Tom Lehrer… not yet pushing up daisies, as of this Monday

New month, so a new math “profile” today (#15 in the series)… all you 65+ year-old mathematicians will already know this individual well, but all you baby-faced, Instagram-addicted 30-year-old-and-younger whippersnappers, dabbling in category theory and elliptic curves, listen up now… AND, respect your elders (despite the damn mess we've left you with)!

The first amazing fact is… Tom Lehrer is still alive!!! Glory be (rampant rumors of his demise the last couple decades have been consistently exaggerated). He’s in his nineties and therefore no longer making appearances on Ed Sullivan, but you can still find him on YouTube (thank you Sergey and Larry). "Thomas Andrew Lehrer" (named after those bulwarks of American comedy, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Johnson), fittingly now lives in Massachusetts, the wise, sensible state that voted for George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis (while mindless, Zombie-like Americans were casting ballots for, if you can believe this, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush/Cheney, LOL). Tom's own political hero was Adlai Stevenson, who famously, and timelessly, said of Republicans back in the 50's that "if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them."

Tom Lehrer may have been the funniest mathematician of all time (…yeah, I know, Matt Parker is trying to give him a run for his money, but if Tom had had the Internet at his disposal, he might have left Matt in his Cantor dust).

Anyway, let’s jump right into it; here, for any Lehrer virgins out there, one of his all-time favorites, that he wrote for me when I was two-years old:

Now, compose yourself, and we’ll continue on…

Tom was born on April 9, 1928 in Manhattan, NY.; the same year that Noam Chomsky was born and also (like Tom) realized by age 2 that the United States was an imperialist corporatocracy.  Lehrer was considered a prodigy early on and after graduating prep school, entered Harvard at age 15 (something I personally refused to do, waiting instead until Pomona College made room for me). There he studied mathematics while also writing comic songs for friends (sort of like we all did on college Saturday nights… except, HE was good at it!). He earned both a BA and MA in math from Harvard, magna cum laude, which I believe is Latin for ‘funny as Hell’.  And he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, which I believe is Greek for ‘magna cum laude’.

Following that classroom stint at Hahhhvahd he taught math classes at MIT, Wellesley, Harvard, and University of California, never getting a dream job at the Claremont Colleges, but oh well. Lehrer continued off-and-on with classes at Harvard pursuing a math PhD. at the same time that his musical parody proclivities drew national attention. He spent time as a researcher at Los Alamos Laboratory as well. He was drafted into the Army and served from 1955-7 working at NSA, no doubt cracking up the code-crackers every time he burst into cryptic song (meanwhile, I was exploring the intrinsic structure of vintage humor on TV under the tutelage of Captain Kangaroo and Dr. Soupy Sales).  Lehrer eventually gave up on the PhD. once it was clear there was more money to be made making nerdy Americans guffaw. (Of course all the laughing came to a screeching halt for America in November of 2016 when happy-go-lucky socialism was replaced with creeping, unfunny, and lunatic kleptocracy… but, I digress.)

Tom also wrote songs for PBS’s “The Electric Company” back in the day, so some of you are familiar with his work even without knowing it.

Here’s a couple more Lehrer classics, before we get too far along:

His take on “the New Math” from decades ago makes you wonder what he might have to say about Common Core today:

...and then branching out to chemistry, "The Element Song"... with lyrics even harder to memorize than Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire":

Tom was by no means just a writer of math/science hijinks, but a general satirist poking fun... sometimes very controversial/irreverent fun... at stodgy society.  Indeed, when he toured parts of the world in the 1960's some of his ‘radical,’ liberal offerings were censored or banned in various locales — because, hey, you know you can’t laugh at the Establishment without consequences, or the next thing you know, you'll be asking them to pay taxes for gosh sakes! (Or, as Tom says at one point, "You can't be satirical and not be offensive to someone.") Of course societal standards were quite different back then — unlike now, you couldn’t even have nude pics of the First Lady of the U.S. splattered across the internet back in those Puritanistic days! Also, long before Mel Brooks took full credit, Tom voiced the idea of doing a musical based on Hitler. Despite his leftward leanings Lehrer was uncomfortable with antics of the 60's so-called "New Left" movement, as well as with some of the 'political correctness' that would follow, recognizing that 'free speech' is threatened by both the far left and far right.

