Communicating mathematics in Europe

Abstract

This article is the second in a series on the communication of mathematics in Europe. In this second instalment Andrea Capozucca visits with Alex Bellos. Some of the topics covered in the interview with Bellos are how to use storytelling for an effective communication, what maths stories are worth telling, the importance of the new mass-media in maths communication, past, present and future projects, the importance of having a proper language for every audience and much more. The result is a journey into the world of maths communication, seen through the eyes of one of the most brilliant and interesting maths communicator all around the world.

Appendices

Appendix 1. Who is Alex Bellos

Alex Bellos was born in Oxford in 1969. He spent his first 12 years in Edinburgh, before moving to Southampton with his family. In 1987 he returned to Oxford to study mathematics and philosophy at the Corpus Christi College. During his university years he was editor and director of the independent student newspaper Cherwell. As a graduate, he began working as an apprentice journalist at Brighton Evening Argus. Finally, he moved to London where he started working in the newsroom of The Guardian.

For 5 years, starting in 1998, he was the correspondent in South America based in Rio de Janeiro. During his stay in Brazil, in 2002, he wrote his first book, entitled Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, which was voted the book of the year by the British Book Award and was included among the books of the year by Publishers Weekly. The book was the result of a profound research that led the author to travel far and wide in Brazil and then to the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic Ocean. In 2014, the book was updated with the addition of an extra chapter on the occasion of the FIFA World Cup. Bellos is also co-author of Pelé: The Autobiography, which topped the sales charts in the UK.

In 2003 he began appearing on TV and other media hosting the TV series Inside Out Brazil produced by the BBC. In 2006 he authored the documentary Et Dieu créa… le foot about football in Amazonia, for the National Geographic Channel. In the following years he was author and guest of radio documentaries on mathematics and science in general for BBC Radio 4. Since 2011 he has been a member of the team of the Numberphile project, a YouTube channel with videos on numbers and everything about them, about mathematics and its applications.

Also in 2003 he returned to London and began writing about mathematics. In 2010 he published Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, which remained for 4 weeks in the Sunday Times top ten (Figs. 6, 7). The book was short-listed for no fewer than three UK literary awards, including the prestigious BBC Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. In the same year, in the United States, under the title Here’s Looking at Euclid, it won the Amazon.com prize in the Science category. Translated into more than twenty languages, in 2012 the Italian edition, titled Il meraviglioso mondo dei numeri, won the Premio Galileo for scientific books and the Premio Peano for popular mathematics books.

Fig. 6

A book launch in Brazil for Alex’s Adventures in Numberland

Fig. 7

A prize ceremony (best non-fiction book at the British book awards for Alex’s Adventures in Numberland)

Bellos’s interests then moved towards the links between mathematics and civilization, examining how maths helps us give meaning to the world, and how numbers affect our actions. In 2014 he published Alex Through the Looking Glass, which, like Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, became a best-seller, receiving positive reviews from major newspapers including the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times. Its American title is The Grapes of Math.

His most recent books are Can You Solve My Problems? (2016), a compendium of almost 200 logical-mathematical puzzles with a historical-biographical background, and a book for kids using football to explain everything from mathematics to zoology, from English to fashion, titled Football School (2017), co-authored with Ben Lyttleton. He is also the author of two mathematical colouring books, Snowflake, Seashell, Star (2015) and Visions of Numberland (2017), in collaboration with Edmund Harriss.

Finally, since 2012, he maintains the mathematical blog Alex’s Adventures in Numberland for The Guardian, which in 2016 has been chosen as the best science blog by the Association of British Science Writers. For the same newspaper, he is in charge of the puzzle blog Can You Solve My Problems?; a selection of the best puzzles from those collected in the book of the same title.

Appendix 2. What is storytelling?

Storytelling is an art and a tool for portraying real or fictional events through words, images or sounds. It is a natural tool through which effective communication takes place: it involves content, emotions, intentions and contexts. Luisa Carrada argues that stories are the only thing that since the dim and distant past can unify information, knowledge, wisdom, emotions, care of themselves and others. And, quoting Ursula K. Le Guin, “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories”. Storytelling, then, has always existed informally. It belongs to fiction, popular tradition, classical literature and culture that sees man as the protagonist of a process that transmits values. Storytelling has now become a scientific and systemic discipline that is indispensable for anyone who wants to communicate to an audience. It is a new communication paradigm.

But communicating using storytelling does not just mean telling a story or knowing how to entertain the audience. Nowadays storytelling is the science of narrative applied to marketing, politics, sociology and even medicine. And, as a “science”, it has some shared rules that every storyteller must respect:

• give the story a narrative sequence that might not reflect the chronological occurrence of the real facts, nor the contingency of cause-effect relationships;

• inspire the reader/listener’s trust;

• develop the story emotionally using conflicts, solutions, tensions, mystery, curiosity, and so on;

• create a special relationship with the reader/listener allowing them to identify with the story;

• take care of the interweaving between the various parts of the narration and its entirety;

• remove anything that is unnecessary or is superfluous to narrative (minor events and characters, incidental mentions, etc.);

• highlight details that in reality may appear less significant;

• leave room for the reader/listener to apply his own moral to the story;

• put the readers/listeners in the best condition to fully immerse themselves in the story and to live through the experiences narrated in the first person;

• make sure the story is plausible;

• remember that the reader/listener evaluates the new stories by comparing them with the ones they already know.

However, storytelling is more than just respecting these rules. Behind the creation of a story there is an in-depth research work, the commitment of highly trained people who know the codes of communication and master the principles of rhetoric and narratology.