Marcus du Sautoy

I think science is a foreign land for many people, so I think of my role as an ambassador's job.

The best mobile phone had the best mathematician. They know how to fit a huge amount of data into a small amount of space. How to do things efficiently, how to do them cleverly.

Mathematics has beauty and romance. It's not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It's an extraordinary place; it's worth spending time there.

Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can't do in the real world.

The reason why we do maths is because it's like poetry. It's about patterns, and that really turned me on. It made me feel that maths was in tune with the other things I liked doing.

Artists realise that mathematicians have a way of looking at the world that can make them see things differently.

It's my belief that you can take everyone down a logical path if you take them slowly enough, and the trouble is that mathematical brains can get scrambled a little bit on the way. You get a bad teacher, it messes you up for the rest of the journey.

I think my primary audience is in some sense an adult audience, because I think that will then have a knock-on effect for children.

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

The point is with good maths skills you have just wonderful opportunities and if you don't have good maths skills, there are just so many things that you won't be able to do.

You know, I'm not terribly fast at my times tables, because that's not what I think mathematics is about.

If I'm flying to China, I can sit and think about a problem. Other scientists have to go to the lab. I'm always thinking about maths, even when I'm doing other things. A lot of the time you're going up blind alleys and it's very frustrating, but then you have a sudden rush of ideas. You can live off that for quite some time.