Tom’s last main public performance was in 1972 on behalf of the presidential campaign of George McGovern (who I proudly voted for, and you younguns don't remember). 25 years later he did do one London performance for a new generation of fans. Through the 1970s, bored with performing the same material (he wrote 37 songs) over and over again, he mostly returned to teaching, and was beloved by students. His multitude of fans have kept his name and material alive and available, though a restrained Lehrer repeatedly eschewed the fame, fortune, and limelight headed his way, maintaining a surprising degree of privacy (making him, according to one writer, "the J.D. Salinger" of musical comedy).

Tom was quite an original, who influenced many future satirists like Harry Shearer and Mark Russell, who is close to Lehrer’s age, but who’s career took off about the time that Lehrer was withdrawing. Russell in turn likely influenced the Capitol Steps who gained national attention starting in 1981, and who will probably use their upcoming annual year-end review to tell Donald Trump (if, incredibly, he's still in office) where to shove it (just my educated hunch). On-the-other-hand, Lehrer once noted that much of the satire that followed him had been "de-fanged" and lost its edge.

Despite his elusiveness over the years, the Web bears a great many pieces on/about him; here are just a few...

A great interview with Tom from 2000:

 https://www.avclub.com/tom-lehrer-1798208112

...and another interview from 1994:
http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html

This fabulous 2014 Buzzfeed piece on Lehrer has a lot more details than I've given here:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/tom-lehrer
(In this piece he’s quoted as once saying his entire repertoire was “part of a huge scientific project to which I have devoted my entire life. Namely, the attempt to prolong adolescence beyond all previous limits.”)

...and another, older piece:
http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/jmazner/lehrhtml.html

(...and there are many more)

It’s kinda a shame Tom isn’t active today given all the material the current “Administration” (and obviously, I use that word loosely) hands out on a platter to work with — but then who wants an 80-hour work week. Still, I'm in the mood for perhaps a timely "Impeachment Rag":



Now I don't want to be accused of starting conspiracy theories, but one pressing question that still remains is, did ANYone ever see Tom Lehrer and Buddy Holly in the same room at the same time... EVER!? huhhhh?:

B.H.

T.L.

Perhaps we should end with one of Tom's prescient and uplifting ditties:

Happy dreams everyone; I hope you've enjoyed this trip down memory lane… and remember sometimes the only alternative to laughing at life… is to incessantly wail.

************************

Check out all the prior math profiles here: 

Matt, Evelyn, David, Sean, Cathy, Al, Tadashi, Holly, Erik, Danica, Marcus, Ben, Tyler, Fawn

Fawn Nguyen… ever heard of her???

pho

Math-Frolic 'profile' #14:

I think I can safely say that one of the few and best things to come out of America’s ill-fated war in Viet Nam was.… Fawn Nguyen (who came here from there in 1976, when I was just a toddler — well, a toddler with a beard and mustache and two college degrees).

There’s an awful lot of wonderful, helpful cross-talk among primary/secondary teachers on internet social media, especially on Twitter. Often when you see a first name (Bob, Carol, Ted, Alice...) you have to check further to see exactly who it is…. BUT when you see the name “Fawn” EVERYone KNOWS who it is!! (ya know kinda like when you see the name Beyonce, Cher, Bono, Euclid, or Quasimodo). Because if you don’t know Fawn Nguyen, you’re probably not a real teacher to begin with, but just some planted Russian spy… who, in your best-case scenario, is hoping to marry a filthy-rich, power-hungry American real estate doofus, and eventually become First Lady (or Escort) of these here not-so-United States… but, I digress (again).

Fawn’s early life story, making her way to the U.S. as a youngster from Viet Nam, is inspiring (especially when compared with Ivanka Trump's childhood stories of Saturday Gucci shopping sprees), as she told it when I interviewed her back in 2014:  

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2014/05/fawn-nguyen-passion-personified.html
It's quite the saga of persistence and fortitude, even while leaving out the more graphic parts about not being eaten by sharks while at sea.

