[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So many people I've spoken to on this podcast actually have talked about when they got to university, mathematics was completely different to what they expected, but it sounds like for you it wasn't.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So when you're at high school and presumably you're applying to do mathematics at university that you've decided that's your thing, what were you thinking your career was going to be? What did you think you were going to be when you grew up and you finished university as a schoolboy?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So for people, for people in America, for example, these Christmas lectures run by the Royal Institution is this sort of once a year real national profile showcase of a science and some famous scientist does like a grand lecture that gets shown on TV and everything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You said that at high school, you already knew you wanted to be a mathematician. Did you properly know what the mathematician was? Like if you went back and spoke to that boy now, would it be a bit naive, his perception, or do you think you pretty much had it now?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That sounds quite grown up, quite a mature attitude for someone of that age to not be thinking, oh I want to drive a Ferrari or play for Arsenal or something. I want to like, you know, I want to do these esoteric things and prove things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What was you, you went to Oxford University, did you, as an undergraduate? What was that like then? You said the first year was, you didn't do that well your first year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it sounds like, you know, there was lots of distractions for you, but you did quite well as an undergraduate, didn't you? Like you kind of got back on track and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, so YouTube videos don't quite have that permanence, I think, but obviously towards the end of your undergraduate and then starting as a graduate, you have to specialize in a subject. Can you give me just a very, very brief outline of what you specialized in? And more importantly, why are you specialized in that of all things?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was it, do you think you just have like, you know, uh, uh, an innate interest in that subject or was, did you have a particularly inspirational lecturer who drew you into it again or?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, you did a defill. Doing this seems like a traumatic experience for many people I speak to. And there's this, apparently there's this time in the middle where everything falls away from under you and you think you're not doing it right. And was it, was it a traumatic process for you or was it smooth sailing?


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[Assistant] Do you find yourself now, if you're stuck on something mathematical, booking some unnecessary train journey in the hope of rattling something loose?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Today's episode has been supported by GE Research, a leading quantitative finance research firm based in Europe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're always looking to hire the brightest people to help tackle the big questions in the world of finance. It's a chance to work with some of the very best in machine learning, big data, and some of the most advanced technology used to predict movements in financial markets.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Maybe you are the sort of person they're looking for. To learn more about what opportunities are available and the great flexible work environment they're offering, head to gresearch.co.uk slash numberphile. There's a link in the notes. gresearch, create today, predict tomorrow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Particularly people outside the UK might not know this about Marcus, but he's, he's known to most people for being like, you know, a real face of mathematics. You know, you're on lots of BBC TV shows and the radio. So, you know, you're very omnipresent when it comes to mathematics and communicating mathematics. You're a real sort of champion of it. But that thing you were worried about when you were writing that Times article, that kind of snipiness or jealousy and that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was that well founded? Do you still find that? Do you think people think, oh Marcus de Soto is just a, he's a TV guy, he's not a real mathematician? Or do you think people have kind of accepted you can be both?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Do you feel a pressure to keep doing math research and publishing to keep like your street cred?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You talked about the Fields Medal before, which is famously given to young mathematicians. You have to be below 40, don't you, to receive it? That's correct. And you also talked about how you hit a couple of home runs really early on. Your D-Field was published in the Annals of Mathematics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Have you still got it now? Do you think, do you think you're as good at mathematics now as you were when you were a younger man?


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[Assistant] What do we, what is the risk? You mean the waste of time? What are you risking by taking on a big dragon?


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[Assistant] One last thing about doing mathematics. How do you do mathematics? I always hear people like you say, I'm going to sit down today and do maths. Like what does that actually?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What does that look like? Not being a mathematician, it's one of the hardest things for me to understand. You sit down with a blank piece of paper and just start writing things and then adding things together? Or what does doing maths look like?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Am I being anti-snobby by suggesting are theatregoers the sort of people who are ignorant of mathematics and the importance of academic studies? And it feels like this is like one area where there wouldn't be a desperate call for, come on, we need to get these people educated.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What was it like for you as someone who for most of your life when you like write a math paper and that there's probably a hundred people in the world who can even understand it yet alone critique it to suddenly be putting yourself out there being reviewed by theatre critics and your writing being.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One last thing to ask or one last concern, and this might be a silly concern, you were talking about how, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Finding mathematical breakthroughs and discoveries and proofs are like immortal, they were chance immortality. That really appeals to me. And you're lucky to be blessed to be one of the people capable of making such breakthroughs. And then I hear you spending about all this time you're spending writing books and plays and giving talks and doing all this outreach, which is really valuable. I feel like you're eating into the hours you have to solve the Riemann hypothesis or make the next big discovery.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So this is like, this is part of your mathematics? It is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alright, you can keep doing it then. Look, I reckon you need to check on that sourdough bread.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well that's all for today, but if you'd like to see Marcus performing his play, see what you think. It's called Eye as a Strange Loop and it's been uploaded to YouTube, where you can watch it for free.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm Brady Harren, and you've been listening to the Numberphile Podcast.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You will not be charged for this call. This call is from...


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[Assistant] I think I'm someone that likes to be prepared. Again, I'm a school maths teacher. I always tell my students, do your homework, do your research. But actually, partly I've had some negative experiences.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On podcasts and interviews where I've turned out for an interview, but-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Physics, is it? No, no, maths. Uhm, so obviously that's completely different, but uhm, I've got into sort of the habit of, for, there's a podcast, there's a TV interview,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Assess my interest and background. The only thing that this was, it was meant to be like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A few bullet points, maybe ten bullet points. But I got carried away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was almost like a chance for me to reflect on my life. It was like, you know, lockdown is there, we're sort of, you know, term is approaching in a couple of weeks, normal school term, and the chance for me to take a step back and go, ah, why do I really love maths? Uhm, so actually, it's given me sort of a spring in my step, I am doing the right thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, uh, the football manager Jose Mourinho because my family are originally from a state called Kerala in South India and the language they speak there is Malayalam, which actually is cool because Malayalam is the longest proper noun, which is a palindrome. It says Malayalam, Malayalam. Same backwards and forwards.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's another Bobby Jose talking to Brady Haran, but in this particular universe that we occupy, Brady, it's Bobby Seagal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And it was an inspirational, quite a short novella, a book you could get through maybe in an hour, hour and a half max, by Richard Bach, an American author. And it's all about the life of a particular seagull called Jonathan Livingston. When you think of seagulls, you think of irritating birds that go and peck at you and,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Eat fish and steal your chips. And they're just irritants. And in this book, seagulls are no different. All they do is they eat


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But Jonathan Livingston, he thought, hey guys, I've got these sort of wings. And he explored flying and, you know, saw tremendous heights. A bit of metaphor in the book, and some people think it's a bit wishy-washy, 60s, 70s, hip-hop, hip, no, hip, hippie culture, aren't they?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But actually he discovered a greater meaning and then tried to teach other seagulls that too. So my dad was so inspired. He thought actually he would love his kids to be educated and then help inspire others.


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[Assistant] What happened? The flock thickens. So I'm one of, one of four boys. So the first one, so let's put it, so my dad loved the idea of the seagull as a surname and thought it was inspiring. My mom's like,


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[Assistant] Dad, it can be a middle name, it doesn't have to be a surname. So brother one Davey, my dad wanted to put Seagull, but he had, my mom actually changed it last minute to Seagull being a middle name, so he's a Seagull middle name, and then Jose is a surname.


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[Assistant] Then, sibling number three, John. Dad, Seagull, Mum came in last minute, so he's a Seagull middle name. Josie's a surname. And the last one, Thomas or Tommy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, my dad won the day, so he's a seagull. So we've got two seagulls and two...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, Seagull Jose's. I mean, all biologically, 100% from the same parents but different surnames.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There have been perks and, uh, cons. The perks, like, at school, primary school. I remember the dinner ladies, they would say, what's your name? You know, they'd have a little token, very few to join the queue. And I'd say, my name's Seagull. And they'd say, oh, that's a lovely name. Why don't you go to the front of the queue?


