Quote of the day

"I don't want to preach to the converted, I want to capture the people who say they hate maths. I see people like that as a challenge. Once you show them it's not a load of boring multiplication and long division, you can say it has beauty and aesthetics and excitement and drama and emotion. Those are things I think might turn people on".

Grand claims indeed from mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, who's taken over from Richard Dawkins as Oxford University's Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.

Quite how you can sex up maths is beyond me (though I suppose that makes me one of Du Sautoy's target audience) but, all the same, he's probably right in saying that his personal crusade will be rather less controversial than Dawkins's...