She eventually made her way from the Midwest (where she first arrived) to the West Coast of the U.S., where she has taught math since the French Revolution, first in Oregon and then in California. She’s still a huge fan of the Oregon Ducks (though frankly, I suspect that’s ONLY because “duck” rhymes with her favorite word). After teaching in the classroom for 30+ years (but who’s counting) they’ve now made her a ‘Teacher On Special Assignment’ (perhaps because too many of her students were deliberately flunking just so they could spend another year with her). Anyway, it all has a sort of clandestine ring to it -- psssst… Netflix, I think it would make a great TV mini-series: “Teacher On Special Assignment, starring Fawn Nguyen” (or, Angelina Jolie playing Fawn)… but then, my best ideas are always ignored. :(

I’d recommend Fawn for a teaching position at Pomona College, but with California either burning to the ground or falling into the Pacific Ocean in the next decade, I hesitate to do that. Better perhaps that she move back to Minnesota (where she first arrived in the U.S. lo those many years ago), hang out with Ben Orlin, and discuss the never-ending intricacies of the Pythagorean theorem. Maybe they could even write a book together — she could do the drawings and it would be entitled “Math With F*cking Good Drawings, At Long Last Dammit” (...or whatever Simon & Schuster preferred).

I also think Fawn would make a great Secretary of Education; I mean after 3 years of Betsy DeVos it would be nice (even earth-shattering) to have someone in charge who understands teaching, and education, and learning, and middle school boys.

I can’t do justice to Fawn here... Like Sean Carroll who I profiled earlier and who can’t possibly be summarized in a blogpost either, there is just too much stuff to tell — but at least I can comprehend Fawn when she talks; whereas Sean is caught up in that crazy cosmology cacophony that leaves me confounded... especially the part where I'm both dead and alive at the same time until someone observes me.

Fawn’s blog “Finding Ways” is one of the more distinctive math blogs out there; a mix of teaching points, personal observation, uncommon wisdom, and Fawn’s helpful household hints (like the hysterically absurdist, "Make your bed every morning;" she's such a kidder!). You never know just what she might write about next, or when a four-letter word will pop up without warning (while you're reading pleasantly to your 7-year-old). I can’t even employ Fawn’s favorite words  here on a nice family blog like this (…well, except that is, when I’m talking about Donald T. or any member of his dysfunctional family… and I use the word “family” advisedly in the same loose, sketchy sense that people speak of the ‘Manson family’). 
By the way, "Visual Patterns" and "MathTalks" are a couple of other sites for math teachers, that Fawn started.

Fawn learned English as a second language, but writes better than most of us who learned it first (or, right after pig-Latin); and certainly better than anyone in Mitch McConnell's Senate Office. In fact, her writing has the ability to make grown men cry (but don’t ask me how I know that), and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve linked to this 2012 blogpost of hers.

But seriously if some prescient publisher doesn’t snap her up one day soon it will be a miscarriage of book publishing (…I may be lookin’ at you Princeton University Press).

Fawn admits to having once been too judgmental, something that having 3 kids and more than 3 doughnuts remedied (still, I'd be a tad cautious about crossing Fawn whenever she's holding a fork):

http://fawnnguyen.com/send-doughnuts/

Fawn loves food, and if you tell her she makes the best Pho on the planet you’ll likely be moved to the #1 slot on her speed-dial, AND be invited over in a few weeks for Thanksgiving dinner. She’s also been known to down a beer on days of the week beginning with a consonant... and, perhaps also a Bloody Mary on occasion:
https://twitter.com/fawnpnguyen/status/1184089101655396353

Fawn is on Twitter HERE in case you’re not already one of her 20,000 ardent followers (more than triple what Donald Trump has, after you eliminate Russian bots).

I get the feeling that “Nguyen” in Viet Nam must be like “Smith” in America — I mean there’s a LOT of them. So if you look Fawn up on the internet DON’T get confused by any similarly-named felons, strippers, embezzlers, ne’er-do-wells, real estate agents, etc. that you may run across there (at least I think they’re different people). You want only the reeeeal Fawn (the one who answers to “Fawnzie” because of her affection for the Fonzie character of old “Happy Days” episodes that she credits with helping her learn English). All the others are lame imitations.

Needless to say Fawn has a lot of fans. Here is one member of her cult extolling her virtues in a blogpost from a year ago:

https://countjoy12.wordpress.com/2018/08/17/fawn-nguyen/

I don’t know how much Fawn normally pays to have such posts planted around the blogosphere, but I want to assure readers that I’m NOT receiving a single penny for today’s blog entry! (…though I may check my mailbox a little more often over the next few days).

