AI and publishing, AI and creativity, and tonight I’m talking about free speech.
So what do you like about the Jaipur Literature Festival?
This is my fourth time at the Jaipur Literature Festival. I love the fact that it brings so many people from different disciplines, different countries, different philosophies, and that I think is what’s so exciting, sharing time with people with very different ways of looking at the world. So, I’m a scientist, so it’s nice to bring a scientific perspective on political issues, for example. I like the variety.
Have you been to Jaipur before?
I love coming to India, and especially Rajasthan. Last year I came with my wife, and after the festival we travelled around Jodhpur, Udaipur, and I’ve been also other places before that. And in Jodhpur we got to know a very wonderful family who are into making carpets, and today I’m having two carpets delivered to my hotel from the family. We are good friends with them. They invited us to their daughter’s wedding, but unfortunately it was two weeks before the festival, so we couldn’t go.
Was mathematics easy for you as a child?
Math wasn’t necessarily easy for me. I think that you have to remember that mathematics is a little bit like learning a musical instrument. You can’t play the piano immediately. You have to practice, spend time in that world, and gradually it gets easier.
I think people have to remember that you don’t have to get everything right the first time, but you have to understand why you got something wrong and learn from that. I only fell in love with mathematics when I was about 12 or 13, and the key for me was seeing some exciting stories of mathematics, not just doing multiplication and all the technical side. And again, it’s like learning an instrument.
If you just did scales and arpeggios, you get bored. That’s not music. Sometimes I feel like the mathematics taught in school is not the real mathematics. Fortunately, I had was a teacher who showed me these stories about math. Things about prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, infinity, geometry, and for me, that was what made me fall in love with the subject, seeing there were so many exciting stories inside there, which if I had learnt the mathematics I did at school, I’d be able to understand or now write myself.
Okay, can you share some of those stories, maybe one story about what made it so interesting for you?
Yeah, sure for example, Fibonacci numbers, which many kids might see, but it’s not on curriculum. So these are numbers which go 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and there’s a pattern because you add the two previous numbers. 5 plus 8 gives you 13, 8 plus 13 gives you 21, 13 plus 21 gives you 34. So, these numbers are growing out of the other numbers. Now, these numbers are all over nature. If you count the number of petals on a flower, it’s either 5 or 8 or 13. If you cut open a fruit, like an apple, you get a 5-pointed star. A banana has a 3-pointed star, a persimmon has an 8. If you take a pineapple and you count the number of cells, it’s a Fibonacci number. When I tell this to my children respond about nature doing mathematics, they start thinking that math must be important, it’s not something arbitrary. But the other beautiful thing is these numbers are important in music as well. If you’re a drummer, a tabla player, with long and short beats, the number of rhythms goes in this sequence, 5, 8, 13. So for me, that’s the kind of story you want to tell. Then the numbers start to creep into nature, into music, into poetry. And then that connects with the things, you know, maybe your child is not immediately interested in numbers, but they might like music. Or they might like the garden. For me, that’s the key, is finding why mathematics is everywhere. And then the children start saying, I want to understand the world, I need to understand maths.
How can teachers convert mathematics into a game for children?
I think we’re in a golden age where a teacher who may not be so confident with mathematics can still teach well because there are lots of resources on the internet that they can use to try and help the children. In particular, for example, I created an internet maths school based on gaming. It’s called MangaHigh.com, and what we did was to take the mathematical curriculum, turn it into a game and then the kids learn the mathematics by playing the game. And the game is clever enough so it understands, well, the student is finding this difficult, so it takes them down a level to lift their confidence up, or if a student is just eating it all up, so it pushes them to the higher levels. I think we’re in a great age where technology can help a teacher to, not replace a teacher.
Somewhere, you said that there is a possibility that AI can become conscious. What if that happens? Will we be in danger?
With new technologies, there are always positives and negatives, and it’s about how we use that technology. So, if AI becomes conscious, we want it to be empathetic to the human race. We can we create AI that understands us and we understand it. So as with any new relationship, it’s about building trust. If the thing is conscious, it’s sophisticated, then we’ll understand because we want to create an AI which isn’t incentivized to wipe out humanity.
How can that happen?
I think what AI is very good at is learning behaviours. So if we give it empathetic behaviour, then it will produce empathetic results. If we lead it astray by depicting abusive behaviour, it will respond with abusive results. We’ve seen many examples of this, where a chatbot put online interacts with people who are racist, misogynist, and it learns how to repeat that, and that’s what we don’t want. We’re at the momentin control of its evolution, and so we need to take responsibility to take it in a positive direction.
Does that mean that if we create robots or anything, it will learn that behaviour?
Yes. And unfortunately, because it’s learning on human behaviour, and human behaviour is not always terribly good, there are dangers that this thing is learning to succeed at the expense of everybody else. That is not a great learning model.
So, will we need to reformat the humans first?
(Laughs) I think so, right? That’s a very good way to put it. But I think that’s what’s interesting and I think people don’t realize this, the AI that is emerging is a reflection of our values and our way of looking at the world, because it’s learning from our world, our art, our writing, our literature. And so it’s not a new thing. It’s a new take on an old thing, which is humanity.
..To Be Continued
This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on July 10, 2024
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