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[Assistant] So it definitely had perks, but then there were some negatives as well, I'm pretty certain. You know your memory can sometimes mislead you, but I'm pretty certain I have a memory of us being four, or me being four or five around that sort of age, and we went to an airport,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But as a school teacher, when my students see Mr. Seagull as a teacher, they're often


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, the first day of term, they want to laugh. And I'll be like, I'll get it out all the way. I'll just say, hi Mr. Seagull, kakao, kakao. Look, you can see my cousins in the playground. That's my auntie. I get the first lesson. So I sort of get out all the seagull jokes out of the way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not love seagulls, but I've grown to, well you know, indifferent, that's even an unfair word. Accept them. Accept that they'll always be part of my life in some shape or form.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When people use the word clever, I always say that of course there's like a spectrum of, of talent as well, innate talent, but I think we become clever or not clever as well in sort of traditional terms by our upbringing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Having people around you, and with my family it was definitely a case of being around people that really were interested in things, and my dad in particular. So like, one routine that we had, that in fact has probably been the defining feature of me, is that every Saturday after lunch, so my mum would make a delicious South Indian lunch with biryani,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was very grateful for the fact that it's a country that offered people a chance to lift themselves from not necessarily poverty, but we grew up in a council estate, really challenging council estate in East London.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and a lot of students might, so in fact some of my peers that I saw there, the next time I saw them in a, I heard about them, was in a newspaper, ah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lad XYZ in for grievous bodily harm. Like, okay, that was you I used to play with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So yeah, I grew up in a challenging country, and my dad saw the library reading as a chance for us to see a wider world. When you're growing up in a difficult place, and you're surrounded by kids that...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Maybe from backgrounds where education isn't valued, it can be easy to fall into those traps, and again, when I was four or five, four or five, about eight to four to six, I'm pretty certain I was part of a gang without realising it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These little kids, going on bicycles, causing mischief, and I'll be like that lookout guy, not knowing what I was doing, had my dad not interested in taking me to the library, there's another Bobby, out there, that's now causing mischief and mayhem, perhaps in and out of jail, I don't think so, I don't think that would be the case, but, I'm just saying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So professionally, he qualified as a chartered accountant in India.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, programming, hence like my, myself, my older brother in particular, when we were young, we were very much into coding and programming, because that was my dad's, he had to retrain himself from scratch to be a programmer, because that was a profession, or an area that was growing, you know, in the late 80s, early 90s, it didn't have much of a feel, but it was developing, and it's something that he could sort of,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Six squared, thirty-six, and John is thirty, and Thomas twenty-six. It's quite easy. It's a fourteen year age gap between the youngest and the oldest. So Davey and I were


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And back then in the UK, they weren't very enlightened about the approach of students with physical disabilities. They assumed, if you're physically disabled, then you've got no academic or mental faculty. So he was with students, some, you know, people with that Down syndrome, other sort of conditions that prevented them from academically flourishing. But Davey's issue was, he had a physical handicap, but not a mental issue, as it were.


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[Assistant] Why, he probably, he's, okay, definitely, he's innately, if you can use the word, innately smart with me, but when I was young, I couldn't really tell that because his numeracy skills, his reasoning skills, his writing skills weren't as good as mine. So I thought, oh, I'm smarter than my older brother who's three years older than me without me understanding the, the wider circumstances of that.


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[Assistant] Because you're always having to consider other people. Because normally if you've got siblings, you're like, ah, they'll sort themselves out.


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[Assistant] Whereas with Davy, you need to make sure, do you have enough water? Do you want me to adjust your chair? Do you want me to get you a book? Because again, Davy was, okay, he absolutely loved computer programming. We had a BBC Micro, and he'd be sitting there programming constantly in front of the computer. But there'll be times where, you know, the com- you know, the-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The TV would switch off, I need to plug things back in. So you need to constantly ask someone, are they okay? Physically, do they need different things? So that sort of-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because he's physically confined, it meant that Davey's mind became imaginative, so my dad would-


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[Assistant] Give us lots of activities to do, so we'd draw, we'd play chess, we'd learn about the stars, again we did some programming, we did mathematics, we...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We had such a breadth of things that we did together, including the, the, the trashy stuff like watching TV, neighbors, oh my god, can I ask you, are you neighbors a home and away person?


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[Assistant] Can I just put it out there, I am a neighbours person, so I'd watch Neighbours, I think I'd watch it twice, I'd watch it, if I was at home, I'd watch the 1.30, and then I'd watch the 5.30 repeat. And in Britain, it was like, it was one of the biggest cultural, uhm, phenomenons. I still can't explain to this day why an Aussie soap opera,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Connection with the Brits, but everyone, so my family used to watch The Daily and I used to watch sort of stuff like that, and to be honest, what do I remember from it? Very little.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Pick it up and be better than me. And I realised, actually, this guy, if you've got, there's something called innate smarts, and I, I, I, I know that I was unsmart, but I think Davey's definitely got a little edge on me on that field.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and this still cracks me up because I can't imagine either of these two now, but it was genuinely either to be a chess player


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[Assistant] So education is very important, but they also have, again, I think it's more socialist, but a party called the communist party that ostensibly wins election or wins power every five years and the next party comes in. So it's always had a strong sort of inverted communist, communist route. So there are lots of books from the old Soviet Union. So growing up we had.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Fiction books, obviously the western fiction books, but we had lots of books from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus. And again, as part of that you had to love space, astronomy, we had lots of books on astronomy, and we had lots of books on chess. So my brother and I used to play chess all the time, used to look at the stars, and I was convinced, I want to be a cosmonaut.


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[Assistant] Or, when I was about eight or nine, I thought I wanted to be a chess player. And the thing that sort of made me decide, yep, I definitely want to go into chess, was back in the, I think 1993,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The World Chess Championships, the guy Kasparov was the big boss man of the chess world. And there was Nigel Short, an English chap, who sort of was rising up the ascendancy. I think he was possibly one of the youngest grandmasters at the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was invited to take part in a World Chess Championship against Kary Kasparov in London. And it was broadcast on, I think Channel 4 in the UK and I vaguely recall Carol Vorderman.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Who was a former numbers lady on Countdown, being one of the presenters, but they would have!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not gifted at sport, I've just gone and practised a bit. I've gone and practised my sprinting with my dad in the playground. So again, it was a case of, even if the schools were disadvantaged, relatively speaking, we'd always use it as an opportunity to try to like say, ah, don't blame the school, do something in yourself to improve your lot, as it were.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, uhm, when I was 15, 16, so doing well, you know, conventionally academic, coming top of my year, and I remember like, if, if in any subject have I ever became second,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They'll be like an inquest, not with my dad, but with myself. I'd go back home and go, how did I come second? How did I drop 1%? Uhm, I was a bit tough on myself, if I ever have children.


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[Assistant] I didn't, I think I did it at the time, I just, because I think it was just for an application form, so I just went there, did it myself. And then a couple of weeks later, we got this really fancy brochure, like really laminated, uh, Eton prospectus that showed off their school playing grounds, and I gave them my, my secondary state school, which is a good one for East London.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To play our sports. And I saw Eaton's like, oh my god, there are like 20 football pitches and, and swimming pools and golf courses. And I was telling him, and then when we got the perspective like, dad, I wanna apply to this place. And he was like, okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, we'll apply there, but again, this has always been an attitude. I didn't expect to get eaten in scholarship, but my thought was, in the process of applying, in the process of trying to prepare for the scholarship, the aptitude test and the interviews, et cetera,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A regular boy that was brighter than me, I might have been like, oh, Davey, he's annoying, he's just smart. Was actually growing up in that environment, actually changes who you are. So again, applying to Eaton, I went there for the open day and I was like, oh my god, thinking about this place at the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Captain Hook, do you know Captain Hook or Sam Eaton? No. That's crazy, isn't it? Captain Hook, if you ever watch any film versions of him, you will see him with a tattoo, and the tattoo is the school's crest. He's had 18 prime ministers, and more recently Prince William, Prince Harry, and actually, Prince Harry was not a friend, but you know those people at school that like, you're like, nod at and you're like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 18 prime ministers, multiple members of various royal families across the world.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There are some six forms in my, so, schools that help kids apply before college or university that have been set up by Yeaton. So they are definitely giving back, supporting other people, but historically the connotations of Yeaton


