Nick Higham: Making Notes in the Margin

I am a mathematician, but also a writer – I spend as much time writing as doing mathematics. In fact, much of the time I am doing both at the same time, writing research papers, books, reviews, or lecture notes and exams.

Humble Pi by Matt Parker, which is about how errors people make in mathematics and computation can affect daily life. I knew some of the stories, and have mentioned them in one of my own books, but there are many here that were unfamiliar to me. Parker has done a superb job of making this material understandable and entertaining for a general audience.

My strongest memory is of taking part in a summer reading contest at my local library when I was around 10. Small prizes were awarded based on how many books you read. I remember reading series such as Biggles and Just William, as well some detective series whose names I’ve forgotten.

I won’t choose a science book, but rather a book on writing, because being able to express yourself well in writing is such a vital skill and one that scientists receive little training in. Of many excellent books on writing, I will pick out Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark, as it is broken into short, easily digested chapters and is full of excellent advice. Moreover, it has an index – something that is all too lacking in many nonfiction books.

I’m fortunate never to have had a job I didn’t like.

Yes. And I appreciate the way that modern technology allows me to download content and read it anywhere.

I’d advise someone considering a career in mathematics to look at The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics (2015) and The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008). Both contain accessible articles by leading experts on a wide variety of topics and can help the reader to decide what areas of mathematics they would like to specialize in.

A dictionary! I have lots of dictionaries and refer to them regularly, usually to make sure I am using a word in the right way, to check US versus British spelling (my publishers are in the USA), or to check etymology (most recently for the confusing word quintillion). As I browse, something interesting always pops up, especially in those dictionaries that contain encyclopedic entries. A recent acquisition is The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (fifth edition, 2018), which is ridiculously big and heavy. It has illustrations down the side of each page and the entry words are in blue: quirky but enticing.

In the past, I have enjoyed reading comic novels related to university life (a genre knows as campus novels), notably those by David Lodge (starting with his Changing Places (1975)) but nowadays it’s hard for me to find the time to read novels.

Donald Knuth, who is arguably the world’s leading computer scientist. His The Art of Computer Programming series of books, which he started in the 1960s and is still working on, has been hugely influential. The books are about algorithms and their mathematical analysis and efficient implementation. Among many other achievements, Knuth developed TeX, which is a freely available system for typesetting mathematics used by scientists of all ages all around the world. It is now possible to run TeX in a browser using Overleaf.

No. Digital books became popular once e-book readers were readily available, but real books have made a comeback. Nothing beats being able to hold a book in your hand, turn the pages, make notes in the margin, flip between two pages, and instantly see where you are in the book. This is brilliantly explained in The Revenge of Analog by David Sax.

The book Matrix Computations by Golub and Van Loan was published at the time I was an MSc student. It was the first modern, graduate-level treatment of the whole subject and was beautifully written and original. It was partly responsible for me changing my research topic from differential equations to matrix computations. I talk about it in more detail on my website.

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges is my favorite biography. It’s superbly researched and a thrilling read. It was published before Turing became widely known to the general public. One reviewer described it as “one of the finest pieces of scholarship to appear in the history of computing”.

I’ve enjoyed excellent writing on cycling, such as Off to the Races: 25 Years of Cycling Journalism by Samuel Abt and The Cycling Anthology series edited by Ellis Bacon and Lionel Birnie, and on gardening, notably The Ivington Diaries by Monty Don.