They have a. Sir Michael, I wanted to thank you very much for giving up part of your birthday meeting to talk to us. And my brief is to invite you to talk about mathematics in Oxford in the seventies and eighties. But I thought the sensible thing would be to start with the sixties, because my understanding. You came here in 1961. That's right, yes. I came as a reader. I think to you on the chart that when Henry White had died, I applied for the chair, but I didn't get the chair or senior.
He moved up one, so he attempted to spot the reader. So I got the job as reader and joined the queue the next year. Right. And did you know Henry Whitehead? Yes, quite well. I used to come to Oxford seminars when I was in with the police, and then as we got quite well and the very genial chap who was he comes across in, there's a talk by either bus bridge which one can find online and she's very warm about it so yes we are is pattern in life. Cricket the pub after cricket mathematics.
Oh and he's from he had a family, he had pigs. He inherited it from his uncle in a herd of Jersey cattle. These are you keep the cat on the farm and the other farm outside Islip. And there we used to go and visit the farm every year. All the mathematics faculty funeral time, we have a cricket match. He was really keen to get it. Yeah, he was a very genial chap, you would think. A mathematician. And did you communed with the pigs to do the.
The monkey business? Well, I've got photographs of him. That would be the photograph. Henry Wakefield with the pig. You know, who are the other Oxford stars? Was Titchmarsh your brother when I was here gave you the phone? I was, but I knew what he was. Brilliant game. Hickman of Titchmarsh. Another piece of pure mathematics. They were very tested for man. He didn't say much. You know, he had difficulty getting words out of him.
He wrote beautiful book spinning. Very shy. Then there was a to a private. Charles Colson was a very extrovert. He was although you know of is he ran the show and did a lot of other things. Well, he was chairman of Oxfam. And then it was George Temple who was did quantum theory like my math level, the full feathers. I was the only one who wasn't a judge from the great great hangman was, I think, in the congregational lay preacher.
And Charles Cushman was a big brother amongst Methodists, and the temple was a Catholic. It ended up as a monk. Yes. I was the only one who did not give a particular character to the style of lecturing. Did you think was it? Well, I suppose all he's addressing a public audience. I'm. Well, they're very different personalities and they're interesting, you know, a mixture of both.
That cousin was the dominant figure. He ran it. He got the before we had Martha Stewart out of the we had a house museum road, the big old house, which has very big rooms occupied by the professors in the classrooms. And he was the one who called that before that there'd be know where mathematics typical used and then he was instrumental to get the new building and he was a very influential figure. Mm hmm. So you became a civilian professor in 1963.
Is that about the time that you moved into the new building? Um, I came in 61. I don't know, because I had my office as professor for a while. The old building I woke up, I got to the office, big old room. So it must have been just a little bit late. I mean, but I became 15 some not so probably later, maybe by the next year it was just going up.
I when I was there, there were all these discussions about the plans and we were quite lucky to get the site because, you know, you know, there's a lot of sites and long term plans and so this site and offered it to some other people was is too small for us. So we grab it. So they grabbed it very fast. And then we we got and it was designed by a Lancaster University surveyor.
And it worked very well for the size of the big for number partitions around in those days there was a the, you know, some college had math passages, but nobody had one. And the full professors, you know, you can kind of have figures of what hand how many members of the were 100 it's noticeable that well the thing that struck me when I was thinking about this interview, the buildings that you've been involved with, because it's always seemed to me the Newton Institute is such a perfect building.
Exactly. I think they credit for that, that people in Cambridge, they were the people who worked with the architect and the design. And I came in as a figurehead in some sense. But but it's a beautiful building and to be very influential. And many other buildings have copied aspects of it this way. It's designed to encourage interaction, open space and so on. And that was a very, very, very nice building. And the math building, nice, also nice buildings.
