Every culture has contributed to maths just as it has contributed to literature. It's a universal language; numbers belong to everyone.

I'm inconsistent because I'm human.

We know next to nothing with any certainty about Pythagoras, except that he was not really called Pythagoras. The name by which he is known to us was probably a nickname bestowed by his followers. According to one source, it meant ‘He who spoke truth like an oracle’. Rather than entrust his mathematical and philosophical ideas to paper, Pythagoras is said to have expounded them before large crowds. The world’s most famous mathematician was also its first rhetorician.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

Every culture has contributed to maths just as it has contributed to literature. It's a universal language; numbers belong to everyone.

When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger's that year.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.