Out For The Count

Like the Periodical Cicada, Marcus de Sautoy is observed only occasionally on British television and presumably at prime intervals. When last seen, in 2009, Sordel's favourite boffin was frolicking on a beach with everyman-for-hire Alan Davies, but now he is out on his own, trying to solve The Code, which is his post-Langdonian nomenclature for boring old mathematics.

"The Code" is evidently all around us, a mysterious and enthralling puzzle that demands our awed investigation. Consider, for example, an ancient standing circle whose circumference and diameter Marcus enterprisingly appraised with a tape measure before sitting down with a notebook to divide the larger number by the smaller. There we go: 3.2 ... the number that underpins all things.

Well, perhaps not. It turns out that the number that underpins all things is not 3.2 but another number. If you can work out what that number is then you are streets ahead of this programme, where the well-meaning du Sautoy attempted to demonstrate all sorts of extraordinary things and failed conspicuously.

From the statistics of a fisherman's daily catch, knowing only how many years that fisherman had been fishing, du Sautoy was able to work out the weight of the largest Dover sole that the fisherman had ever caught. Three pounds, declared Professor du Sautoy. When the fisherman said that his biggest Dover sole had been "three to three-and-a-half pounds" one half expected the mathematician (who looks disarmingly like Simon Pegg's smarter brother) to turn to the camera and say "well, we all know what liars fishermen are."

The problem with all this popularisation should have been obvious at the outset: boring old mathematics works wonderfully on paper, but du Sautoy's attempts to show it in action run up against the fundamental inability of the audience to keep pace with even his most pedestrian insights. Leaning over the shoulder of a flight controller, du Sautoy explained how the calculations involved in Radar depend on the Imaginary Unit. (Go on, click through that link ... I dare you.)

The bemused controller (presumably thinking: who let this guy in here and where's his handler?) smiled with good-natured befuddlement and said that there was nothing imaginary going on in his tower.

But of course there was.

Imaginary educational television: a world where experiments that don't work are substituted for explanations that you can't possibly understand.

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.