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That makes it all worthwhile. You got a bargain bucket after you came out with my youngest brother.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, I know, I know. Oh my, okay, my first day at Eaton when I turned up, because again, in East London, I'll tell you what's cool back then, Reebok, Adidas, Nike, Kappa, all the sort of, Elisi, all these sports brands, and I thought, I'm gonna wear my finest Adidas and Nike, and I turned up day one to Eaton wearing this purple,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nike top with Reebok trousers and Reebok classic trainers and a really cool baseball cap and I thought like, I'm the boss, I'm from East London. And I looked at everyone else like, ah, they're all wearing Ralph Lauren, really smart shirts and like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But back then, uh, when I joined, so the way it works, you live in a boarding house with 50 other boys, 10 from each year group, so 10 who are age 14, 10 who are age 15, 16, all the way up to 18, so 10 times 5 is 50.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] About 25 boarding houses. And in my boarding house, I was the only non-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In that particular way about the, the geopolitics of why is there only a, the only brown person in this particular boarding house. I went there as someone that loved football, eating Haagen-Dazs, listening to S Club 7 music and Robbie Williams.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and I found commonalities with boys in that way. So boys would be like, oh Bobby, we're going off to play football, do you wanna join us? Or Bobby, we're gonna go and have a genuinely big Haagen Dazs feast. We'd go off to the shop and buy like tubs of Haagen Dazs till we felt sick.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so those are the, so boys treated me like a boy. And again, of course you'd realise that at half term when you would go back to East London on the train.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm thinking, initially I thought it would be fine, I'd immediately get to the top of the school. But actually, when I first joined, I'd found that students were...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because there would have been students there who would have been smashing the, the, the, the maths olympiad type.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And again, when you think about stuff that Eaton contributes towards, especially at university level, maths and stuff, they are good. They produce good mathematicians, but it's their art that they tend to outperform.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How did I come, how did I come top in history? So initially when I was thinking about the university process, my peers, my housemaster would say, Bobby should definitely apply to do history at Oxford because that's his strength. But, but for me, maths and numbers, maybe partly because of my Asian, Indian background, that's where I always felt my affinity, that's where I felt like I need to be investing my time and my efforts towards.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I, you know, knew about the development of France, the 1600s, 1500s, so I was able to bring in prior knowledge. So I think it was the reading in the libraries that made my history knowledge stand out beyond just the syllabus that we are studying. So that's why I think initially you could say if you saw a 16 year old


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 17 year old Bobby, you'd think that's his, uh, that's his sort of natural inclination for the future.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh god, this is- I actually had to have a chat with my brother about this to make sure that I not done him a disservice because there was definitely an argument involved and that we can- we can- what argument was-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he couldn't join my state school because there was no, uh, wheelchair accessibility to the science department. So if he joined my school, he wouldn't have been able to do science or geography.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it's like, no, no, you can't do that. So you have to go to another school which is actually at the time, I think in the, literally in the bottom three in the entire country. In the entire country in the UK. Uhm, and you join that school.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, they had wheelchairs everywhere. You got lifts up and down. To be honest, the school had, they were good for students with sort of special needs, but they weren't good for students academically thriving.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At Trinity College Cambridge, which uhm, you know, I think in the UK is the most prestigious.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think one thing that marks my family is that as a teacher I try and encourage my students at the same as an attitude of you just push for the best that you can and if you don't reach it, fine, but don't let others put a limit on your ability. I remember when Davey was thinking about university, there were some


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, Cambridge, don't bother Davey. Even Trinity, like, if you're going to Cambridge, Trinity's a bit of a mad choice. But Davey's like, I've seen Newton went there. Van Moolenjoen went there. I wanna give myself a chance. So again, that attitude of like, I'm gonna aim for the top. If I miss it, fine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, Davy, I sort of thought I wanted to go to Trinity, but now you're at Trinity. Okay, let's, let's, and I visited Davy, and I was thinking, Cambridge is definitely the place I want to go because that's, that's where you do mathematics. And I had a look around, went for an open day, uh, went to Oxford and Cambridge for an open day, went to Cambridge first, and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I looked at Trinity, but I thought I can't be the same college as my brother. Even though they- I think they had like 40 to 50 places, uhm, per maths. There's 250 undergrads each year, and maths was about 20% of the intake. But I just thought-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We'll be cramping each other's styles. You know, I don't want to be just hanging out with Davey's friends. Yea, as cool as Davey was. Davey actually was quite cool. Uhm, but I thought we needed separate-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Beef, that's the word we say in East London. Beef is an argument about football. And then, it's petty, honestly. It's petty petty. And at the end it's like, I'm not going to Cambridge, I'm going somewhere else. I don't want to be near you Davey. I'm gonna go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sliding doors. Had I not picked up the Times newspaper that day to read about a possible West Ham, Tottenham transfer, whatever it may have been, I may have ended up with David at Cambridge.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It would have been about football. Football was the thing that we'd argue about. But, I don't know why it made me want to change university. Pettiness. Petty Bobby. Bobby was very petty.


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[Assistant] Yeah, so again, I had a gap year before I went to Oxford. Again, I applied with a gap year, which is harder to get in theory because the university's almost got to give up a place for a year's time. I worked in the city, uh, as an accountant for KPMG for nine months. Did youth work in Edinburgh, helping young people. Again, education's always been important to me. Started at Oxford, and then when I went to Oxford,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like again, at Eden, you had like a really strong pastoral network, you know, you got a housemaster, a dame, so it was always like father, mother figures, just keeping an eye on you, as Oxford's like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You do what you want, you got freshers fair, you got alcohol, I never really drunk anything before, you got all these societies, you can take part in debating, sport, you can go to societies, you can go to other people's lectures, you can do volunteer teaching, you can take part in college politics, and my mind is blown, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was like, wow, this is like, have you seen Pinocchio before the cartoon? I have not, no.


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[Assistant] You know, from starting term 1 as something that looked like a first candidate to the second candidate, the second term, like first 2-1, second, second to third term, 2-1-2-2, and then by the end,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 2-2 or anything below, even if it's a Trinity Cambridge and you get 59.9, 2-2 means you're pretty much getting cut out. And that was where I was at the end of my first year.


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[Assistant] First is the, uh, the alpha, the top mark you can get at a university, which is meant to be the creme de la creme, but if you're applying for lucrative graduate jobs like investment banking, you pretty much need that. Two ones are regarded as like, good, you got a good degree, and you can move on, and most graduate jobs require that, and two-two is getting to the point where


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when I was thinking about the summer applying for banking jobs, even when I was applying in the summer of my year at Oxford, I wasn't getting into the banking themes. They were just like, I'd get rejected, start off, because if I was predicted a 2-2,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It would have been too late for my banking because you've got to apply for jobs at the start of your internship at the start of your second year. And if you don't get an internship, you don't, you can't apply for grad jobs. Again, it's a bit sad because it's driven by a job requirement rather than the subject.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then I made a decision, like, I'm not gonna go back to Oxford because I'm not gonna get that 2.1 at this rate. I definitely won't get the banking job. But by this stage, university has already started.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's like, ah, it's too late to get to go to any other uni because, you know, London's got economics, imperial, they've already been a week into term.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm not going back to Oxford. My mum's like, Bobby, this is a joke. And she's like, in a sort of half Indian, half English, Bobby, you're joking, you're joking. It's a good joke, yeaah. I'm like, my mum's not a joke.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I remember like, on my deathbed, I looked back at moments in my life where you could feel like, you felt all the emotion. I felt that then, I was like, I worked so hard to get to Oxford, I've taken myself from a difficult council state, to Eton, to Oxford, and now I'm not throwing it away, but I'm just like, I'm making a decision to abandon that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In a bizarre way, I think that was probably the toughest decision of my life, but also as one of the decisions in my life in terms of professional decision making, that's made me look back and think,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think humility is a skill you pick up, because it can be easy. There are times in my life where my ego gets suddenly a little bit, a little bit large, and then people in my family, my brother, my cousins, my close friends will be like, oh Bobby, don't get too big for yourself. That again taught me to learn to be humble again, because before that, I would have probably been maybe like 19 years old thinking, ah, you've got to have an Oxbridge degree, otherwise, you know, is it really worth anything? But after that I was actually thinking, ah, university is not just about Oxbridge, it's about, you know, lots of other universities. In fact, some people, university may not be the right option for them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To be honest, it's not too dissimilar from back then. It was, I remember writing to my friends who I was leading, when I was leading at Oxford, and just telling them that I'd just not put in the work, simple as that, and I just put my hand on my chest and said, I messed up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I remember like getting an email from my tutor saying, you know, you know, you can't cry over it. Just look at the next option. I just put my hand up and said I messed up. Uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Again, even thinking about it now, like it brings back the emotions. Because I really think about the, obviously I think about the steps that I took, but I never think back, I never put myself back in the position I'm in. In fact, right now, I'm thinking about sitting on my bed, telling my mum when she came round.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And yeaah, it's definitely a bit, I'm not tearing up, I'm not tearing up, but I definitely feel it was an emotional decision.


