Alex Bellos, mathematician
After two years researching and writing it, my book on maths – ‘Alex’s Adventures in Numberland
The research involved me travelling around the world interviewing people whose lives link to numbers in some way: Japan, India, the US, and many other places too.
But in one case the interviewee came to me: Wayne Gould, the New Zealander who introduced Sudoku to the UK.
Gould has a daughter who has a flat locally, and during one of his visits was we went and had coffee together.
He is a lovely, modest man who appeared quite bewildered that he had become richer and more famous in retirement than he ever was during his career as a judge in Hong Kong. (He calls himself the Stepfather of Sudoku, since it was invented before him but he made it into the international craze it became).
In 2005 Gould was named by Time magazine as one of the people who most shaped the world that year.
And he is probably the only one of that illustrious group who ever has had coffee in the Salusbury deli. I can’t ever remember seeing Bill Gates or George Clooney in there… Yet.
PS: Here’s an interesting way to do multiplication.
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The perfect Father’s Day present, no?