Well, I again, I was I was not involved with the committee. So you doing the planning, but that was one of the uses. Oh, well we like to fit with it in some sense. Buildings had got better, that they were better adapted to their purpose and so forth. Well I mean it needed to do I came quite late of course and that has, I think influences this building layout.
Open spaces, staircases is much bigger of course, and Angela's number is used in other parts of the world like the field in Toronto very have modelled on that and that was definitely was one way the building was built around the function that what the message of the what and they want the place where you would interact he and the architect were it was a small not very well known architect and he was very happy to accommodate the views of the now this was better known architects come
with their own views and I don't think Cambridge it is successful I have to say the Cambridge buildings I think are nothing like the other campus, although with architectural prizes but nearly so well adapted to mathematics, it doesn't. Yes, it's as though there are six separate Newton institutes.
That's right. I mean, an institute, all the spaces we see, a big lift and a staircase around it occupies half the space of the tower, and the offices are afterthought, slung around and multiplied by six terrible places, partly because they they're very much aware of we're building that Stephen Hawking was going to be there. Everything had to be laid out. So Stephen Hawking agreed.
But the need to have six stairwells, enormous side at the expense of this lovely space and all the direction space, I think I'm afraid I'm not a fan of the Cambridge building. The main cafeteria area is good. That brings people together and the layout looks nice, but otherwise you're far superior. But that by a small architect who never really got. He did a very good job later on, never actually got it, you know, he never moved up the scale in the fairly small.
So nevertheless I think he did a lot of great building. I noticed there was an earlier set of interviews that you did under the Athena Swan rubric. Yeah. And as transcribed in the first five sentences of it on the you three times make allusion to the size of the room that you've got and it's clear that you're sensitive to the environment in which you were coming. Is that. Oh, yes. I mean, I, I like a big room and I have I, I can't stand that. Small rooms, booking rooms. I like space.
And partly because I think when I walk around, I like to walk. And you've got a small office, you can't walk in the car. So I like a house. I like being gregarious. I like to have other people in to talk with and blackboard discussions. You can do that. These are quite decent sized. Mine was going to be bigger. I am. I was to do office to put together a unit and will me first build it. Put it up there for big offices for the four established chairs they are very proud of.
I had one of those and I was really impressed. I came back as well. Sorry, Professor, I had to make do with it. I was given a week. I served my students. I put to the office together, make myself a big office. Right. So you came back as society research professor in 72 or 73, 73, 73. And that's about the time I was being a graduate student. And one of the things that was very vivid in my memory is the illustrious collection of seminar speakers that you had.
So in the first year I was there, I think we had Sarah brought singer Hertzel Brook, and it did seem to me that this was one of the extremely useful things for graduate students to be able to. I mean, was it by design on your part? Well, you know, America has huge mathematical units. Everyone has a they have a university math colloquium, big event wide audiences. And when I came from Cambridge there, they had seminars. They didn't have room.
And when I came back, America, after each visit, I tried to encourage the subsequent pattern of large scale colloquium, of general interest. So we invite famous people. We have these nice big rooms down below and big good audience. We turn out to kind of cross border and make circle together. And that was deliberate. And I, you know, I invited people different times earlier on. I had people like Mark Katz and, you know, I might have felt unfriendly, could he will not come.
So we invited people were brought into this kind of a wide range of subjects and we got very good audiences as well, pretty well packed out. And I think they did influence people, students encourage them and feel part of a community. And it was a deliberate policy, of course, happened to pally with all these people. But my contacts at Princeton made it easy. But it was a deliberate effort to transport over America. The better aspects of American university system.
Mm hmm. Of course, with the Americans, in some sense, it's easier for them to travel, because all they do is they have to travel across a landmass, as it were. I mean, was how feasible was it to have all these people visiting and did you have to mortgage your house to the. Well, in the very early days when I first you know, I remember very hard getting sad to come over and having to get money to pay for is talked about and there were no research grants and so on.