Fawn has talked to teacher groups and conferences more times than I've flossed my back molars (not that that’s saying much). Here is a brief inimitable example of her in action:

With the money she’s amassed from teaching, Fawn will no doubt be able to retire in just a few more decades, and all her past students (who have become Wall Street bankers or professional poker players), can then fondly visit her at one of Los Angeles’ finest homeless shelters.

Until then, Fawn, keep up the great work!!

p.s…. you make the BEST Pho!

——————————————————

Check out all the prior math profiles here: 

Matt, Evelyn, David, Sean, Cathy, Al, Tadashi, Holly, Erik, Danica, Marcus, Ben, Tyler

Tyler Vigen…. Correlate THIS!

Readers have been clamoring non-stop for another scintillating mathematician “profile” (well, not really, that's more like a KellyAnne Conway alternative factoid), so without further ado….

The hottest thing going in mathematics these days is statistics/probability (I mean other than the 613 books out this year on calculus), so figured a profile of a statistician was in order (just a short while back I mentioned several that I follow on Twitter)… BUT, I rarely do what I ought… so instead, will briefly profile a former law student...

In case you think that makes no sense, well not so fast Stephen Hawking wannabes! In recent years this particular law student had one of the most popular stat-related websites of anyone on the entire Web (in fact, he turned it into a little book). If you’ve followed math much at all on the internet over that time you likely already know of Tyler Vigen and his “Spurious Correlations” site. IF you’re NOT familiar with Tyler’s work, he regularly posts graphs of variables that seem to correlate VERY strongly, even though they have no logical reason for doing so (he's generated ~85,000 graphs!). So for example, here’s one of his graphs:

Or, for something less pleasant to think about:

Perhaps that even makes sense to you!? Anyway, you get the idea…. (statistics that are ludicrous... with or without fat tails). 

But of course who says these correlations aren’t real!?  “Correlation is not causation” is not so simple, my friend.  As every third-grader knows by now, a butterfly flying over the Indian Ocean in April may cause a hurricane in Miami in October (or, the election of neo-fascists in two of the world’s oldest democracies later on… but I digress). Perhaps A does not directly cause B, but perhaps A does cause Q which causes R which causes X which causes Y which causes Z, which, causes... B! Well then!… (Hey, it could happen... and does!).

In any event, here's Tyler explaining his site in his own words:

So back to our main focus….  the profile of Tyler Vigen, known anagrammatically as “Ever Tingly”:

Ever, I mean Tyler, was born in Burnsville, Minnesota on Feb. 13, 1991 (the same year that "Silence of the Lambs" came out and fava beans with a fine chianti became a thing). That makes him an Aquarium, just like myself, and accounting for the constant ’sink or swim’ feeling I've had throughout life. No, no, truth-be-told, the 'Age of Aquarius' ended long ago, and ever since Reagan we’ve been floundering deplorably in the Age of Rush Limbaugh (not completely unlike what 1930s Germany experienced... in fact the correlation gets closer and closer over time; some sort of regression to the mean... and reprehensible).

Tyler earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Metropolitan State University in Minnesota and worked in the National Guard in areas of geospatial analysis and satellite imagery and other data. From there he went on to Harvard Law School, thus missing out on a real education at Pomona College, but his technical interests and computer programming continued. He created his “Spurious Correlations” website while at Harvard, writing a program to search out misbegotten statistical flukes (each one of which Republicans ponder super-seriously). He also wrote other programs to assist students along their way.

He graduated Harvard in 2016 but was not interested in pursuing a career in law (which is a shame because I may need a good lawyer before the current Administration, known colloquially as the 4th Reich, comes ignominiously to a grinding halt, just maybe around Christmas!). But I can't really blame Tyler; I mean if there are two things the world is awash in, it's lawyers and people who write calculus books.

Tyler, by the way, pronounces his last name “VEE-Gun,” just like that cult of San Francisco hippies who, unlike the rest of incorrigible human riff-raff, actually takes ethics seriously. Tyler got married earlier this year and now lives and works in Chicago as a management consultant for Boston Consulting Group, where, if you can believe this, John Legend, Mitt Romney, and Bibi Netanyahu all previously worked (probably Carl Yastrzemski too, but I haven't verified that). There, Tyler makes use of his programming skills, and, I assume if Government contracts are involved, is eligible to become a whistleblower.

