Marcus Du Sautoy: Sidelining arts in the national curriculum is impacting a generation of scientists

Marcus du Sautoy is a mathematician, writer, broadcaster, and Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. He’s known for making abstract ideas feel graspable – from symmetry to infinity – and for exploring the often-overlooked relationship between numbers and meaning. 

In this conversation with The Skylark, Du Sautoy makes a compelling case for mathematics as a creative language; not cold or mechanical, but aesthetic, emotional, and alive in the world around us. He speaks about prime numbers in music, fractals in Pollock, and the silent geometry of nature. More than anything, he argues for an education system – and a culture – that stops forcing a choice between logic and imagination.

When I went up to secondary school, I fell in love with science. It felt like this amazing new way of describing the world. Doing experiments in the lab, discovering how things work. At the same time, I was learning the trumpet, I was doing theatre, and I really enjoyed those creative outlets too. I found it incredibly frustrating that the education system seemed to demand a choice between the two.

But I was lucky. I had a maths teacher at my comprehensive school who changed everything. He started to show me what maths was really about. Not just equations and rules, but something much deeper. He showed me the aesthetic side, the creativity, the storytelling. There are good stories in maths. And maths, of course, is the language of science; a powerful way of telling scientific stories. I realised it could be the bridge between those two parts of myself: the creative, artistic side and the desire to be part of the scientific community.

Over the years, I’ve kept a big connection to the arts. What I’ve discovered is that time and again, artists are interested in structures that I recognise as mathematical. In music, in architecture, in visual arts, even in literature. And that made me realise, it’s not just that maths is creative, it’s that it's often the structure underpinning creative work. That led to Blueprints, a book about breaking down the idea that maths is cold and logical and unemotional, and that the arts are all about feeling and ambiguity. I wanted to bring those subjects closer together.

Because actually, maths is deeply emotional. It’s about engaging the reader, taking them on a journey. And art, in its own way, is often about order and structure. Many of the artists I spoke to told me their work doesn’t start with emotion, it starts with a structure they want to explore. The emotion emerges from that. Audiences encounter the emotional impact, but the artists themselves speak more like mathematicians. And I wanted to write that down, not just to challenge assumptions about maths, but to show that people don’t really understand how artists work either. Artists sometimes enjoy covering their tracks, making it look like magic. But there’s deep structure underneath it all.

In Blueprints, each mathematical structure starts with an artist who has used it in some way. For prime numbers, I chose Olivier Messiaen, a French composer who wrote one of the most iconic pieces of the 20th century: Quartet for the End of Time. He composed it while he was a prisoner of war, using just a clarinet, violin, cello and piano. The clarinet and violin pass bird motifs between them, but then the piano comes in with this extraordinary repetitive structure.

There’s a 17-note rhythm – 17 being a prime number – and that rhythm just repeats. It’s a kind of syncopated rhythm. At the same time, there’s a sequence of 29 chords – again, a prime number – which also repeats. But the rhythms and the harmonies are never in sync. Every time the harmonic sequence plays, it lands on a different part of the rhythm. You never hear the same combination twice, not until 17 x 29 has passed – and by that time, the piece is over. It’s a musical system that keeps everything slightly off balance. And it fits with the title, Quartet for the End of Time, because time depends on repetition. Here, you’ve got something that’s repeating, but never aligning. It’s an illusion of time, not its presence.

Messiaen was a musician who had no formal mathematical training, but he was instinctively drawn to these patterns. I spoke to George Benjamin, the composer, who worked with him, and he said Messiaen discovered the power of prime numbers without ever studying them formally.

Then you’ve got people like Salvador Dalí, who did seek out mathematical ideas. He explored four-dimensional geometry, infinities, and wove them into his paintings. Or Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote about these infinite libraries and recursive patterns in fiction. But Pollco, like Messiaen, worked more instinctively.

People often say, “Well, anyone can make a Pollock. Just throw paint at a canvas.” But his work isn’t random. It’s chaotic. And there’s a big difference. Chaos is about systems that are sensitive to initial conditions. The geometry of chaos is the fractal, structures with infinite complexity, where zooming in never leads to simplification.

If you zoom into a Pollock, there’s no fixed sense of scale. You don’t know if you’re close or far. Whether you’re looking at a branch or a twig. It’s scaleless geometry. That’s part of what makes them so immersive. You almost fall into them.