And I've gone where they came from, but I got £10, which was well enough to bring in. And it was hard work to get £10 for somebody famous is that it was difficult later on got material. The Americans of course had their money to fly over and have their research council money became available. So money was easier. Early days it was it was really quite hard. And the not many people you couldn't give any people the. So Roger Penrose arrived around about the same time as here in 73.
And it's often seems to me that it was one of the great pieces of good fortune for Oxford, Mass. That you were both there at the same time. Yes. Yes. But a lot of the. Pure mathematical knowledge and technique that he was needing interest in theory. You were in a position to supply. Yes, Michael. Roger goes back to when we were graduate students. We're both graduate students in Cambridge at the same time.
Technically, I was under Hodge. After the first year, he moved across and I worked with Todd. But we knew each other from those days. Then we just, at a party went into physics and then we only met again when he came back to Oxford. I remember meeting when I was in Princeton, talking to Freeman Dyson and the whole thing talked about Roger Penrose possibly coming to Oxford and he said, Well, Roger did these things on black holes.
He knew about the funny things called twisties. I don't understand them. But here on the set, the very fact that when I came, Roger explained to me what he was doing then I shouldn't short the after. It dawned on me that what he was doing could be handled very well with all the new techniques coming out of algebraic geometry out of Paris, which I'd been studying. So we have managed to bring all that into the theory of physics.
And so it is a natural marriage between the two subjects which has flourished ever since it was happening, knowing Roger well, early few days, but it was the culmination of he's coming back just the moment when his techniques required the sort of ideas that I picked up in Princeton and elsewhere. So it was good fortune. And it was it was all of the defamation theory, the good IRA types. Yes. And but it was also old sheaf cosmology.
That's what commodity with the one I thought of Ruddy telling me he had all the calculations to do with complicated intervals and singularities, and he kept saying, Well, the only thing that counts, and it were very vague and you knew what you were doing, the computations, but he had no machinery to handle it. And I suddenly it dawned on me, I've got one day. So what he was doing was just chief commodity with Coca-Cola.
And suddenly. So I remember having three sessions in spelling Roger and students the basics of chief commodity how you apply the thing and they were very very fast learners they took it off very quickly and before I knew where it was, they were all ready to go ahead. And it was it was a good piece of luck. It just happens that personal contacts are very important in a rigid gap like that. I remember one of the things that Roger used to say about some.
But it was the the nonlinear gravity and the possibility of jumping lines and things like this. And he used to say, oh, jumping lines that was in a T is first paper that anywhere close to the. Yeah, I think so. But I remember also Roger came back from a conference in Copenhagen once, told me that just think that there are these funny things called instant mobs, which will go down a lot of them.
And I never heard of them when I was that I had all those for him and then we moved on to them mathematically. Yes, it was a very interesting, uh, period where all the ideas were with and, and I learnt from him a certain amount of the physical significance of these things. And so I was learning physics. They know he was picking up all the mathematical techniques. So did Gates theory come to you via Roger, do you think?
In part number of things. Partly that at the same time is singer who is pally with and churn and Yang, Jan and Yang have talked together and realised that get used to the physicists. Well, let's say with a connection of five. But we didn't think it was that group of friends figures years and he told me about them so and I went to MIT and talked to him so very quick in the chain we discovered that the what I going to be doing because we were doing already very close work on anomalies.
And so that was independent of the, to the uh, error. So it was a whole collection of things happening more of the same, very fast moving look back and there's a lot of these things happening here too. Yeah. So now we think of decades ago. Yes. That things move slowly in that time when the things are happening can be very fast. Yes. Well, Yang Mills was around since the fifties. Yes. But it would be dormant. Really? Yes. Nothing really. Nothing happened. Visited it didn't really find uses on it.
And of course, in my one of my contemporaries in Cambridge was Bernard Shaw, who really see his independent younger years and his supervisors said it's not worth publishing write for. Chap is another one of those independent discovery things that yes, yes it was because it ran at the time. But in this case for Gerry, he is in his thesis hidden in the library.
