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Diary

Marcus du Sautoy

Wednesday, 23rd January 2008

Marcus Du Sautoy discusses vampires, maths and football

I think I actually saw a vampire today. Just next to where we were filming, this woman leant down next to a car and bore her teeth in the car’s wing mirror. Fangs! Huge fangs! Her canines were enormous and definitely very pointy. However, she almost lost all her teeth when the car suddenly reversed, the wing mirror knocking her to the ground. But as I relate my drama to my son Tomer on the phone that evening, he calmly stops me in my tracks and says it can’t have been a vampire. Rather crestfallen at his cool reception of such exciting news, I ask why not. ‘Vampires can’t look in mirrors and it was the middle of the afternoon.’ I must admit he had me there. ‘Perhaps she was some non-Euclidean sort of vampire that doesn’t obey the classical rules of vampirism,’ I replied weakly. Tomer was more impressed that we were staying the night in Cluj, home to the Cheeky Girls.

Three countries in one day is a bit much: Romania, Austria, then Germany. The bulk of the day is spent in Vienna, where we are on the search for the pre-war haunts of the 20th-century logician Kurt Gödel. Almost as dramatically as Bolyai, Gödel’s discoveries rocked mathematics to its foundations. Gödel managed to prove the deeply unsettling fact that within any logical system for mathematics there will always be statements about numbers that are true but which can’t be proved. It was a discovery that went against everything mathematicians had believed since the Ancient Greeks. Both Bolyai and Gödel went mad in later life, further fuelling the stereotype which seems to haunt mathematicians.

Gödel’s mathematics was reflected by the politically unsettling situation that surrounded him at the time. We film a sequence on the steps where Gödel was attacked by a group of Nazis, unhappy that Gödel was associating with so many Jewish academics. He was saved by his girlfriend, a dancer from a local nightclub. My director wants to film a sequence in a strip joint to illustrate how Gödel met his girlfriend but our flight to Germany leaves before any of the Viennese clubs open. I’m spared that embarrassment.

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