There’s also another side to that book which is really special, which is CP Snow’s introduction. 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. It also contains two beautiful proofs, quite simple proofs that someone at school or an adult can understand. That book really brought mathematics alive for me. 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. 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. 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. Your first book is GH Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology, which is about the beauty of maths.
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