These are references, people now he wrote, you know, 50 years after the time when his career was rather ruined because, you know, sort of making a big step forward and move on. He was shunted sideways. Right. Right. Yes. But I knew. Well, you want to make fun of my contemporaries. What are the you you said that you and Roger were both, at least notionally students of Harvard. Yeah. And I noticed in one of these questionnaires that you put down Hammond violins.
You're one of your great heroes. Yes. Yes. I'm pretty sure that he's one of Roger's great heroes as well. Yes. I only met and never actually met him. And while I did actually see him, the Amsterdam Congress in 54, I think Roger maybe there too. Somebody mentioned that. I think he might have been I think it was a graduate student. I think the graduate students in Amsterdam just across the way. So metal thing together. And he was the man who gave the talk giving the feels of out to certain Godard.
So I saw this big man of their news. I went to Princeton in 55 and and he died just before I arrived. So we never actually met. But Influence was aware and I followed his work. So over the years, every time I did anything, I him involved with the guy fairly. Yes. I think it's things like that isn't it? As somebody might be in a similar relationship with Qatar, they find that connections done everything just before that.
That's right. Yes. Yes. But you know, I haven't involving I last only a few years ago. I have to write a obituary for the US National Academy of Sciences. I haven't oh gosh, 50 years even longer undone, you know, this year. So they asked me and I feel great, but I mean, six years out of the time it's unusual. So I used it an occasion to find out what happened in the 50 years, as it usually had to predict.
This man's work will be here easy. Look what happened in the last few years to see what his influence was. I turned around and I was told to pay my respects in that way because he had a conformal theory of gravity as well. He had lots of them. He had almost every good idea. You find that he and the like. Electromagnetism combined with rage theories. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I see. I'm I was going to go back and talk about the different students that you had while you were in Oxford.
And it's often written down that Glenis was your first student here. Is that anything? Well, when I first came here, I sort of inherited or acquired a few students who were here being looked after by you and general topology. Some of them were my students officially, but de facto Lou Quadri was one of them. Early one Guineas came from Australia, maybe in the first minutes of the new lot of students acquired.
And then Graham SIEGEL must have been at the time he went first to Cambridge, then moved over. All right. Yes, they from that period as I had seen regularly for I don't was but then I went away to Princeton and then I came back. I got a bumper crops. Yes. Yes. Well, the those ones from the seventies, the early seventies, that certainly includes Francis. And then on Sam Donaldson and John Rowe and Michael Murray. And they were all one at one.
Yes. Cohort B and Lisa Jeffrey was in that list and he's younger. And Ruth and Ruth Lawrence actually have three very bright women students. End of my career, you know, Francis and Lisa Jeffries and Ruth, not wholly different. Yes, I do think I had students like Peter Kornheiser off of that lot as well. And so it was one of the benefits of Got back to Princeton was that I got the chance to get these good graduate students. Mm hmm. Most of them came from Cambridge, right?
Yes. Yes. It was a unique crop. Do you have any sense of. Why? Why would they suddenly. What was it? Well, um, came. We, of course, had a lot of Italian students. Depending on interest, they would naturally work with somebody in that field. And that time in Cambridge, there probably wasn't anybody working in some of the fields. And I was I'd come back from Princeton. People knew about me. And so, yes, it was, hey, why did you go to work with the Oxford?
But I can't remember. She didn't come to work to give me advice about where she should go. I told her, If you go to Harvard, I'm going to Oxford. So but tell people this that she come and talk to me. And Sam Donaldson first started to work with Nigel and he shifted to me. And I think one of the if you've been around long enough, he says, you come back from America, you naturally attracts you people, people that send them your way.
