You have a choice. There’s the long way: boring, repetitive, hard work. Or the shortcut: a cunning, less intuitive path to your goal. In this talk, Marcus is going to be giving you the map to the fantastic shortcuts that mathematics has come up with over the last two thousand years to get to you to your destination in the most efficient and fastest manner. Shortcuts have enabled so much of human progress, whether in constructing the first cities around the Euphrates 5,000 years ago, using calculus to determine the scale of the universe or in writing today’s algorithms that help us find a new life partner. Based on my new book, Thinking Better is a celebration of mathematics as the art of the shortcut.

Marcus du Sautoy is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He is author of seven books including his most recent book Thinking Better: the Art of the Shortcut. He has also published a play I is a Strange Loop which was performed at the Barbican in London in which he was also lead actor. He has presented numerous radio and TV series including a four part landmark TV series for the BBC called The Story of Maths. He works extensively with a range of arts organisations bringing science alive for the public from The Royal Opera House to the Glastonbury Festival. He received an OBE for services to science in the 2010 New Year’s Honours List and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016.