A Mathematician’s Apology

"Yes, it really appealed to me when I read it as a kid because I was interested in music, I played the trumpet, I loved doing theatre, and somehow GH Hardy in that book revealed to me how much mathematics is a creative art as much as a useful science. In fact he probably goes further, he really revels in the beauty of the subject and says he’s not particularly interested in the applications. That really appealed to me at the time – I was still hankering after something that made a lot of logical sense and wasn’t too ambiguous but was creative. That book really brought mathematics alive for me. It also contains two beautiful proofs, quite simple proofs that someone at school or an adult can understand. One is the proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers and I thought it was a piece of magic that, with just a little bit of finite logic, you can capture the infinite. There’s also another side to that book which is really special, which is CP Snow’s introduction. This is a beautiful piece of writing about the biography of GH Hardy and particularly about his meeting with the Indian mathematician Ramanujan. That’s a story that plays into another book I chose, which is the script for A Disappearing Number, performed by the theatre group Complicite."