Marcus du Sautoy

Alone in a cube that's glowing in the darkness, X is content within its little universe of infinite thought. This solitude is disturbed by the appearance of Y, who insists on exposing X to the richness of the physical world. Each begins to long for what the other has, luring them into a strange loop.In this play for two variables, Marcus du Sautoy and Victoria Gould use mathematics and theatre to navigate the furthest reaches of our world. Through a series of surreal episodes, X and Y tackle some of life's greatest questions: where did the universe come from, does time have an end, do we have free will?I is a Strange Loop was first performed by the authors at the Barbican Pit, London, in March 2019.'I is a Strange Loop is a play that plays with ideas, concepts, abstractions and relationships that are, usually, hidden from the sight of ordinary mortals, articulating the ineffable, incarnating the incorporeal, revealing the inconceivable. It makes us feel we know a great deal more than we do. It is also very funny, utterly compelling and marvellously human.' Simon McBurney

Kan en maskin måla, komponera musik eller skriva en roman, och göra det på ett sätt som lyfter, vidgar och omvandlar innebörden i att vara människa? Ännu verkar sublima höjdpunkter inom konst, litteratur och musik ligga bortom deras förmåga, men hur blir det i framtiden?I De skapande maskinerna belyser Marcus du Sautoy kreativitetens villkor i dag. Resultatet är en fascinerande upptäcktsfärd som förändrar vår syn på vad det innebär att vara människa – och som får oss att förstå AI lite bättre.”A brilliant travel guide to the coming world of AI.” Jeanette Winterson”du Sautoy ställer frågan om huruvida en maskin kan vara kreativ, och utforskar på samma gång den mänskliga skapandeförmågans mest subtila och häpnadsväckande sidor, som de kommer till uttryck såväl i matematisk bevisföring som i konst, musik och litteratur. Genom statistisk analys av sådant som vi människor finner meningsfullt lär sig maskinerna att själva ge upphov till samma sak. Men upplevelsen av mening – och detta visar du Sautoy tydligt – är och förblir ett alltigenom mänskligt fenomen.” Helena Granström, författare och fysiker"Marcus du Sautoy ger en fascinerande inblick i hur AI utvecklats från ett verktyg att lösa komplicerade uppgifter som att spela schack och go, till att utmana mänskligt tänkande inom kreativa områden som matematik, musik och konst. Han skriver medryckande, lärt och personligt om en av våra största framtidsfrågor: Är AI ett hot eller en möjlighet för mänsklig utveckling?"Anders Karlqvist, f.d. professor, docent i systemanalys och tidigare chef för polarforskningssekretariatet

A Financial Times "Best Summer Books" Selection"Fascinating...If all the experiences, hopes, dreams, visions, lusts, loves and hatreds that shape the human imagination amount to nothing more than a `code,' then sooner or later a machine will crack it. Indeed, du Sautoy assembles an eclectic array of evidence to show how that's happening even now."-The Times"Thoughtful and illuminating."-Sunday Times"Fact-packed and funny, questioning what we mean by creative and unsettling the script about what it means to be human...a brilliant travel guide to the coming world of AI."-Jeanette WintersonCan a computer compose a symphony, write a prize-winning novel, or paint a masterpiece? And if so, would we be able to tell the difference? Does the future of creativity belong to AI?Mathematical genius and creative polymath Marcus du Sautoy plunges us into the mysterious world of creativity in this essential guide to how algorithms work. He introduces us to programs that are making drip paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock, composing pieces that have fooled Bach experts, and inventing plot twists that would have Harry Potter running scared. In a thrilling tour of the landscape of invention, he explores what it means to be creative-and how much of that is human.

Will a computer ever compose a symphony, write a prize-winning novel, or paint a masterpiece? And if so, would we be able to tell the difference?

"An engaging voyage into some of the great mysteries and wonders of our world." --Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dream and The Accidental Universe "No one is better at making the recondite accessible and exciting." --Bill Bryson Brain Pickings and Kirkus Best Science Book of the Year Every week seems to throw up a new discovery, shaking the foundations of what we know. But are there questions we will never be able to answer--mysteries that lie beyond the predictive powers of science? In this captivating exploration of our most tantalizing unknowns, Marcus du Sautoy invites us to consider the problems in cosmology, quantum physics, mathematics, and neuroscience that continue to bedevil scientists and creative thinkers who are at the forefront of their fields. At once exhilarating, mind-bending, and compulsively readable, The Great Unknown challenges us to consider big questions--about the nature of consciousness, what came before the big bang, and what lies beyond our horizons--while taking us on a virtuoso tour of the great breakthroughs of the past and celebrating the men and women who dared to tackle the seemingly impossible and had the imagination to come up with new ways of seeing the world.

Do something amazing and learn a new skill thanks to the Little Ways to Live a Big Life books! Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it... Not falling in love, but counting. Animals and humans have been using numbers to navigate their way through the jungle of life ever since we all evolved on this planet. But this book will help you to do something that humans have only recently understood how to do: to count to regions that no animal has ever reached. By the end of this book you'll be able to count to infinity...and beyond.On our way to infinity we'll discover how the ancient Babylonians used their bodies to count to 60 (which gave us 60 minutes in the hour), how the number zero was only discovered in the 7th century by Indian mathematicians contemplating the void, why in China going into the red meant your numbers had gone negative and why numbers might be our best language for communicating with alien life.But for millennia contemplating infinity has sent even the greatest minds into a spin. Then at the end of the nineteenth century mathematicians discovered a way to think about infinity that revealed that it is a number that we can count. Not only that. They found that there are an infinite number of infinities, some bigger than others. Just using the finite neurons in your brain and the finite pages in this book, you'll have your mind blown discovering the secret of how to count to infinity.