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[Assistant] Again, so, uh, just quickly, literally in 30 seconds, spin through my career. After World Holloway, I got my dream job in investment banking, was a trader, actually traded something called collateralised debt obligations, partly, which, eh, was involved in, watch the film Big Short, uh, is partly involved in the financial sub-prime crisis. It wasn't me though, I was just a junior.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] University Challenge. Actually, Simon Singh did his PhD at Emmanuel College, so Simon Singh and I are from the same college, just for other Numberphile fans. So I got onto the quiz show. Most people who are, get on the quiz show, Universe Challenge, it's a something, it's like a family ritual.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They'd watched it with their parents, always wanted to get on the program. But bizarrely enough, perhaps because my parents are from India, we never really watched the program. In fact,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'd watch no more than 30 seconds of the show growing up. But again, because of my time in the library, I'd always had a good range of broad knowledge.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then when I got on the show, again I was thinking, ah okay, so I've got, I've got, I'm on the quiz show, now I'm gonna take it seriously. There's an amateur gentleman or like Stephen Fry approach to the show where you can sort of just turn up and just like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I watched lots of old episodes on YouTube, prepared a massive spreadsheet with all the different topics that turned up, gave it to my team, allocated different subject areas like presents to the US, Nobel Prize winners,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Booker Prize winners, uh, presidents, uh, prime ministers of Britain, all the capitals, all the periodic table elements, we, you know, systematically allocated topics to people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We'd go and practice quiz shows in the university at Cambridge. You know, we'd religiously practice on a Tuesday night, Thursday night. In fact, there'd be times where


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So by the time that we got on the quiz show, we were like, ah, I reckon we can win this thing. So we got better and better as the series progressed. And actually, they pre-recorded, Brady, the whole show.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hello, my name is Bobby Seagal. I'm from East Ham, the London bar of Newham. I'm studying for a Masters in Education specialising in Maths.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But when it was broadcast, so it got broadcast after it was, uh, after it was recorded, like five, six months after, I ended up going viral on Twitter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, did a tweet, remember that, there's a particular match, I think we were playing Soaz, they said, is this the happiest contestant ever? Yeah. I was on, like, radio stations and a few newspapers, and they were all talking about, this is Guy Bobby Seagal, he's knowledgeable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But also, he's like, fun, and, you know, he talks to his teammates, and, you know, the way we discussed answers, we weren't, as normally on the show at Brady, people got quiet and hesitant. If they got an answer, they would discuss it, like hushed whispers. Whereas I would discuss it aloud with my team. We would say, I'd say to my team, oh, didn't we discuss that on the train on the way here? What was the answer? And like, people sort of enjoyed, like, almost like behind the curtain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] John Donne. John Donne? No, it's George Orwell. And as the series progressed, there was actually another guy which plays an instrumental role in my series. So we did go to Canada, in Oakville, a man called Eric Monkman.


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[Assistant] What if these two guys collide? What if we get Monkman vs Seagull? And we actually, we didn't face off in the final, we played in the semi-final, which I was a bit gutted about.


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[Assistant] And the other teams are slightly behind, but in our series we have three teams that are very good. So the match was going to and fro, and it went down to like, pretty much the last question, and it was a question in Japanese cinema.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, and I was thinking, okay, I've got two guys on my team that are really good at cinema. I sort of think I know the answer, but I can't take a gamble. It was about, uhm, Kurosawa, and he did a, a film called, was it Game of Thrones of Blood?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] BBC called us up that, I think the very next day after it was broadcast, or the same night, and said we'd love to get you on The One Show. And The One Show, if I can explain to foreign users, is like BBC's magazine show on every night at 7 o'clock.


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[Assistant] And normally they use it as a platform, and there's like a famous TV actor or a pop star who's introducing a new album or new film, they get them on the show.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they're like, we're gonna get Monkman and Siegel on to talk about University Challenge. And they brought us on the show, and then from there just sort of spiraled. We got so many different opportunities.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And again, there's one thing Brady I'll tell you about and our international viewers.


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[Assistant] I thought, ah, I've got this platform, I changed careers to become a teacher, I'm gonna use this platform to talk about mathematics because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Become a very vocal advocate for math education in particular, but also education in general. So again, I changed careers because I wanted to be a positive influence for maths as a teacher, but University Challenge has given me this platform to become a much more influential person within the field of math education in England.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think my path was to become a managing director, make lots of, you know, millions and millions of dollars. And I think had Lehman not gone bankrupt, I think I would not have adjusted my mindset. Because again, two of my siblings, the number one and number three, entered banking and they'd actually been in the same firm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, like, approval. I found I came to life. That was me, like, I would stand there, I don't know with this ego note, but like, having to teach people, but like, ah, I know something, I wanna help you guys learn it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I love the feedback, the kid, the kids, the adults, the 21 year old, 22 year olds that were saying to me, Bobby, we really love your teaching, we love the way you're so enthusiastic. And again, when I would teach them, I would teach them in a way that, obviously, I've got the knowledge, but I wouldn't do it from a perspective of arrogance. I'd be like, oh guys, here's what I know, but if you know something better than me, help me understand as well. And I absolutely loved that, and I thought, oh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What's the thing that, that's sort of been the thread for my life? It's my, I've always enjoyed numbers, I've always enjoyed mathematics, pattern spotting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I thought, actually, I wanna go into teaching. So I took some time away, almost like a sabbatical away from a sabbatical.


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[Assistant] I was supporting a social enterprise that I set up actually so again in 2007 when I joined banking


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Supporting kids who are 15, 16, 17, applying, you know, from tough backgrounds, applying for top universities, Oxford, Cambridge and other top unis. Uhm, so I know that was interesting education. I spent like six months with that organization as it were, supporting kids. But this is the thing that I did, which was, I don't think anyone has done sort of before, maybe not ever since. I know advice. I spent six months.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I forensically sort of did a study of all the schools, understanding how was math taught. I've got this amazing book, again, another mighty tome of mine. Every school I've been to, looking at their lessons, looking at the way they teach, looking at the schools, the demographics, and trying to make sure that if I'm going to make this move as a 30 year old now, into teaching, and teaching maths,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I could, you know, get to 90, be an investment banker, earn millions and millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, and great, you've got some money, but-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And for me, education, again, it transformed my life. Again, growing up in a really challenging council state, there's some of my friends there that didn't get, you know, didn't get


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's, you know, I don't think there's any greater joy than being someone in a class as a teacher when you see a kid when you're trying to teach someone Pythagoras theorem or rearranging an equation.


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[Assistant] And when you suddenly see that child have that lightbulb moment, honestly, they're, they're, they're...


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[Assistant] They're the priceless moments, as a human being, as a, yea, as a person.


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[Assistant] They're the moments that make life worth living, I think. Again, money's nice, but, you know, some things are much more valuable than money. It's impacting others.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so this is my career. Again, Universal Challenge has slightly changed my path in different ways. So initially, when I was doing Universal Challenge, my path was I want to become a full-time math teacher, head of a math department, head teacher, then be like, again, as ambitious to, be like an influential head teacher with a focus on math education.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, which I'm still doing sort of part-time, uh, looking at math anxiety, why people are scared about studying mathematics, and the relationship with math and the media, and how the media, I think, often portrays the subject so negatively.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But uhm, the rest of my time is often doing work to do with math propagation as it were.


