Can Marcus du Sautoy do for maths what Brian Cox did for physics? Can he convince us of the beauty of numbers and help us fall in love with pi? It’s a tall order, but not only does Professor du Sautoy have an unstoppable passion for ratios, he’s also a natural communicator, which clearly helps if you’re the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding for Science, which he is. And so du Sautoy guided us through some basic mathematical principles which underpin the workings of the universe. He introduced us to The Code.
Everything is governed by The Code, he explained, and he made it sound both wonderfully sinister and divinely mysterious, which was rather the intention. Though the laws of mathematics are more powerful than Opus Dei, of course, the programme makers were keen to make the most of the Dan Brown allusion. And why not? Frankly, maths could do with a decent bit of marketing.
Thus this first episode, of three, opened with du Sautoy admiring Chartres Cathedral whilst standing, in the crepuscular gloom, on its famous labyrinth. Numbers were once thought to be intrinsically divine, and so God, the ultimate architect, must also have been responsible for the precise proportions of that High Gothic splendour. We can only imagine what it might have been like to be a medieval worshipper awed by God’s own masonry, but I’m sure the same feeling of tremulous wonder translates quite easily to the 21st-century viewer. And that sense of wonder for the physical world can be understood through the hidden numbers, patterns and shapes that can be detected everywhere if only we just understood The Code.
Indeed, so much care was taken over the editing, the visuals and the atmospherics that even the number crunching looked enticing. On more than one occasion, du Sautoy was filmed walking through narrow cobbled alleyways whilst voices from previous clips echoed like the voices of soothsayers revealing immutable truths, which, of course, they were.
In between he told us about prime numbers and imaginary numbers (“the mathematical equivalent of believing in fairies”), negative numbers and pi (“that essense of circleness). But like any good storyteller, he didn’t just tell us, he showed us. Which is where the periodical cicada, which has a life cycle of 13 years, came in, and the beautiful spiral formations inside the shell of the ocean-inhabiting nautilus, and even the humble dover sole. And, it's also where sound waves and music came in and, of course, Chartres Cathedral, which is physical proof of how 12th-century scholars were familiar with elements of The Code.
You might say this was all fairly basic stuff, and it both is and it isn’t. It wasn’t that du Sautoy made it look particularly easy, though, but what he did do was something far better: he made it look exciting. Move over Johnny Ball.
- Watch The Code on BBC iPlayer
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