Alex Bellos

Alex Bellos, author of Alex's Adventures in Numberland, describes his quest to bring mathematics to the people by any means possible. In a wide-ranging talk which skips from Kilburn to India, via Arizona, Bellos reveals the mathematical principles that underpin the most unexpected aspects of modern-day life. He demonstrates how sports punditry is “basically a delusion” by recounting his meticulous daily experiments with bread-weighing, reveals the relationship between the work of Pythagoras and Puff Daddy’s identity crisis, and illustrates how a numerically-defined ‘golden ratio’ forms the basis for contemporary conceptions of beauty.