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[Assistant] Around the country, trying to get governments, I've done some stuff with OECD, I've started doing talks in, I've got some, you know, Geneva, Madrid, in Paris, so I'm trying to like, yeaah, not just math, but education as well, trying to get people to realise how important education is to a country.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On a weekly basis. And no matter how glamorous my career in that sort of media world gets, I, again, I'm saying that I'm almost like putting my, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm putting myself out there. I almost will never quit being part time in a classroom. So I think the value I add is that I'm someone that's still in a classroom but has that connection to the media world. Then I can raise, again, things like


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In my school, when we're having to think about our budget for photocopying, or having to cancel extracurricular trips, I can now go, I've seen that in my class, and then take that higher up to politicians using my media platform. So I think it's a, it's a combination of the two. So again,


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[Assistant] At some stage I might go back to full five days a week, but right now I'm in this sweet spot where people in the media in Britain do want to listen to me and my views on education, but I think my views on education are more valued and more valuable because I still teach in a class. So it's somehow if I can keep both going on as long as possible, that'll be the dream for me.


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[Assistant] I personally, so my research, again this is a separate question, can I do a doctorate part-time while I'm doing all these other things? There's gonna be a, I'm gonna have a crunch point very soon about that, but my doctorate initially was looking at maths anxiety, so again maths anxiety is academically, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Termed as that negative emotion response that we feel when encountering maths. And again, it can happen to school children, either doing long division or adults, whether, you know, they're splitting a restaurant bill. So that's visceral fear.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And their job is to try and help people, again, it's what it does in the tin, to improve numeracy skills across the UK so that people can go about their day-to-day life feeling confident with numbers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the question they asked a stratified sample of people was, can you calculate


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Listening to the show, that's not math, that's just a quick arithmetic question, and it is. Again, to work it out mentally, you could work out 10% at 9 pounds.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which is 900 pennies, that's 90p, and half of that, 5%. It's 45p, and it's a really straightforward question. And again, with a calculator, you can just do 5% of £9.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And of course, if you're trying to become like a fields medalist, or, you know, uh, become one of the very top mathematicians in the world, of course, I'm gonna say for those type of people,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One to three percent, and for those people like dyslexia for words.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You need a different approach, but for the vast majority of the population, it's their attitude towards maths that hinders them. So my research initially wanted to look into why do people get anxious about maths? Actually getting into the field, the academic field of maths education,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the perspective I thought I can add is I'm now working in the field where I'm a class teacher, but I'm also


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[Assistant] When I'm often like on, let's say on BBC Breakfast or ITV or any of the major broadcasting stations in Britain, they'll introduce me, I've got Bobby Seagal, maths teacher, and the first thing they'll say at Brady is, oh Bobby, I hated maths at school.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So then I realised actually from my research, it's more useful if I look at almost the relationship between maths and the media. Why is it that the media portrays maths in a negative fashion? And then how that negative reputation in the media


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At the end of my thesis, where the media have got to sort of, again, it's a voluntary code, but media will sign this thing where, if they're a major broadcaster, major newspaper, even like a major Instagram influencer, they'll not use math for cheap shots, and if they do, they'll explain vibes. I think this constant negative messaging does infiltrate people, because again, one example I'll use is,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cigarette smoking. So growing up, it used to be really popular. Loads of naughty kids would smoke cigarettes because you'd see cool ads, you know, Marlboro Lights and Formula One cars. But since they got rid of the advertising, and now in the media generally, people do not talk about smoking, it's almost like, it's not when people still smoke, but smoking numbers in western societies have gone down.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] About approaching the people that have that negative approach, negative impression of somebody. Can we reach them? Because if we can reach them...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're going to open up Maths to many more people because I can imagine, again, I listened to you again, by the way, as I wanted to say, on behalf of my students, Numberphile is like, you're a god. The kids that love Maths, you're doing an amazing service for young people, adults around the world, so just a big thank you. And I listened to James Grime on your podcast, and James Grime talking about


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think we could, there could be more James Grimes out there, but we're not finding them, because maybe they're in a family where math is viewed very negatively, maybe they're at a school where


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Doesn't discover math, maybe goes on to discover computing or discovers being, I don't know, a great Instagram influencer in physics. I don't know what it is, I don't know what it is, but something else. But we lose them, we lose them because there's so much negativity about subjects. So I wanna play a part.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now I'm going to change attitudes towards mathematics. Obviously I'm going to start with England. But longer term, I'm 36 now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Seem a bit more attractive. Again, I've always thought like, when I'm, when I'm dead, Brady.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What would I like my influence to be? Like I'd love my epitaph to say here lies Bobby Seeger. He made math a little bit less icky.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think Brady used to do the way it's taught at school, which again, there's difficulty about this, but at school...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So imagine you've got a, in the morning, a teacher's like, okay, guys, we've got literacy in the morning. Why am I being a strange primary school teacher? Okay, we've got literacy in the morning, and then we've got numeracy or maths in the afternoon. So in the morning, they're there writing a story, and in the afternoon, they're doing some problems. Again, in primary school, it's often just, you know, teach a method, and they'll do some long multiplication.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And my English, I talked about an elephant climbing the, you know, the Empire State Building.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The way we teach math at elementary school leads to that perception. Whereas with reading, we never tell someone, oh, you've struggled with a couple of words, you can't read. It's just, oh, there's a few words you need to read. So I think it's the way we teach at elementary school needs to be looked at internationally.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'll tell you why, and this is actually what, the reason behind this is partly how I address people that tell me, why should we do math?


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[Assistant] They'll tell me, oh, what's the point of math in school? And of course, there's some bits of maths which I think are important in terms of numeracy. Being able to use skills like basic percentages, understanding ratios, so your day-to-day, whether it's working at your tax bill, or making sure that you don't burn the turkey, or making sure that you plan your journey to work in time. So those bits of numeracy


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then kid, then people say to me, oh Bobby, but the other bits of math, you know, like your number theory, your graph theory, your trigonometries, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Analytics, analysis, all those sort of things, they're not necessary, they're not relevant. And I'll go to them and say, what's the point of Shakespeare? What's the point of listening to some rap music?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I immediately just, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, of course I accept.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know. So I was born in Oxford from a Hungarian naturalised French mother and a father who was still a student there, whose grandparents were poor immigrants from Ukraine. So,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They did all right and I guess now I'm posh in the sense that I then studied at Oxford and I write books, but I don't think then you'd have called them posh. You'd have called them kind of hardworking immigrants. What occupations do they do?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, lots of books. Yeah. Yeah. My dad, I think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And writing and learning is something that's really important. So I definitely feel that the house was one devoted to learning and that was what's important. The only way to get my dad's attention was to like do well at school basically.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I never wanted to become an academic, part of that might have been security that I didn't think I was good enough, but also for all the


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A man that I respected, my dad, for his academic career, I thought there's gotta be more out there, and I was, you know, couldn't wait to get out into the real world. I think my dad was probably slightly disappointed about why I didn't go into academia, so I think there is maybe a bit of,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Job in an institution that's been around for a thousand years!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I didn't want to be anything because I liked the idea that I didn't have to make my mind up. I kind of rebelled against this idea that, oh, if the, you know, Jimmy wants to become an architect, Tommy wants to become a doctor. And I just wanted to get out there and see what there was. I was always really interested in journalism and I think that's because I'm a gossip.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And finding out about the world and describing the world is always what I wanted to do. I never would have thought that I could have actually done that professionally because I didn't really, you know, I didn't know anyone who did that, but so I probably would have said, I don't know what I want to do, but did you hear about Mrs Jones?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, Led Zeppelin and you know, the Zofo, whatever it is. So yeah, I was totally into that. And then I had this amazing change when I was about 16 and I became into like soul and I used to like the kind of Northern soul. And so I would like wear kind of jean dungarees and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I like music. I played electric guitar, so that's what I like to do. Were you good at school? Yeah, so I was lucky that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you can do it and you don't really need to do very much work. So I always knew.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was going to have loads of free time, because the maths didn't take me any time at all, whereas both people...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're struggling and I always knew that I was going to be near the top of the class because just the grades you get for your maths, if you do the maths, the physics and the chemistry is not that like difficult. Um, also cause my mom was French. I spoke fluent French. So yeah, I was always, I was always quite good at school and I kind of enjoyed it. You know, I had a dad, it was a.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was always a really short kid. Also, I moved up like a year or maybe even two years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even in my own age range I was short, but I was with kids who were one or two years older than me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Made me feel like a bit of an outsider. So I was really keen to be like an insider and someone that people would sort of embrace. And also, so I grew up, well I was born in Oxford.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then when I was two I moved to Edinburgh and I was in Edinburgh for ten years and I thought it was a thick Scottish accent and then at age 12 I moved down south to live in Southampton which is where I went to secondary school and then sixth form and I can remember.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was the kind of short guy with all these like tall people and also cause I was good at maths, but I realised quite early on that back then, this is the late seventies, early eighties, maths, there was no geek cool. There was no nerd cool. If you were the good, sort of the nerdy people, it was uncool. It was, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was also interested in girls. So if you wanted to be part of the gang that hung out with the people who liked music and there were girls in that gang, you had to make a real effort to do other things than just the maths. So I was always quite nerdy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I think that as I went to the secondary school,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so this is an institution, like the college, that only has those two years. And it was much more like a university than it was like a school. Like they didn't force you to go to lessons. If you didn't want to go to lessons, you didn't have to. You could smoke if you wanted to. There was no uniform or anything.