When you first starting off, your young man students are on and yet they're on the ground locally. But most of my students will not do that separately on oxygen and the economy is not yet. But a lot of the good ones came from get through. What led to your first meetings with Ed Witten where whether they know or whether they really clear my mind in the mid seventies when we discovered that we Methodists were doing similar things to go physicists were doing in terms of computing anomalies on air.
I went across to talk with Ramoji Film City and we had a meeting and obviously you have young, younger people and one of the younger people there with him and I don't he was that type of junior fellow at Harvard even brought in I remember by the end of the meeting, it's quite clear to me that he understood more than the other guys. Yes. Yes, I know. I was trying to explain what we were doing in mathematical terms. And then he was obviously much sharper, follow better.
And so I ended up by inviting him to come to Oxford, um, same time and invited Grantham to come from Cambridge. And he spent two weeks here. He had a lot of lectures. I remember one of them back down in the city department and I made quite a quite a bit of a splash and then I kept up with him ever since that. And I got a very you know, he was so bearish on the off the ground, which must have been, what, 76 or seven early middle seventies.
So yeah, I've got a different default and value because I remember seeing him in 76 at a conference in America and he was telling us all about Twisted Theory, which he did. He hadn't exactly reinvented and he picked it up from Roger. Yes, he spent time here if you have two weeks, which is. But that's long enough to pick things up and the easier. But so I must be 74. I mean and they were. They might be and yeah, we had a lot of em, right.
But that was, you know, time with a lot of talk with first with many of the physicists I talked to where you have by far the sharpest, quickest young man whom he knew so much. But it's yes, it's often pointed out that it's I mean, well, the fact that he got the Fields medal that yeah. That he's as you know as a physicist, he's just an extraordinary mathematician. That's right. You know better that more mathematical mathematically.
And one of the I mean, one of the things I do remember when you and Roger were talking about Twisties was there was this tension between what was it going to be Riemannian? Was he going to be Lawrence? Yes, yes. And for the for the mathematicians, there's a sense in which all works much better if it's Riemannian. But Roger was always adamant that it had to be about the world, and therefore he wanted it to be there and said, yes, well, that's true.
And when we came in, mathematically, we we gave his point of view, Riemannian geometry, and we thought he did nicely there and could make a clean result. All the instant calculations I knew in principle, of course, it had to think had to do with then too. But they were always he would talk about quick rotation on the side and the glib of course, and recent times I've got rather than the Benson theory myself and see that I mean, you have subtle things going on there.
But I didn't, you know, Roger said you have to do with a wrench in case of something that you did on, but that times of physics is quite happy that people doing fine and angels were quite happy with working with utilisation and doing function and then changing the sine afterwards.
So it wasn't that we told the physicists generally, you know, the mining case, they they were doing it already themselves and they, they were working on it and tons of people in the opinion and but Roger is just as he was a bit so there was this long gap but it was different points of view. But Richard Ward, whose work with Roger pushed off a bit in that direction. Yeah, but it was a. Again, interesting, but it is a bit like a repeat of what happened with Hodges.
Hodges took back from the great sweetheart Lorensen and took the Romanian counterpart and developed honesty and he knew that he was just copying the formula and usually a mathematical way different. But formula was very good and he got the right ideas. So the transition from the original picture to the remaining picture he did by Hodge and in some sense I think had to do the same thing with the right equation. We took the right equation, we turned it took a Romanian version of it.
Nobody done that before. Right. And we made. Make use of that in a way that hadn't been done before. I always say that hard, direct talk to each other. They were the thing to pop very early. They would have done all that, and I would've been out of a job because I didn't talk to anyone. He was the notorious that's light hearted, very extrovert, but they were very good crew. There were only two of the four professors, and I must admit that their regular basis.
And how did that make this decision to remain in geology? Because it formed you guys waiting for someone to do with the equation. Now, there's of course, people aren't responsible for their own Wikipedia page, but I know your role. I don't know. But I mean, can't I? I know how to press a button saying Wikipedia. Right? But I didn't know. Well, I am yours is has quotations embedded in it.