Pollock didn’t know about fractals. But he used a chaotic dynamic system. He painted by moving his whole body, not just flicking from the wrist. His shoulder, his arm, his elbow all moving at once. That’s how you generate the kind of pattern we now know as a chaotic pendulum.

His studio was in the countryside, surrounded by trees. When I visited in winter, the leaves were gone, and the bare branches revealed their structure. Trees are fractal: the trunk splits into branches, the branches into smaller branches, twigs, finer twigs. I think Pollock was responding to those natural forms, abstractly expressing his engagement with the natural world. The same is true in maths. Any of the structures I explore originate in our attempts to understand nature. I think the arts are doing something very similar.

Even prime numbers appear in the wild. There’s a cicada in North America with a 17-year life cycle. It lives underground for 17 years, emerges, mates, lays eggs, and dies. Why 17? Maybe it keeps it out of sync with predators. If it used a composite number like 16, it would be more likely to align with predator cycles. But a prime number avoids those overlaps. There’s even a theory that cicadas with non-prime life cycles were eaten to extinction. It’s the same principle as Messiaen’s rhythm – the cicada is the rhythm, the predator is the harmony, and the two never align.

Art, mathematics, and nature; they can exist independently, but they’re far more powerful together. And it’s not a one-way relationship. Artists don’t just take from science; sometimes they discover things first. Those Indian poets and musicians who used Fibonacci rhythms in their compositions found the pattern long before it was named in Europe.

People often think they’re “not good at maths.” But maths is a language. We tend to teach it as a process, not a way of understanding. Just because someone doesn’t speak the language fluently doesn’t mean they can’t feel its beauty. Art is similar. Sometimes you look at a painting or hear a piece of music, and it makes you feel something, even if you don’t know why. Often, that’s because it reflects a structure we recognise from nature.

So why is any of this important?

Because we’re shortchanging young people. We silo subjects at school and don’t give students a real sense of how maths operates in the wider world. You might not understand the full mechanics of a fractal, but you can grasp the idea, just as you might not understand every line of Shakespeare but still feel its impact.

In English, we have both language and literature. We should do the same with maths. One course focusing on utility – managing money, passing exams, and such. But the other could explore the ideas that give the subject its power: infinity, symmetry, logic, geometry, narrative. Let’s show students where maths lives in art, in music, in nature.

I work with Central Saint Martins, and the course that sells out fastest is Maths for Artists. By that stage, the students are all saying, “Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?” They see how maths supports their practice and how it enhances what they make.

And it's not just about helping artists. Some of the best scientists I know play musical instruments, write poetry, throw clay. We made a mistake sidelining practical arts in the national curriculum. Without them, we’re missing out on a whole generation of scientists who aren’t developing their creative side, who therefore won’t be as creative in their science.

So that’s why I keep telling these stories. Because they’re not just about maths, they’re about how we see, how we think, and how we make sense of the world.

This conversation took place at the Hay Festival on 26 May 2025 and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Blueprints: How Structures Shape the World is out now in paperback, hardback, ebook, and audiobook from Fourth Estate.

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The decline of arts in UK education is measurable

Entries for arts GCSEs in England have fallen by 40% since 2010. Design & technology, once a core subject for practical, creative thinking, has seen a 70% drop in uptake. Experts warn this narrowing of the curriculum risks stifling the very skills, like curiosity, synthesis, abstraction, that future innovation depends on.

(Sources: Cultural Learning Alliance; Department for Education)

STEM needs the arts to thrive

Studies show students who engage in both arts and science perform better across subjects and are more likely to enter high-growth careers. The British Academy has called for an education system that integrates “STEAM”, science, tech, engineering, arts and maths, not just STEM, to reflect how real-world problem-solving works.

(Sources: British Academy, Nesta)

Maths anxiety affects 1 in 10 adults in the UK

Research from the National Numeracy charity shows that around 49% of UK adults have the numeracy level expected of a primary school child. Maths anxiety, often caused by rigid, test-focused teaching, undermines confidence and career prospects, especially for young people. Teaching maths as a creative language, as du Sautoy argues, could transform that.

(Sources: National Numeracy; University of Cambridge Faculty of Education)

UNESCO calls for curriculum reform worldwide

In its Futures of Education report (2021), UNESCO urges countries to move away from rigid subject divisions and encourage integrative thinking, creativity and systems literacy. Education, it argues, must “empower learners to address complex challenges” like inequality, ecological collapse and technological disruption.(Source: UNESCO Futures of Education report)