The Glass Bead Game

"There’s the ideas of mathematics, of philosophy, of music all brought together in this game, the glass bead game, and it’s interesting you picked up on the word ‘pattern’ because that’s what mathematics is about, pattern-searching. And it’s why there’s this link to music very often because the way you listen to music and make sense of it is to find patterns, relationships, structures, evolving structures, common themes changing, mutating. I think all of those ideas are very common to how people do mathematics as well. When I read that book I thought, ‘Yes, this is the game I want to play.’ That’s what I try to do in the work that I do, to combine my love of music, to explain why music and mathematics have these common themes, to bring mathematics alive through the theatre, write the books I do. That’s my ultimate aim, to become a master of the glass bead game. It’s the book I took on my desert island when I was asked to do Desert Island Discs. I just think it is a magical book."

"This is about the beauty of organised structures and how we play them in game-like fashion and how much they entrance us. So it’s about a kind of priestly cult that played a game called the glass bead game, which you can think of as a mix of chess and music and mathematics and much more, and he has compelling descriptions of just how spellbound and into this game people would get. And I think indirectly he was the first person to put his finger on why we so often find the web such fun. It’s like this game for us, but it’s also deeply serious and it holds our interest and can be suspenseful and, even though he’s not writing about the internet at all, this is a literary treatment of what we’re doing now and why we find it so intriguing. Every day I can learn something new. I have learnt quite a bit about how the German economic experiment of unification in the 1990s reflects the advantages and disadvantages of fiscal policy. I have learnt a lot on that topic."