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[Assistant] Uhm, so already going to a sixth form takes kids from a much wider area. You're meeting people who are a bit more like you and I had a good gang. One of them had a car. We would like go to nightclubs and experiment.


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[Assistant] I really enjoyed my childhood in Southampton. So Southampton, you know, talking to Americans, it is a city of maybe half million people, 300,000 people. It's far enough from London for it to have its own energy, but it's quite kind of square.


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[Assistant] But it hasn't, it has good cinemas and it's got a theatre and it's got a university. So it's safe enough.


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[Assistant] To experiment in loads of things and for it not to be particularly dangerous. And it's also because it's a port city, it's very diverse culturally. That when I went to university, when I went to Oxford, all the kids who had grown up in London


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[Assistant] Which is bold! Though like, London's much more interesting than this, whereas I was kind of really excited.


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[Assistant] Because it was like going somewhere that was new and a bit different.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I mean, I went to a state school, so I didn't go to private. It was paid by the government at free school. And...


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[Assistant] One other person from my school, maybe two from the college went there. So it was, yeah, it's really unusual.


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[Assistant] I worked quite hard, but I also spent a lot of time socializing and the only thing that I could get in to a good university was maths because that was what I was good at. And I must've had quite a good intuitive sense of maths because to get into Oxford you had to do an exam and I did the exam and.


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[Assistant] I don't know, 200, 300 people. There must be several thousand people do it because I think they accept 200 people and most of the people who go to private schools have special teachers that teach you to try and get this exam. It sounds like a kind of humble brag, I believe is the term, but I was like something like 30th or something.


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[Assistant] So, I did really well at my exam. That's basically the best I've ever done in an exam ever in my life. But because of that, Oxford were going to take me.


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[Assistant] Reading kind of Bertrand Russell and reading beginning books on philosophy.


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[Assistant] It's not so was it, but it, um, it was just one thing I was interested in and there were other things that I was maybe more interested in.


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[Assistant] There was only one or two other people doing maths and it meant there were only one or two tutors. So you had to do that tutor and maths all of a sudden it gets really difficult. And to understand it, you need to have.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A tutor who is like good at teaching and you also need to have lots of other people who are studying it who are also struggling and


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[Assistant] I didn't have anyone to talk to about it, and also I was interested in the philosophical side.


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[Assistant] The university paper. I also, so this was, I was 17 when I went to Oxford, uhm, so that was in 1988.


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[Assistant] It was 1987. Once I'd edited the paper and beginning my second year, it was the summer of love. It was 1988. It was acid house. So I started a nightclub. So for my next couple of years, I was running this nightclub. It was your nightclub? It was my nightclub, Club Automatic. Yeah.


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[Assistant] I didn't own the venue, but we put it on in several different venues. It was me and two friends and I was the, one of the guys was the DJ. One of the guys like did the posters and one of the guys did like the money and like dealing with these guys. That was me.


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[Assistant] The great thing about university is you get to sort of make all those mistakes early. I mean, it's kind of-


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[Assistant] The first night we did, club automatic opening night, what we did, it was called Bliss was the opening night of club bliss. And we had these passports and which we made and distributed them around the university. And you had to bring your passports and we say, Hey, we had a stamp for each different night that you would stamp in your passports. You can see which one.


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[Assistant] I mean just, it wasn't a particularly good night because when I tried to go downstairs, actually I couldn't go downstairs because there was like far too many people. It was packed. It was far too packed. So you learn pretty, you know, you wouldn't do that. So if a fire broke out that night.


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[Assistant] Mm, philosophy of math saying, I'm kind of surprised by, well this is how I remembered, having got done so well at this, but I really enjoyed doing it and if it, it's really good.


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[Assistant] Is there maybe a future for me carrying on in academia and being doing the philosophy of maths? I never heard back.


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[Assistant] You only hear the results and you know, you're off. You're going.


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[Assistant] Began to realize how the English establishment network works. So I was in the group of people who would did journalism, did newspapers, and I knew at the time that, you know, the person who was the editor of the Guardian then had editor Charwell. So I had been the editor of Charwell and.


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[Assistant] Journalists at the time, not too well known, walked him to my college, he gave the talk, walked him back and kept in touch with them.


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[Assistant] Researching maths or studying maths, I definitely had a super mathematical way of understanding the world.


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[Assistant] The number of people on the horizon up this way, and the number of people that way, and then you multiply them together, and then that gives you the estimate. People just don't understand, it's like basic maths. So I used to always think that the fact that I understood maths,


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[Assistant] Really gave me an advantage in a lot of simple news journalism and also when it came to writing stories. I was never particularly good at writing, but when you come to write news reports, they have a structure and it's like learning how to write a proof.


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[Assistant] But I had my own interests. I can remember once the Polgar Sisters, if you can remember them, they were the first great female chess players. They were sisters from Hungary and they were making an appearance somewhere in the Brighton area. And I was like, I want to interview them. I'm like totally, totally excited by speaking of female chess player.


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[Assistant] I can remember that this was just right at the beginning of the internet, right at the beginning of emails. And I used to often be given those stories that required some kind of knowledge of how a computer might work. I mean, I can't code or you'd call the programming thing.


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[Assistant] And then I started to work within days of graduating. I always made a promise to myself when I'm 28.


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[Assistant] That was the day when I'm 28, I'm going to stop everything and take a year out. So I'd got myself this great job with the Guardian and I was like.


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[Assistant] Yeah, yeah, and it was kind of the best thing I ever did. So I said, well, I'm going to resign. And then I thought, okay, I want to go and live abroad and I want to live somewhere where, so this is where I could learn the language to a fluent level in a year. So that eliminated.


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[Assistant] Okay, uhm, so I thought Spanish, Portuguese.


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[Assistant] Probably to live like, really skin for a year, but not to live particularly well.


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[Assistant] So I thought, let's go somewhere and try and live cheaply, but if I need to earn money, I need to be able to, what can I do? I'm a journalist. I need to be able to write stories. So where is the place in the world that has the most amount of stories?


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[Assistant] For the smallest amount of journalists who were there. And at that time, so this was 1998,


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[Assistant] Deforestation of the Amazon, the workers movement, uhm, massacre of street children, it was very much this kind of anti-dictatorship human rights issues which


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[Assistant] Very important, but tended to attract the kind of campaigning sort of journalists writing about inequalities, which you want to hear about them, but gives you such a one note idea about what the country is like. There was no one writing about Brazilian music.


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[Assistant] So I thought, well, there are obviously these great stories out there, but no one's writing them. And Brazil has the other problem that where do you base yourself as a journalist? São Paulo, Rio or Brasilia? So they were all kind of spread. Um, anyway, so I made the decision to go to Rio just because.


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[Assistant] I did, I did all this like amazing, amazing stuff. And two years into that, a publisher approached me and said, do you want to write a book on Brazilian football? And like, I like football, but I'm not a sports journalist. And my initial response was, no, not really. I like football.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ask a sports journalist, because I thought what they were asking was a book that tells you, you know, the size of Pele's shoe.


