Professor Marcus du Sautoy joins Professor Frances Ashcroft to discuss A Mathematician’s Apology by GH Hardy and Exactly: How Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester. A Mathematician’s Apology is GH Hardy’s panegyric on pure mathematics in which he claims that pure maths is the pinnacle of the sciences and that it has an inherent beauty. Exactly tells the stories of the pioneering engineers who developed the precision tools and machinery that underpin the modern world. Along the way, the author addresses questions like why is precision important, how do we measure it, can we be too precise?

Marcus du Sautoy is Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. A distinguished mathematician with a particular interest in symmetry and number theory, he is also the author of several popular science books about mathematics, including the critically acclaimed The Music of the Primes, and he has presented numerous TV programmes.

Website: https://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/