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They have a.

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Sir Michael, I wanted to thank you very much for giving up part of your birthday meeting to talk to us.

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And my brief is to invite you to talk about mathematics in Oxford in the seventies and eighties.

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But I thought the sensible thing would be to start with the sixties, because my understanding.

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You came here in 1961. That's right, yes. I came as a reader.

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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.

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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.

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Right. And did you know Henry Whitehead? Yes, quite well.

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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,

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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.

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Cricket the pub after cricket mathematics.

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Oh and he's from he had a family, he had pigs.

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He inherited it from his uncle in a herd of Jersey cattle.

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These are you keep the cat on the farm and the other farm outside Islip.

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And there we used to go and visit the farm every year. All the mathematics faculty funeral time, we have a cricket match.

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He was really keen to get it. Yeah, he was a very genial chap, you would think.

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A mathematician. And did you communed with the pigs to do the.

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The monkey business? Well, I've got photographs of him. That would be the photograph.

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Henry Wakefield with the pig. You know, who are the other Oxford stars?

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Was Titchmarsh your brother when I was here gave you the phone? I was, but I knew what he was.

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Brilliant game. Hickman of Titchmarsh. Another piece of pure mathematics.

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They were very tested for man. He didn't say much. You know, he had difficulty getting words out of him.

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He wrote beautiful book spinning. Very shy. Then there was a to a private.

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Charles Colson was a very extrovert. He was although you know of is he ran the show and did a lot of other things.

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Well, he was chairman of Oxfam. And then it was George Temple who was did quantum theory like my math level, the full feathers.

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I was the only one who wasn't a judge from the great great hangman was, I think, in the congregational lay preacher.

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And Charles Cushman was a big brother amongst Methodists, and the temple was a Catholic.

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It ended up as a monk. Yes. I was the only one who did not give a particular character to the style of lecturing.

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Did you think was it? Well, I suppose all he's addressing a public audience.

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I'm. Well, they're very different personalities and they're interesting, you know, a mixture of both.

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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,

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the big old house, which has very big rooms occupied by the professors in the classrooms.

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And he was the one who called that before that there'd be know where mathematics typical used

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and then he was instrumental to get the new building and he was a very influential figure.

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Mm hmm. So you became a civilian professor in 1963.

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Is that about the time that you moved into the new building? Um, I came in 61.

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I don't know, because I had my office as professor for a while.

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The old building I woke up, I got to the office, big old room.

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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.

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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,

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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.

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So we grab it. So they grabbed it very fast. And then we we got and it was designed by a Lancaster University surveyor.

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And it worked very well for the size of the big for number partitions around in those days there was a the,

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you know, some college had math passages, but nobody had one.

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And the full professors, you know, you can kind of have figures of what hand how many members of the were 100 it's

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noticeable that well the thing that struck me when I was thinking about this interview,

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the buildings that you've been involved with, because it's always seemed to me the Newton Institute is such a perfect building.

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Exactly. I think they credit for that, that people in Cambridge, they were the people who worked with the architect and the design.

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And I came in as a figurehead in some sense.

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But but it's a beautiful building and to be very influential.

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And many other buildings have copied aspects of it this way.

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It's designed to encourage interaction, open space and so on.

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And that was a very, very, very nice building. And the math building, nice, also nice buildings.

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Well, I again, I was I was not involved with the committee.

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So you doing the planning, but that was one of the uses.

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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.

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Well I mean it needed to do I came quite late of course and that has, I think influences this building layout.

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Open spaces, staircases is much bigger of course,

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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although with architectural prizes but nearly so well adapted to mathematics, it doesn't.

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Yes, it's as though there are six separate Newton institutes.

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That's right. I mean, an institute, all the spaces we see,

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a big lift and a staircase around it occupies half the space of the tower, and the offices are afterthought,

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slung around and multiplied by six terrible places,

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partly because they they're very much aware of we're building that Stephen Hawking was going to be there.

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Everything had to be laid out. So Stephen Hawking agreed.

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But the need to have six stairwells, enormous side at the expense of this lovely space and all the direction space,

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I think I'm afraid I'm not a fan of the Cambridge building.

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The main cafeteria area is good. That brings people together and the layout looks nice, but otherwise you're far superior.

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But that by a small architect who never really got.

