Oxford today

JOBY SESSIONS
NO MORE
ISOlATION
Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy considers how many of
the problems being addressed by academics are no longer
amenable to a single subject focus
A
few months after I took up my
chair as the Simonyi Professor
for the Public Understanding of
Science I got a phone call from
a journalist. “The Nobel Prize
for Medicine was announced this
morning for the discovery of telomeres. I wonder
if you could explain what a telomere is?”
I am a mathematician. Sequences of nucleotides
at the ends of chromosomes are not my usual
poison. Of course the title of my Chair does give
journalists the impression that I might be able to
explain the whole of science. I guess the last person
who was able to do that was probably living in the
nineteenth century.
Shortly after that phone call, the BBC asked
me to make a programme about consciousness
for them. Again my first reaction was: “But I’m
a mathematician.” Yet when I began to think about
the subject matter, I realised that it’s far from clear
in whose domain a subject like consciousness lies.
Philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, physics,
biology, chemistry – even maths. The conclusion
I came to at the end of making the programme was
that it lies in all of them. Rather like the brain which
shows extraordinary integration to create that sense
of one identity out of many millions of neurons, the
way to crack the big problems is not to use ideas
from a single discipline, but to integrate modes of
thinking from across disciplines.
One of the joys of my job as Professor for the
Public Understanding of Science has been the
chance to stick my head out of the world of
mathematics and find out what is going on in the
other subjects that surround me in the University
Science Area. It’s an increasing revelation across
the academic world that many of the problems we
Professor Marcus du Sautoy stands beneath
one of the atria in the new Mathematical Institute
31
are trying to crack are not amenable any more to
a single subject focus. Traditionally the picture of
a university looked like a collection of isolated silos:
the chemistry department here, the maths
department over there. The truth is that
increasingly the picture of the research being done
looks more like some intricate Venn diagram of
intersecting disciplines. Mathematical biology.
Computational chemistry. The physics of finance.
This interplay between subjects is absolutely
necessary if we are going to tackle such complex
problems as climate change, virus spread, economic
stability and population growth. This is the
motivation for the creation of bodies like the Santa
Fe Institute or the Oxford Martin School that have
championed this multi-disciplinary approach to the
problems of the twenty-first century.
Even questions that don’t at first sight have an
obvious multi-disciplinary nature could equally
benefit from discussions with those in the
department across the street. The low-lying fruit
probably exists in learning the language spoken
by another department and applying it to the
problems in your own field. I have seen how an
economist who learnt gauge theory from a physicist,
a mathematical language to describe the dynamics
of elementary particles, was able to apply this new
language to model the rate of change of inflation,
a notoriously difficult problem given that the basket
of goods you’re trying to track changes with time as
do the prices of the goods. But the breakthrough
came only as a result of two previously alien cultures
finding a common language of discourse.
In my own area of research, number theory, the
most exciting progress on the Riemann Hypothesis,
the great unsolved problem of mathematics, came
from a chance meeting of a mathematician and
a physicist over tea. That conversation led to the
discovery that energy levels in large atoms like
uranium have very similar patterns to certain ➺
www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | email@oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | @oxtoday