And there's one very, very charming one which has you saying algebra is the offer made by the devil to the Methodist? Yes. The devil says, I will give you this powerful machine. It will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give me your soul, give up geometry, and you will have this marvellous machine. Did you have it? Yes, I did. I did. I mean, it's like the way that I called it, the fastest offer in a bargain.
And I really believe it has an inspector in algebra. It is definitely a machine. Once you've got the rules, you plug in the formula. It rolls along by itself and you don't need you think every time what this means, you just take the output the other end. So it's a black box. It's something you put in the form of a machine, grinds on the geometrical thing.
You try to understand every stage why this is true, why this is harder work, because you have to step every time you understand the whole the machine by cog. But you but you don't lose sight of the meaning of things. So if something is you, it is right. You give up your soul in return for this machine, which now can be called a computer algorithm. And I think that was the difference between Newton online. Is he Newton?
Did all these calculus applications, the calculus for the dynamics in geometrical terms, in two pictures, you understand the orbits of the ground and your school for them, calculus. Was it a formal algebraic operation, you know, and they were very successful. And subsequently, of course, it took over the conventional way of thinking of Newton's Duke of Edinburgh. He wasn't as good as well as anybody because, you know, do do do you do every X so have school one in that sense.
But you didn't go too far down that route. You you lose contact with another reality. One of the things that I mean so I feel quite strongly and so I mean, of course you make a statement that is very provocative. Oh, algebra isn't like it at all. No, no, no. But the but I mean, it's it's is I could imagine Roger making essentially the same statement. Yes. Yes. I mean, he he is he thinks I mean, geometry and physics.
Are people like Roger or does it have to be like Newton or ask because they think you think in terms of physical. Well, we think of the physical world as the through grade and when they put things in it. And geometry is the natural language for dealing with physics, at least some level, obviously. And Roger, is that kind of physical geometry, I have to say, view from the other side of the mathematician. My understanding of physics is that one violent on an Einstein.
You know, Roger and I both share unbridled admiration. I think I decided that I keep going back to Einstein's papers to find the more I like the famous quotation, you know, the when Joe Enlai, the Chinese leader, was asked what he thought the long term influence of the French Revolution was, he said it's too early to tell. So when people say, well, it was it was was Einstein right with Niels Bohr right. And quantum mechanics to tell we've got another century? Yes.
Because quantum mechanics is is not devoid of geometry. But, you know, but the I still didn't like the fundamental quantum mechanics. They always tried to argue it out. And people think that he lost the battle with Niels Bohr. But I, I think the coalition is still open. I think it's. There are still. So I think Einstein will, you know, come back in. Yes. And give another century. Yes. But that should be in a hurry. The frontier of physics has this kind of scorched earth feeling behind it.
And you feel that perhaps there are these many problems that the frontier has left behind this? I well, I think, you know, because you have the physics big that is is a kind of bandwagon effect. You know, you get on the latest. Machine, his cutting his way through. And you forget everything else, except for a few oddballs like Roger and others who think outside the box. And that works very well, but it can miss out on the future. And you have to go back and pick up the ideas left behind.
And so I think there's a in the present system of very fast moving subject matter, also university appointments and publishing papers with a lot of pressure on people to keep up with the front line to follow the leader. And that's not a good for the science of the whole. You won't have diversity of inquiry. You want people following up on bold ideas. And if there aren't enough of those you'll be stuck with. Your marching column will hit a brick wall. A monoculture.
You'll have a monoculture. Exactly. So no diversity. We are biodiversity of idea is actually because you have the people have taken that idea of selection, natural selection and into the world of ideas that they want a lot of ideas and the best ones survive and so on. So I think that's true. Okay. Well, I think we have to stop now because the your birthday conference. That's right. For us. I want to say thank you very much. Well, thank you. And join me for my next birthday. Oh.