It Simply Doesn't Add Up

Prof. Marcus du Sautoy is the man to whom television turns when it wishes to satisfy its educational remit with regard to Mathematics. Regular viewers of mathematical educational television may recall his wholly uninfectious enthusiasm being coughed, spluttered and quite possibly spat in the bright young faces of a group of young people at the Royal Institution Christmas lectures in 2006. The name of this series of lectures was The Num8er My5teries, which horrendous title probably goes some way to explaining why none of the attendees or viewers contracted anything more serious than a mathematical headcold. It was gr8. (Not really.)

Prof. du Sautoy waited patiently, and sure enough the B.B.C. - discovering a need to bolster its own so-called educational programming - decided to give him another tilt at the windmill. This time, rather than an audience of young people, they brought in ordinary-man-for-hire Alan Davies to act as stooge while the grand professor ran through what my limited acquaintance with mathematics would term a "sub-set" of his earlier Christmas lectures. Slapping the once-proud brand of Horizon on the resulting programme, they aired the result this week and you can probably catch it, roughly now, on any digital channel, or again an hour from now.

The problem with Mathematics is not that we all hated it at school (and with good reason) but that we all hate it now, and with good reason. The poster-boy for our hatred is Marcus du Sautoy, who knows all about Mathematics, is a wonderful communicator, and couldn't communicate the smallest fraction of his understanding of it if you gave him eternity and a big blackboard. Oh, and you would also need to give him a dougnut, since a doughnut is evidently an important element in explaining a cosmological theory that describes a hypothetical universe that is quite possibly nothing like ours.

So, Alan and Marcus (as the chirpy, up-the-Gunners tone of this programme would have us think of them) went up the Grande Arche in Paris so that we could see what a three-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional cube might look like. Wikipedia tells me that this shape is called a tesseract, but Alan and Marcus steered clear of a term like that for fear that their audience would call for torches and burn down the mansion inhabited both by this mathematical Frankenstein and his ill-stitched and inarticulate sidekick.

There was a strong homoerotic undercurrent to all this, and it went beyond Paris, which the couple will presumably always have. In fact, by the end, Marcus and Alan were rolling on a beach in what promised to end up as a From Here To Eternity-clinch but for the presence of two telescopes and Alan's fatuous speculations on the universe. (I suppose they could have used the telescopes for that purpose as well, but that would have entailed moving into territory that Channel Four has been covering in The Sex Education Show v Pornography.) They had bonded, which was nice, but one does wonder whether this narrative was really a fair substitution for any actual, y'know, mathematics.

By the end, others honestly viewing for an entertaining mathematical exploration rather than the spectacle of two grown men shying balls at tin cans may have felt as I did. It seems that the mathematical problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.