Tyler seems to have been inactive on Twitter for about a year, but he does have a Facebook page where Mark Zuckerberg violates his rights each-and-every day while stealing his identity to put up for sale on the Dark Web, right alongside Jared Kushner's (no, I’m kidding of course, Mark would never do that... but Jack Dorsey, not so sure).

I hope that while he was at Harvard, Tyler taught those lawyers-to-be some statistics — we need more lawyers who understand statistics… heck, we need more mathematicians... and, more 12th graders for that matter... who understand statistics, if America is to be saved!

That's about all my crack investigative team could dig up on Tyler, but we wish him well in all future endeavors, and caution him to moderate his margarine consumption. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm in the middle of exploring any budding correlation between presidents committing treason and impeachment... and I don't mean spurious.

—————————————

Check out all the prior math profiles here: 

Matt 

Evelyn 

David 

Sean

Cathy

Al

Tadashi

Holly

Erik

Danica

Marcus

Ben

Ben Orlin…. Mathtoonist!

Ben Orlin has a new book coming out soon (October). I’ve already interviewed him twice here, and mentioned him ~1729 other times as well, so didn't feel I could justify a third interview and let him pull that far ahead of others (I mean I didn't get to interview Grothendieck even once!), so instead I’ll offer up a brief “profile” of Dr. Ben… America’s math-Cartoonist-In-Chief.

First off, ya know how when you hear someone's voice on the radio for awhile you develop a picture in your mind of what they look like — and then when you finally see them, they are utterly different from what you expected!  Well, that was sort of me and Ben. From reading his blog regularly I formed a very clear picture early on of this Orlin guy in my head:

  48 years old, about 5’11,” receding dark-grey/light-black hairline, 165 lbs, trim athletic build,    conservatively-dressed, golfer, married with 3 children and a collie or labrador retriever.

…And then I finally saw video of Dr. Orlin… or else some impostor making off with his speaking fees, and my image shattered: 

Nobody who looks this young should have any right to be so brilliant… and funny… and perceptive. After-all, some of us take 65+ years to attain one troy ounce of such wisdom. And surely, his wife must disdain him… I mean when she is 60 years old and looking 39, he will probably be 63 and looking 29… such is life, unfair and illogical! …But, I digress.

Anyway, Ben’s new book is sure to be another boring, wordy, eye-rolling, gobbledy-gook volume of… er, no, wait, that’s Bill O’Reilly’s next piece of ghostwritten crapola… Ben’s book will be a delicious cornucopia of the current math topic du jour, calculus (which was allowed to leap ahead of Bayesian probability this year). Steve Strogatz has already given us a lush history and overview of calculus, and now I expect Dr. Orlin will flesh out some of the nuts-and-bolts in a way that only he and his li’l round-faced amigos can do. Calculus with laughs! Who’d a-thunkit… certainly no one in my generation.

But enough about Ben’s coming attractions; a little bit of his background:

I could not find his birthdate (but I think he was raised in Boston, and he has that Red-Sox-fan sort of naive look about him). So, maybe he's a Sagittarius and maybe he ain't. In fact I couldn’t find much at all about his personal life, siblings, or upbringing. It’s as if he just showed up one day, fully-formed, plopped on planet Earth from some galaxy far, far away. Hmmm… (I don’t wanna know what happens if he ambles into a room with kryptonite). He did graduate from Yale, but I suspect many extraterrestrials may have matriculated there.

Ben has taught middle/high school math in Oakland, California, and Birmingham, in the UK (where his wife did a math postdoc), and thus knows how to speak both English and British fluently. He also briefly taught biology, psychology, English, and earth science, and for some fully explicable reason has yet to be assigned to teach Drawing 101… a near-Renaissance Man in the age of emojis. He admits to being very 'liberal artsy,' while his wife is more the specialist or purer mathematician. I can imagine that while his wife is in the living room solving some equation in fluid dynamics, Ben is in his man-cave figuring out how to deftly capture just the right combination of surprise and smirk on one of his hand-scrawled faces.

He has said that his “academic interests run a mile wide and three feet deep” which is probably part of what makes his work so fun and fascinating, and somewhat unpredictable… I’m trying to arrange with the Dept. of Education to have Ben cloned (because no child should have to grow up, like me, without a Ben Orlin to teach them math), but thus far Betsy DeVos has not returned my phone calls... the fact that I sign my emails to her, "The Resistance" may not help.

