One, Two, Three . . . Infinity

"George Gamow's "One, Two, Three . . . Infinity" (1947) and Edward Kasner and James Newman's "Mathematics and the Imagination" (1940) are both still in print. I have aspired to write a book as influential to others as these books have been influential to me."

"Yes, one of the things that really excited me when I read this – again when I was at school – was this idea of infinity. Gamow was a physicist first of all: Mathematics is the language of physics and you can see that through this book. It was where I read for the first time the idea that there could be different sorts of infinity and that was just mind-blowing. I thought infinity was something you just couldn’t understand. Also the book explores how mathematics feeds into the other sciences and that’s why I found it exciting. There’s another book by George Gamow which also turned me on, which is Mr Tompkins in Paperback. It’s a set of physics lectures which this guy, Mr Tompkins, goes to and always falls asleep during the lecture and then he dreams he’s in a world in which the speed of light is 30 miles an hour so he can see the effects of relativity happening on the streets. Gamow’s a very inventive, top-rate scientist, as is GH Hardy, and I like top-rate scientists talking about their subjects in a lay way. I guess both of them were role models for me because that’s what I try to do: To do top-rate mathematics and then communicate it. I think we’ve all been living a little bit under this spectre that if you attempt to communicate your subject outside of the ivory tower, then you’re going to be knocked as being a second-rate mathematician. I’ve really been trying to prove that wrong in what I’m doing."