Alan and Marcus Go Forth and Multiply: A Review

Now any one familiar with the TV series Jonathan Creek would know who Alan Davies is. It goes without saying that he is also the regular guest of the quiz show QI hosted by Stephen Fry. Delightfully witty and charming, his is altogether a lively presence on TV- a graceful actor with a humorous demeanor.

Describing Marcus Du Sautoy can be a little difficult- his accomplishments are so many. He is one of the foremost mathematicians in the world, a vibrant presence on TV in documentaries on mathematics and a member of the Royal Society. However, to fans of science education he is mostly known as the successor of Richard Dawkins as the Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford.

This unlikely duo are the main characters of the BBC Horizon episode “Alan and Marcus go forth and multiply”. The Biblical double entendre notwithstanding, this is a story of mathematics and how it surrounds every bits of our lives.

The story begins with what the duo have in common- a passion for the Arsenal (that's an English soccer team). We hear how Alan had always been rubbish at math while Marcus had been a precocious learner. The Professor and the actor meet at the Arsenal station -presumably a Tube station, and head off to their Great Mathematical Adventure.

First stop, Alan's school where Marcus tries to find out the extent of Alan's math literacy. We see Alan struggle through Venn diagrams and multiplications until he gets hopelessly lost. Marcus decides that it is time to show him the true nature of Math- not school level algebra but the language of the universe. He's going to show Alan the fundamental aspect of what Math is all about.

Marcus begins with (what else?) football. When he describes footballers as mathematical geniuses who can work out quadratic equations in their head in milliseconds, even yours truly had to do a double take. Footballers = good mathematicians? Give me a break!

Soon we move onto the odds of win and lose- and betting! Alan gets schooled in a crash course in probability in a game called the Monty Hall game. Folks, I am not going to describe it to you. Unless you see it, you would begin to understand the hilarity of the whole situation. I am still in stitches . The whole thing can be summed up in the words of Alan: “My common sense made me lose and Math made Marcus win.”

Have you ever seen a four dimensional object? We see our dynamic duo head to Paris in search of the fourth dimension. They come across Le Grande Arche, an architectural representation of a four dimensional cube. Now I don't know about you but watching the building as well as CGI representation of what a cube would look like in four dimensions left me rather gob smacked. I have been trying to imagine it since eleventh grade and here it was in all its symmetrical beauty. 

When I go to Paris, my first priority is not a certain tower or the Left bank or Arc De Triumph or nay other tourist hot spot. I want to see this with my own eyes!

Alan sums it up for us: 4D snails, they could conquer the world!

Alan takes a trip to Marcus' office in Oxford and feels rather intimidated by all the complicated symbols used in advanced math. He begins to doubt if he could ever learn math. Marcus disagrees, he feels that anyone could learn it. They both undergo neurological exams to test the hypothesis. We see the brain activities of both of them as they tackle increasingly difficult problems.

Marcus then takes Alan to the areas where he is mostly passionate about: proofs and prime numbers. He shows Euclid's method of proving the existence of infinite primes using pebbles on the sea shore. They go to the National Physical Lab only to find out that natural phenomenon is related to the distribution of prime numbers. From sound wave distributions, to quantum energy levels in atoms to bus schedules in Mexico to parked cars in London-all of them are connected to the Riemann prime distribution.

Then we are given a crash course in the Millennium Problems- the seven problems, each of whose solutions would earn the solver a million dollars. Marcus spends some time explaining what the shape of the universe is. It's a four dimensional donut shape.

I simply cannot recommend this program enough. The passion of Marcus combining with the child like innocence of Alan makes this an exciting learning experience. But that is not the most important question that Alan has in the end.

If light leaves the earth, travels all around the finite universe and then comes back that poses an interesting problem. If we are looking at the night sky, can we see our past selves?