For now Ben is taking up residence in Minnesota (and teaching), so please everyone, send him blankets, ear muffs, and hot cocoa; I’m not sure that he knows what he’s in for.

Ben has freelanced various venues along the way and started his now must-read blog “Math With Bad Drawings” in 2013 -- my original 2015 interview with him is here:

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2015/02/ben-orlin-math-bloggings-bill-watterson.html

He says he always has “a folder of half-baked ideas-in-progress” from which he seems to draw a never-ending supply of fresh, fully-baked material — it’s almost like a magician who just keeps pulling rabbits out of a hat, one after another… except it’s not always a rabbit, but may be a raccoon, possum, chihuahua, or lemur.

Of course today Ben is rich and famous… or at least readily-employable and better known than he was a few years back. In fact, I bet he can barely walk the street (...immediately outside of the Museum of Mathematics in New York city) without being stopped by autograph hounds and fans wanting to take selfies. Being able to pass as Paul McCartney’s grandson probably doesn't hurt his math rock-star status either.

I could not find a single picture of Ben ever wearing a tie (further earning my immediate, deep, and abiding respect!)… I used to have a line on my resume, that stated my “Life’s Goal” was: “To make a decent living without ever wearing a tie” — indeed, just about the only life goal I actually accomplished.

Here was my overview of his fantastic first book, “Math With Bad Drawings,” which, against stiff competition, became my math book-of-the-year for 2018:

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2018/10/good-math-bad-drawings-great-book.html
We're all anxiously awaiting the big-screen movie version, starring James Grime.

And gee, it’s possible his new book, “Change Is the Only Constant,” could end up as my 2019 book-of-the-year, an unheard of back-to-back two-fer, at which point I think Ben can retire to a life of doodling and let his wife support him henceforth.

A couple months ago Ben wrote about the new book… AND another small volume that he co-authored with his wife ;))

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2019/06/26/change-is-the-only-constant/

Yes, Ben had a new daughter (first child) just a couple of months back. By now no doubt in her spare moments she is exploring the Riemann zeta function while learning to say first words like “derivative” and "epsilon."

Jim Propp also has a daughter (whose name, by the way, is NOT Kurt) who will probably be getting her PhD. at MIT at just about the same time that Ben’s daughter is applying for admission either to there, or alternatively (if she’s reeeeally bright) to Pomona College (assuming no earthquake has sent California into the Pacific Ocean by then). But I digress… again.

You can find Ben on Twitter (where he often posts material additional to what ends up on his blog):  https://twitter.com/benorlin
He also has a Facebook page, but I refuse to link to FB pages until Mark Zuckerberg fires himself and apologizes to the world-at-large.

You must of course buy Ben's upcoming book (and all future books), subscribe to his blog, and if you ever have the opportunity to see him speak, take it. Other than that just ignore the guy. As funny as he is, he's not as funny as Ben Stiller:

—————————————

Prior math profiles have been of: 

Matt 

Evelyn 

David 

Sean

Cathy

Al

Tadashi

Holly

Erik

Danica

Marcus

Marcus du Sautoy… in brief

Math-Frolic profile #11 is upon us... Marcus du Sautoy is one of the best known, most prolific math popularizers out there. I’m especially drawn to him because, he’s even more follicularly-challenged than I am, despite being young enough to be my baby brother. He’s so well-known in fact that there’s really no reason to profile him… but that hasn't stopped me before, so, in brief, here goes:

Marcus was born in 1965 the same year (as he may or may not wish divulged) as Piers Morgan, and also the same year I bought perhaps my favorite Beatles album, “Rubber Soul” (…which thank God didn’t have “Hey Jude” on it — the most over-rated pop song in galactic history, and if you think otherwise then we better never meet in a dark alley… but, I digress).

I don’t know what kind of name “Du Sautoy” is, by the way, but it sure is hard to rhyme anything with it. Even Ancestry.com doesn't seem to know a lot about it; perhaps it is of Martian origin.

Speaking of which, I’m pretty convinced that Marcus’s dad was Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame (…don’t ask me how I figure these things out; but ya know I didn’t go to kindergarten for nuthin’):

I couldn’t find much on Du Sautoy’s childhood or teenage years or past lives nor his FICO score, but he did attend Wadham College, Oxford (probably because the daily commute to California's Pomona College from London would’ve been ghastly), where he received a PhD. in mathematics in 1991. He continues to teach at Oxford… when he’s not involved with one of his 1501 other activities/projects.