Spanning 60 years, this publication surveys the art, editing and curating activities of London-based, Pakistani-born artist Rasheed Araeen (born 1935) for the first time, presenting an expansive artistic practice that has had a profound influence on generations of artists, writers and thinkers. Whether as a pioneer of Minimalist sculpture, a publisher of magazines at the forefront of postcolonial thinking like Third Text (founded 1987) or as an abstract painter drawing inspiration from the art of the Abbasid period, Araeen has consistently sought to realign the understanding of Modernism imposed by the hegemonic discourses of the West. Bringing together newly commissioned essays by leading art critics and historians, documentation from the artist's archive as well as an extensive survey of Araeen's work, this publication offers the opportunity--long overdue--to assess Araeen's impact as an artist and thinker.

â??Brilliant and fascinating. No one is better at making the recondite accessible and excitingâ?? Bill Bryson Britainâ??s most famous mathematician takes us to the edge of knowledge to show us what we cannot know.

Inthe tradition of Fermat's Enigma and Pi, Marcus du Sautoy tells the illuminating, authoritative, and engagingstory of Bernhard Reimann and the ongoing quest tocapture the holy grail of mathematics--the formula to predict prime numbers.Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, calls TheMusic of the Primes "an amazing book. . . . I could not put it down once Ihad started." Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman, writes, "this fascinating account, decoding the inscrutable language of themathematical priesthood, is written like the purest poetry. Marcus du Sautoy's enthusiasm shines through every line of this hymnto the joy of high intelligence, illuminating as it does so even the darkestcorners of his most arcane universe."

Every time we download music, take a flight across the Atlantic or talk on our cell phones, we are relying on great mathematical inventions. In" The Number Mysteries," one of our generation's foremost mathematicians Marcus du Sautoy offers a playful and accessible examination of numbers and how, despite efforts of the greatest minds, the most fundamental puzzles of nature remain unsolved. Du Sautoy tells about the quest to predict the future from the flight of asteroids to an impending storm, from bending a ball like Beckham to forecasting population growth. He brings to life the beauty behind five mathematical puzzles that have contributed to our understanding of the world around us and have helped develop the technology to cope with it. With loads of games to play and puzzles to solve, this is a math book for everyone."

From the author of â??The Music of the Primesâ?? and â??Finding Moonshineâ?? comes a short, lively book on five mathematical problems that just refuse be solved â?? and on how many everyday problems can be solved by maths.

This new book from the author of 'The Music of the Primes' combines a personal insight into the mind of a working mathematician with the story of one of the biggest adventures in mathematics: the search for symmetry. This is the story of how humankind has come to its understanding of the bizarre world of symmetry – a subject of fundamental significance to the way we interpret the world around us. Our eyes and minds are drawn to symmetrical objects, from the sphere to the swastika, the pyramid to the pentagon. Symmetry indicates a dynamic relationship or connection between objects, and it is all-pervasive: in chemistry and physics the concept of symmetry explains the structure of crystals or the theory of fundamental particles; in evolutionary biology, the natural world exploits symmetry in the fight for survival; symmetry and the breaking of symmetry are central to ideas in art, architecture and music; the mathematics of symmetry is even exploited in industry, for example to find efficient ways to store more music on a CD or to keep your mobile phone conversation from cracking up through interference. Marcus du Sautoy constantly strives to push his own boundaries to find ways in which to share the excitement of mathematics with a broader audience; this book charts his own personal quest to master one of the most innate and intangible concepts, and to demonstrate the intricacy and beauty of the world around us.

Symmetry is all around us. Of fundamental significance to the way we interpret the world, this unique, pervasive phenomenon indicates a dynamic relationship between objects. Combining a rich historical narrative with his own personal journey as a mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy takes a unique look into the mathematical mind as he explores deep conjectures about symmetry and brings us face-to-face with the oddball mathematicians, both past and present, who have battled to understand symmetry's elusive qualities.

Thestudyofthesubgroupgrowthofin?nitegroupsisanareaofmathematical research that has grown rapidly since its inception at the Groups St. Andrews conferencein1985.Ithasbecomearichtheoryrequiringtoolsfromandhaving applications to many areas of group theory. Indeed, much of this progress is chronicled by Lubotzky and Segal within their book [42]. However, one area within this study has grown explosively in the last few years. This is the study of the zeta functions of groups with polynomial s- groupgrowth,inparticularfortorsion-free?nitely-generatednilpotentgroups. These zeta functions were introduced in [32], and other key papers in the - velopment of this subject include [10, 17], with [19, 23, 15] as well as [42] presenting surveys of the area. The purpose of this book is to bring into print signi?cant and as yet unpublished work from three areas of the theory of zeta functions of groups. First, there are now numerous calculations of zeta functions of groups by doctoralstudentsofthe?rstauthorwhichareyettobemadeintoprintedform outside their theses. These explicit calculations provide evidence in favour of conjectures, or indeed can form inspiration and evidence for new conjectures. We record these zeta functions in Chap.2. In particular, we document the functional equations frequently satis?ed by the local factors. Explaining this phenomenon is, according to the ?rst author and Segal [23], “one of the most intriguing open problems in the area”.

20 years later The Music of the Primes is still a groundbreaking popular science book. This new edition features updates from the author and a foreword by actor and director, Simon McBurney.