India, Sept. 26 -- 1 You assert that artists and writers tap into the same structures that you recognise as a mathematician. The book is the stories of the many artists that I've either collaborated with or whose work I've enjoyed. It's surprised me so often that when they say this is really how this thing works and I'll say, but that's a bit of mathematics and they'll go, really? You think that these two worlds are almost like chalk and cheese, so opposite. Yet, often I'll talk to a composer and they will explain how their piece is put together. And I'll say, but that's using ideas of symmetry or Fibonacci numbers or golden ratio. Sometimes, even the artists are surprised because they do it for the aesthetic value of the thing. And then they're surprised when they discover that I recognise that as a piece of mathematics. The book is telling lots of stories of the way these two worlds meet. 2 Please tell us more about how Shakespeare would disrupt his iambic pentameter for effect. So, the most famous line of Shakespeare, 'To be, or not to be, that is the question' is 11 syllables. I think Shakespeare is doing this very deliberately, that iambic pentameter has a kind of almost soporific feel to it. Then, he wants to make sure that you notice this speech is the most important speech of the play. Hamlet is considering suicide and is worried about what might happen after if he kills himself. So that 11 is a disruptor to make you actually sit up and take note of what's going on. And there's a wonderful allegorical poem that Shakespeare wrote, The Phoenix and the Turtle. A lot of people have had trouble understanding the significance of it. But if you read it, you see that, again, there's a lot of prime numbers and actually even references to mathematics and Euclid. So that poem is very intriguing for almost being a celebration for Shakespeare of the power of number in poetry. 3During your research, what was that one discovery that elicited the most emotion out of you as a mathematician? I think it probably was the Shakespeare. I performed Shakespeare plays as a student but I never realised that this idea of number was so important to him. I learned it because I talked to the English tutor in my college in Oxford. He's a Shakespeare expert, Will Poole. I asked him because I'd been asked to give a talk about Shakespeare and mathematics and I knew nothing about it. For me, that was the really surprising discovery - to find somebody as literary as Shakespeare, the greatest wordsmith of all time was also a number nerd. 4What do you want non mathematicians to take away from your book? I want it to resonate with people who are nervous about mathematics but then see that, oh, but the music, the visual art or the architecture I enjoy - mathematical ideas are being used to create those. I want people to realise that mathematics isn't in a separate silo....