Crying by a graveside with a calculator in my hand

My interview with mathematician & Oxford Simonyi Professor, Marcus du Sautoy.

Jonny Thomson

and

Big Think

Feb 07, 2025

Hello everybody,

Last year, I sat by a grave and cried. I do this a lot. I regularly sit by graves and cry.

On this occasion, I didn’t know the person buried. They were dead long before I was born. This is what the inscription read:

In loving memory of a dear wife and mother, Nora Olive Cooknell, who died 5th June 1971, aged 80 years. Also her husband, Thomas, who died 4th November 1971, aged 88 years.

Reunited.

What a word to choose. Because tucked up inside that word — compressed and crammed like some infinite babushka doll — lies the collective weight of Thomas Cooknell’s grief and belief.

Now, I have no way of knowing what those five months were like for Thomas — no idea how much pain, numbness, or curious denial went into his days. But I know that Thomas chose to have "reunited" engraved on his tombstone because, for five months at the end of his life, he missed his Nora, and he believed he would see her again.

That sentiment alone would have been enough to make me cry. But on this occasion, there was something more. I cried because of the half-century separating us and the forever-gap of our emotional lives.

I can project all kinds of meaning onto that word "reunited." I can read all kinds of hidden or wrongly sentimental things into it. And that’s why I cried. The language we use and the words we engrave are a woefully insubstantial tool to express the depth of our being.

I cried not only because of Thomas’ grief and belief. I cried because he could never, ever truly tell anyone what either really meant.

Today, we explore the limits of language.

Go well,
Jonny

MINI MEDITATION

Lower-dimensional versions

You are a walking sensory device. You are a measuring stick and a barometer. In every moment, you are appraising the world and funneling it along to your narrowly focused, singular mind.

You will see and feel certain things. You might stop to look at a bud starting to flower—inadvisably early in the season. You might listen to a Spotify recommendation, wait for the traffic light to change, or count the potatoes left on your plate. You might give a breathy laugh at a joke someone told you last week or think back to that accident you had at preschool—when your mum was nowhere around to help.

Then you are left to express those things. We have to tell people what we’re doing, thinking, or feeling. And that’s when things break down. My ramble-companion this week, Marcus du Sautoy, put it like this:

"What's so fascinating is that language itself is a low-dimensional version of what is going on inside our heads. It’s already losing a lot of information. We developed language because there's no point in me showing you my synaptic activity and expecting you to understand my emotional state."

For du Sautoy, we use language because it is our only way to tell other people about the world as we experience it. But language is not limited to the English I’m writing in now or the Spanish you’ve translated it into. For du Sautoy, mathematics is one of the essential ways we make sense of reality.

"How did mathematics emerge? It emerged out of humans trying to understand the natural world around us, such that we can have a little bit of control. So, it's inevitable that if there is structure in nature, then those will be the first structures we discover as mathematicians and humans."

Du Sautoy is a self-labeled “Platonist.” He believes that there are structures—or what he calls “blueprints”—in the world, and our language is an ineffective, “lower-dimensional” attempt to understand or represent them. The reason this is interesting is that it offers a “theory of everything.” There is no maths vs. poetry, science vs. the arts, or rationality vs. creativity. Everything we do—from talking about my childhood to writing sums on paper—is an attempt to formalize the structures latticing the universe.

We are trying our desperate best to make sense of that insensible essence. We’re trying to grasp what cannot be grasped. But we’re trying our best and our hardest.

Listen to my full, unedited interview with Marcus du Sautoy:

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PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS

The Mathematics of Beauty

One of the first things that any artist will learn is the “rule of thirds.” The rule of thirds is where you divide your artwork into three, and you decide where you want people to focus it. It’s seen in photography, classic paintings, and in fashion. But the rule of thirds is just one example of formalism in the philosophy of art. Formalism is the idea that…

THE REFLECTION

An Argument About AI and Human Art

This week, we asked you about the mathematics of beauty. Can we explain beauty by formal techniques of geometry and proportions? And if we can, does that reduce the beauty in any way? Lots of great comments, but this one had me staring out the window.

“With the development of AI, many artists claim that variation will disappear. The theories of formalism that you mention, which were new to me, confirm my own suspicions that much of art is based on certain rules and not very original at all, so AI won’t make a big difference.” — Tobias Robinson, Instagram.

Here are two arguments laid out in good ol’-fashioned premises:

If you only follow formal techniques and algorithms, your art will not have variety.
AI depends on formal techniques alone to create its art.
Humans also depend on formal techniques alone to create their art.
Therefore, both AI and human artistic output will lack variety.

Now, this seems to be a valid argument (the conclusion follows the premises), but is it a sound argument (are the premises true)? Tobias thinks so. He thinks that formalism is right and that humans are no different from AI in that they, unconsciously or not, follow formal algorithms and techniques. And so, AI will be able to create as much variation and depth of art as any human can or has.

What do you think? Is Tobias right? Or are the premises wrong?