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[Assistant] I'd gone to Brazil. I didn't know anyone there. I had to discover who I was essentially. It's by me searching for my own identity. And Brazil is such a young country that it's still searching for its own identity. So I guess I was really interested in like identity and culture and like who you are.


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[Assistant] What a great way to tell the story of Brazil through football. So my book on Brazilian football, which I then accepted to write is essentially about the anthropology and history.


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[Assistant] I was on my own, and I vowed never to read a book after that because it took about 18 months, and I worked on it every day, and writing books...


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[Assistant] You don't know whether you can do it. Brazil is such a big country that there's always more you can do. And there's where do you, where do you stop?


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[Assistant] The people who live in Rio, the Cariocas. I wouldn't say all Brazilians. Rio is a very difficult place to live as a foreigner.


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[Assistant] If you're going to, unless you totally become Kadiaka, it's a place where there's not no great intellectual culture. People don't really read the newspapers. They're not really bothered about the rest of the world. They're obsessed about body image and how Rio is brilliant and amazing. And.


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[Assistant] Yeah, and I think that it was part of going away and it's, it's good to go and sort of, you know, say you are, don't sort of explore the world, but then you sort of think it's time to come home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, so I came back hoping that they might, and there was nothing there for me. But also, before I went to Brazil, I was writing about, you know, parochial British matters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But a lot of me was still, a lot of my friends and a lot of my heart was still in Brazil. So for the next few years, I tried to write about Brazil. At one time I tried to, uhm, so I could have made it, been a millionaire. I came back saying, guys, there's this amazing fruit that is really big in Brazil, you can't get anywhere, it's not in Brazil, it's called açaí. How about I start importing açaí?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then I never did and now Acai is just like mega. Everywhere. This is absolutely everywhere. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, it's lovely. I still order it from Ronan. I've always got it in my freezer. You mix it in with banana and pulp. It's delicious.


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[Assistant] Yeah, so what happened, I was completely failing to do anything, getting bored writing about Brazil, not being in Brazil, failing to import SAE, and then someone came to me, in fact a friend who's an agent, who then became my agent, who said, Alex, you are a writer, your book on Brazil did really well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But you understand about maths, that's what you need to be doing. And I was like, yeah, maths, I gave that up like a decade ago. And she's like, no, no, think about it. Go.


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[Assistant] Roughly how it works. So this is my friend, she said, I know there's an interest in maths, in people who can write to write about maths. I just know there's, so write me a proposal for a maths book.


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[Assistant] And the editor was moaning, oh I've got my five year old kids just started school and I can't even do the maths homework. And so my agent friend was like, aha, this is a woman who I need to pitch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is the book that's going to explain maths to parents. In fact, the book that Rob Eastray


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rote, Mass of Mums and Dads was ultimately the book that this...


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[Assistant] I went back and I thought, okay, I'll try and write a proposal. So I went and read loads of sort of maths books, popular maths books, and I can remember being so bored reading them and just often lying on my sofa and falling asleep in the afternoon reading them.


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[Assistant] Maybe I was not the audience for it, maybe. Yea, a lot of them were just, just boring, just boring. And I can remember thinking you could do a really good kind of movie shot of me depressed, walking down thinking it's just boring, it's all rubbish, it's all boring, and then thinking,


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[Assistant] Wow. This is the breakthrough. Maths is not boring. So the fact that the books that I've read are a bit boring means that there's room for a not boring one.


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[Assistant] So I was like, brilliant, I got really excited and I was like, this is the book that is going to make math exciting and interesting. And so.


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[Assistant] I realised that the Brazilian book that I wrote was the best possible training to write Alex's Adventures in Numberland. Why I wrote the Brazilian book is I spent a year going all around Brazil, interviewing people in Portuguese, synthesising in my head and writing a book for people who have never been to Brazil about what Brazil is like.


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[Assistant] I did exactly the same thing for Numberland. I was like the foreign correspondent in the world of numbers.


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[Assistant] Interviewing people whose lives connected to maths in some way, kind of mathsy people, and came back home, synthesised everything and wrote it in information that someone who doesn't like maths would be interested in. So when I'm writing, I always have imagined me sitting at a bar talking to my friend, usually it's my friend Bridget, who's not interested in maths.


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[Assistant] And it's me just saying a sentence or a fact, and I imagine how she would respond to that fact.


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[Assistant] And the reviews started coming in, positive reviews, and even, and I realised that actually the people who were reading it was kind of the maths audience, because the maths audience were also really happy to read about maths things.


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[Assistant] Who's done time as a foreign correspondent and as a local cub reporter on an evening paper. So I know how to...


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[Assistant] Even so, you're going to be interested in the life of the man who lives in Reno, Nevada, who sets the odds to more than half of the world's slot machines.


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[Assistant] The probability involved is not complicated, but you get to see it through this man's life, how it applies in the world through a personal story. I think the trick in math writing is to appeal to the bridges of the world.


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[Assistant] But also to the people who know the maths, and the way that you do that.


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[Assistant] I mean it's kind of not for the faint hearted and like I do, even now, like lose sleep about how a book is going to be received. You put all your emotion, all your energy, you really believe in something and once it's out there, people can criticise it.


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[Assistant] You don't understand the power you have in that review. You know, I've spent a couple of years writing a book. It's 300 pages long.


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[Assistant] There's one line that you've chosen to basically review on, which is something that you don't believe yourself, but actually if you bothered to look in the notes at the back, if I kind of, you know, argue against that position, and so what you're saying isn't there, is actually there, that makes me kind of angry. And I think that often, young, I forgot, I was young once, uhm, I think that sometimes the mark of a bad reviewer,


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[Assistant] Uhm, exactly. And sometimes I think that if you don't like a book, don't review it. That's my thing. Unless someone, it's so kind of outrageous and someone's trying to be someone that they're not. But most books,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is often in math, you need to be incredibly clear what you're talking about. You know, you could be, I get this all the time when I'm writing puzzles that you.


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[Assistant] Inevitably you get people saying, oh, but what about zero people?


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[Assistant] It's totally, so you need to have the confidence of you need to write incredibly clearly, but totally unambiguously. And that's actually quite difficult because if you were to say it totally unambiguously, you would have an


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Find the puzzles, write the puzzles, do the headlines, and no one really checks it. For a while I was trying to ask other mathematicians to check it, but then it's too time consuming and also who checks the checkers, etc. And what I've realised that there are lots of people who


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[Assistant] Because there's always going to be a few people who spot something that no one else has spotted. And sometimes the only way you get that is by putting it in a column by these people. So where I slightly resent.


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[Assistant] And languages. So in that sense, it does bring me back to.


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[Assistant] A house full of languages, but don't be deceived by the title. This is actually a book for mathsy people.


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[Assistant] Right. It's almost all the puzzles are code breaking puzzles. It's just that rather than that code being something invented by a computer or something invented to show some mathematical idea.


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[Assistant] And then you've got a few other words and then you have to deduce what that might mean. Uhm, I've got a puzzle say on Egyptian hieroglyphics. So probably the greatest decipherment in history was the decipherment of hieroglyphics by Champollion in the 19th century.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I talk about ancient languages, modern languages, I talk about invented languages, I talk about scientific languages. You talk about numbers and other languages too. I talk about...


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[Assistant] There are some languages that have brilliant words for numbers. Chinese, Japanese. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten, one, ten, two, ten, three, ten, four, to two, ten. Two, ten, one, two, ten. That's really, really simple.


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[Assistant] Yeah, and it means that children find learning numbers much easier than they do in a country like ours, where you go 10, 11, 12, 13. Like, what's that about?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 20 rather than, well French is even worse, you've got quatre-vingts, uhm, four eighties. No, eighty, which is four twenties. But of the...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What I do is that I give you a bunch of words in Danish and say, well those represent these numbers. And then I give you a few other words in Danish and you need to work out what those numbers are. And you will realise that the word for 50 in Danish.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Doesn't have the root of the word for five in it anywhere, but has a root of half and of three. Right.


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[Assistant] Equivalent to 50 with the word for five in it and put it on their banknotes, but that's like no one ever used that word. Once it's kind of ingrained, it's complicated, but you just, you just get used to it. And there are lots of other languages. I've got puzzles about number systems of Papua New Guinea is unique.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Perhaps when you're giddy, because what they're doing is that they count pinky, so one, then your five fingers, then it might go, wrist, elbow, elbow, shoulder, nipple, chin, nose, and that's how you do it.