He famously took over Richard Dawkins’ position as the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science:

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

Hmmmm... "Public Understanding of Science"... in America at least, that would be a bit of an oxymoron. Nonetheless, me thinkest Marcus is a very topnotch science communicator... and we urgently need more of those types in the U.S. to assist Ben Orlin in his ongoing, uphill endeavor. So Marcus, please Brexit Britain for the U.S., AND, as a bonus you'll get to learn how real football is played! If you'd bring John Cleese along with you I'd be especially grateful.

Like Dawkins, Marcus labels himself an atheist, though in the past he has quipped that his religion is Arsenal, which I worry may categorize him, by some, as an arsonist.

Du Sautoy notes that he is an admirer of the creative, romantic French mathematician Evariste Galois (whose name is also difficult to rhyme), though I suspect not so much an admirer of the lad's paltry dueling prowess.

Despite Sophie Carr recently being crowned The Internet’s Most Entertaining Mathematician for 2019, it’s possible that off the Web Du Sautoy holds that title with his many books, lectures, appearances, programs. In any event if Marcus ever challenges Sophie to a duel I’m not sure, without doing some Bayesian analysis, who I’d put my money on.

Marcus has written several popular books, the latest one being on AI:

“The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think” 

Others include:

“Finding Moonshine”

“Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature”

“The Num8er My5teries: A Mathematical Odyssey Through Everyday Life” 

“What We Cannot Know”

“The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science”

and perhaps his most popular volume, “The Music of the Primes,” one of a mini-flurry of fascinating general audience accounts of the Riemann Hypothesis to come out in recent times. I think that IF they turned this volume into a theatre-release movie entitled, “The Music of the Primes of Miss Jean Brodie” (starring Matt Parker and Hannah Fry) it would be a guaranteed smash success.... why does no one ever follow up on my brilliant ideas?

Marcus plays the trumpet (Aha! "Bugle Boy du Sautoy") and likes what they euphemistically call 'football' in Europe (ya know, kicking a ball around for 11 hours hoping perchance it may fly into a net at some random point).
In fact, one webpage reports that Marcus has a cat named ‘Freddie Ljungberg’ — being American I had to look that reference up since I didn’t have a clue; and then I was disappointed, especially upon learning that Freddie had been a model for Calvin Klein underwear… ewww.  Personally, I prefer engineer Saramoira Shields’ names for her cats, “Parsec” and “Ligo.” Or how about “Archimedes,” yeah that’s a fine mathematician's name for a feline… but, well, to each their own.

Du Sautoy says in one interview that he “fell in love with mathematics about the same time as I started learning the trumpet. Since then, I've always been convinced that mathematics and music share much in common.” I totally agree with that (…so long as one doesn’t count “Hey Jude” as music).

Marcus has won many prizes, awards, honors over the years… too many to mention, so we’ll just say he seems to be a splendidly fine chap all-in-all and leave it at that. He writes for many different venues, has appeared on a slew of BBC series and specials about math and science, and collaborated on various artistic projects, as well. If you want to see him in action, and have a few months of free time, you’re welcome to binge-watch some of these videos:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=marcus+du+sautoy

In short, I don’t know how he does it all; at his age I was still trying to figure out how the metric system worked, which, like the rest of America, I gave up on. But he just keeps going and going, like the Energizer Bunny; writing, speaking, doing, mathematizing, with occasional loo breaks (see, I can speak British when I choose to).

Marcus is on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/MarcusduSautoy

And he even has a Facebook page, but by now I assume Mark Zuckerberg and all Facebook pages are under the stringent control of Vladimir Putin, so I'll refuse to link to it. (Take THAT Vlad!, you rascally Rooski) You may do so at your own peril though.

If you wish to know still more about Marcus du Sautoy simply Google or DuckGoGo his name and plenty additional will come up… just try not to get confused and link by accident, to Marquis de Sade; that could prove embarrassing (…don’t ask me how I know that).

(p.s.… the amazing thing is that I actually finally got completely through one of these math profiles without making even a single ill reference to our very own sh*t-for-brains President.)

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Prior math profiles have been of: 

Matt 

Evelyn 

David 

Sean

Cathy

Al

Tadashi

Holly

Erik

Danica