Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy /dʉˈsoʊtɔɪ/, OBE (born 26 August 1965)is the Simony i Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. Formerly a Fellow of All Souls College, and Wad-ham College, he is now a Fellow of New College. He is President of the Mathematical Association. He was previously an EPSRC Senior Media Fellow and a Royal Society University Research Fellow.
His academic work concerns mainly group theory and number theory. In October 2008, he was appointed to the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science, succeeding the inaugural holder Richard Dawkins.
Du Sautoy was born in London, grew up in Henley-on-Thames and was educated at local comprehensives Gillotts School and King James's College (VI Form, now Henley College) and Wadham College, Oxford, where he obtained first class honours in Mathematics. He went on to complete his DPhil in mathematics. He currently lives in London with his wife and three children and plays football (No 17 for Recreativo Hackney FC) and the trumpet.
In March 2006, his article Prime Numbers Get Hitched was published by the online Seed magazine. In it he explained how the number 42, mentioned in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as the answer to everything, is related to the Riemann zeta function. He has also published an article in the scientific magazine New Scientist.
In December 2006, du Sautoy delivered the 2006 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures under the collective title The Num8er My5teries. This was only the third time the subject of the lectures had been mathematics — on the first occasion in 1978, when the lecture was delivered by Erik Christopher Zeeman, du Sautoy had been a schoolboy in the audience. The venue for the 2006 Christmas Lectures was the Institution of Engineering and Technology's headquarters at Savoy Place, London.
Du Sautoy is an atheist, but has stated that as holder of the Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science his focus is going to be "very much on the science and less on religion." He has described his own religion as being "Arsenal - football," as he sees religion as wanting to belong to a community. Du Sautoy is a supporter of Common Hope, an organisation that helps people in Guatemala. He is known for his work popularising mathematics. He has been named by The Independent on Sunday as one of the UK's leading scientists. In 2001 he won the Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society, which is awarded every two years to reward the best mathematical research by a mathematician under forty. He writes for The Times and The Guardian and has appeared several times on BBC Radio 4 and on television. He presented the television programme, Mind Games, on BBC Four.
He has also written numerous academic articles and books on mathematics, the most recent being The Num8er My5teries. Du Sautoy is also on the advisory board of Mangahigh.com - an online maths game website and has appeared on Channel 4 Newsand on BBC Radio 4's Today programme promoting the service and is a regular contributor to the same network's In Our Time. He also appears on the TV series School of Hard Sums with Dara Ó Briain, where he sets three mathematical questions with a real world application, for Dara O'Briain and a guest to solve, using mathematical and experimentation methods respectively Du Sautoy was awarded the Berwick Prize in 2001 by the London Mathematical Society for the publication of outstanding mathematical research. In 2009 he won the Michael Faraday Prize from the Royal Society of London for "excellence in communicating science to UK audiences". Du Sautoy was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire(OBE) in the 2010 New Year Honours "for services to Science".In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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