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[Assistant] Well, it's very interesting to say that this is the first time that I have kind of stepped onto his patch and... Has he read it? Yeah, he's got a copy, but interestingly, we've had less discussion about this book than any of the others. So, yeah.


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[Assistant] It's a book of puzzles within language and I think that.


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[Assistant] Also, I think that it is language, but you need to have a mathsy brain to solve these puzzles. So I think he would struggle. I think he does struggle with actually doing the puzzles, even though he might know about the languages concerned. You know, there's a puzzle in there, which is it's a cross number where all the clues and all the numbers are in Malagasy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so you might be brilliant at, well actually that's a bad example, but uhm.


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[Assistant] Perfect, because it will take you, you know, as the evenings draw cold.


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[Assistant] I spent the last five years essentially writing puzzles in the newspaper and puzzle books. And what's wonderful about puzzle books is that, well firstly they're entertaining, they're fun, they're sort of satisfying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But they're a way of learning something interesting. So I'm only interested in puzzles that at the end of it, you think, wow, I never knew that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it's a way of getting this kind of thrill of discovering something new, but with the pleasure of having worked it out for yourself. So it's kind of this like a amazing thing rather than, you know, you could read a book about something, but you might get bored. But if you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Working out, well, why did the Babylonians write numbers like that? Why did, you know, why is Esperanto like that? It's much more satisfying, I think, to not be told.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But to work it out for yourself. And I think that's what a good puzzle does really well. It gives you a bit of fun, but also you learn something by yourself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Industrial Revolution, that was one of the starting places for the Industrial Revolution. Let's see, in terms of, if you're a rugby fan, rugby league.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not rugby union, rugby league began in Huddersfield at the George Hotel. I did not know that. Yes, absolutely. Is that where the rules were drawn up? That's where the rules were drawn up. Yep. At the George Hotel. And then, um, of course, I suppose then you've got people like Harold Wilson, who was the Prime Minister, was born in Huddersfield. James Mason.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Famous actor, was born in Huddersfield. I used to run, going to school, used to run through his mum's garden to get to school, did a shortcut.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, very happy, very happy childhood. I, I would just be playing out with friends out in the, my parents moved into an estate, a new estate that was being built. So it was still being built when they moved into the house. So as I grew up, when I was four or five, I started playing out on the estate that was still being built.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, which is not a great idea, right? And in fact, there is a story of me, um, so I'd be climbing up scaffolding, you know, in the houses that were being built, I'd be climbing up the scaffolding and there was a, one day I climbed up and I slipped, which, and I slipped, but the scaffolding went up my jumper.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, but we used to play football, uh, a lot of football and, and then there's a big motorway goes near where I live called the M62. When I was growing up, they were building it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They have to blow it out of the ground. I mean, so if you've been on the M62, it's blown into the ground. So it's like a valley. And so we'd get a...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 10 minute warning, you'd hear it like a siren going and you had to close all your windows and they, and they'd explode. There'd be explosions and then we'd shoot off. We'd go looking for explosions and going down into the valley to partly to go across to another field where it was an even better football field we could play on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was a naughty boy, uh, as a, as a child. I've learned my lesson. I mean, when I was three, me and Gary Bradley went down, uh, the, the, the local postman, in fact, the man who owned the local post office, he, he, he saw us on the main road on our tricycles.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, I wanted to be a footballer, but, but yeah, I was, I think I was thinking about it the other day and when I was at primary school, so that's the school you go to when you're five or so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They, I remember the teacher giving me and someone called Paul Flynn extra cards, which had sums on them. So we, we'd obviously, I just remember receiving these, the teacher would sort of rather exasperatedly hand them out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I'm still a footballer, but I quickly realised, you know, when I was eight, I got into the first team, first team, my junior school's team, which were for 11 year olds, so I was doing


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Pretty well. I was in when it was, I was at, yeah, football. So I was, I was doing pretty well. And then when in my final year at primary school, junior school, when I was about 10 or 11, I scored 31 goals.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I started playing cricket and we, we were really, we had quite a good team and we were, we were quite good. We got into the final of the Lord Taverners, it was called, the, the regional final, the Yorkshire final.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the winners of that with the Yorkshire winners, and then they would play other county winners and you'd end up at Lord's that the actual final was at Lord's.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We, we, we reached the final and we played a school called Ampleforth College, which is a very famous public school, or if you're in America, a private school.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The grounds, I remember coming across the top of a hill and just seeing everything in front of us and our teacher turning around to us and saying, this is all owned by Ampleforth. And it had a massive effect on us. We just sort of felt, oh, we've had it. And we played really poorly and lost in the final. You didn't get to go on and play.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was a big one. And so I, I played, uh, I didn't get in the final Yorkshire team, but in the trials we were playing outside and it started raining. So we, we went inside to the nets and in the nets, there was two nets there. One had a spin bowler and I was a batter and one, I was facing the fast bowler.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And all, everyone was over on the, all the, the scouts, all the, the, the members of the Yorkshire board that were selectors, the selectors were over on watching the spinners and then they just gradually started coming over.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then, yeah, he's hitting and it turned out the guy I was hitting played for Yorkshire in the end and it was the best I've ever done. It was probably the highlight, me hitting this guy. And I played a few days later for Huddersfield against a local, another town called Halifax and about three of them came to watch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I, I played really, I opened the batting. I was the number one batter and I opened it and I got 14 or 15 runs before I was out, but it took me 14 or 15 overs. Right, slow batting. So slow, sure batting. Right. And they weren't interested in that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I knew I was better at maths and physics and the sciences than I was in the arts. My English essays were adequate. They were passing exams, but I wasn't setting the world on fire.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, my mum and dad had, uhm, my mum was a, she was from Ireland and she was born on a farm and her education ended when she was 13. She went, had to go back onto the farm. She was born in 1933. So being a woman in Ireland, you didn't have much of a chance of higher education.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She was good at maths, it turned out. She was, I remember she sadly passed away now, but she, I remember her telling me that, uhm, they realised at the school she was at when she was about 13.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She did have a gift for maths, so they put her in a maths class instead of doing the needlework class. So, you know, I tell people I walked around for the rest of my life with holes in my clothes, but I could do a bit of maths. So I'd like to think, even though she had no formal education beyond 13, that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She just had a natural ability. My dad was born in 28, so the


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where he stayed for five years, it was a very difficult time because he was in an area of Ireland where there was a lot of anger at the English, shall we say, so he took the brunt of that at the school.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So he then came back and became a joiner. He was, he trained to be a joiner. So his, his formal education ended sort of when he was 13 as well. And you know, you, you do a lot of practical maths when you're a joiner or a carpenter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you couldn't work. That was it. You got no pay. And if you were ill, that was it. You got no pay. And I remember him, you know, he slipped and fell through a roof twice. So he was badly injured. And I remember sitting on his knee every evening he'd come home and I'd sit on his knee and we'd read the paper together. That was a way of me learning how to read, I suppose.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The other thing he did, both him and my mum drove home to me was respect everybody, you know, respect all professions. It wasn't, he wasn't respecting the profession. I mean, without builders and you know, he helped build the M1, right? And all the bridges that you go under on the M1 around Birmingham, he did them and he did all the shuttering on them and stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But he, he also knew that there was other things you could do, which, which were just as important. And, and, and, and just from a practical standpoint, it said you don't want to be having to rely on, and it's a very hard work, these, these jobs, you easily get injured on them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I'm doing all right in maths and physics. Yeah. And chemistry, the chemistry teacher wanted me to go and do that at a level, sorry, at a degree level.


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[Assistant] It was a toss up for me between maths and physics. I really love maths and I was okay at physics, but there was something about, I remember hearing about Fermat's last theorem.


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[Assistant] Have you ever heard of a modular form, Andrew? No, I've never heard of that. Well, yeah, try that. So I went and I remember thinking, well, I'll just...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, yeah, I guess a sign of, of, of how much I really enjoyed just doing maths was, uh, I'd read Scientific American, but I'd always go first to the Martin Gardner.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, so I, I, I had this tough decision to make, maths or physics, and actually it was with, my dad said,