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He did a very good job later on, never actually got it, you know, he never moved up the scale in the fairly small.

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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.

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Yeah. And as transcribed in the first five sentences of it on the you three times make allusion to the size of

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the room that you've got and it's clear that you're sensitive to the environment in which you were coming.

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Is that. Oh, yes. I mean, I, I like a big room and I have I, I can't stand that.

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Small rooms, booking rooms. I like space.

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And partly because I think when I walk around, I like to walk.

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And you've got a small office, you can't walk in the car. So I like a house.

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I like being gregarious. I like to have other people in to talk with and blackboard discussions.

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You can do that. These are quite decent sized. Mine was going to be bigger. I am.

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I was to do office to put together a unit and will me first build it.

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Put it up there for big offices for the four established chairs they are very proud of.

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I had one of those and I was really impressed. I came back as well.

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Sorry, Professor, I had to make do with it. I was given a week.

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I served my students. I put to the office together, make myself a big office.

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Right. So you came back as society research professor in 72 or 73, 73, 73.

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And that's about the time I was being a graduate student.

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And one of the things that was very vivid in my memory is the illustrious collection of seminar speakers that you had.

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So in the first year I was there, I think we had Sarah brought singer Hertzel Brook,

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and it did seem to me that this was one of the extremely useful things for graduate students to be able to.

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I mean, was it by design on your part? Well, you know, America has huge mathematical units.

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Everyone has a they have a university math colloquium, big event wide audiences.

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And when I came from Cambridge there, they had seminars.

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They didn't have room.

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And when I came back, America, after each visit, I tried to encourage the subsequent pattern of large scale colloquium, of general interest.

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So we invite famous people. We have these nice big rooms down below and big good audience.

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We turn out to kind of cross border and make circle together.

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And that was deliberate. And I, you know, I invited people different times earlier on.

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I had people like Mark Katz and, you know, I might have felt unfriendly, could he will not come.

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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.

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And I think they did influence people, students encourage them and feel part of a community.

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And it was a deliberate policy, of course, happened to pally with all these people.

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But my contacts at Princeton made it easy.

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But it was a deliberate effort to transport over America.

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The better aspects of American university system.

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Mm hmm. Of course, with the Americans, in some sense, it's easier for them to travel,

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because all they do is they have to travel across a landmass, as it were.

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I mean, was how feasible was it to have all these people visiting and did you have to mortgage your house to the.

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Well, in the very early days when I first you know,

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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.

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And I've gone where they came from, but I got £10, which was well enough to bring in.

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And it was hard work to get £10 for somebody famous is that it was difficult later on got material.

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The Americans of course had their money to fly over and have their research council money became available.

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So money was easier. Early days it was it was really quite hard.

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And the not many people you couldn't give any people the.

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So Roger Penrose arrived around about the same time as here in 73.

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And it's often seems to me that it was one of the great pieces of good fortune for Oxford, Mass.

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That you were both there at the same time. Yes. Yes. But a lot of the.

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Pure mathematical knowledge and technique that he was needing interest in theory.

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You were in a position to supply. Yes, Michael.

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Roger goes back to when we were graduate students. We're both graduate students in Cambridge at the same time.

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Technically, I was under Hodge. After the first year, he moved across and I worked with Todd.

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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.

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I remember meeting when I was in Princeton,

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talking to Freeman Dyson and the whole thing talked about Roger Penrose possibly coming to Oxford and he said,

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Well, Roger did these things on black holes.

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He knew about the funny things called twisties. I don't understand them.

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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.

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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,

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which I'd been studying. So we have managed to bring all that into the theory of physics.

134
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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,

135
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but it was the culmination of he's coming back just the moment when his techniques

136
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required the sort of ideas that I picked up in Princeton and elsewhere.

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So it was good fortune. And it was it was all of the defamation theory, the good IRA types.

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Yes. And but it was also old sheaf cosmology.

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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,

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and he kept saying,

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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.

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And I suddenly it dawned on me, I've got one day. So what he was doing was just chief commodity with Coca-Cola.

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And suddenly. So I remember having three sessions in spelling Roger and students the basics of chief commodity how you apply

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the thing and they were very very fast learners they took it off very quickly and before I knew where it was,

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they were all ready to go ahead. And it was it was a good piece of luck.

146
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It just happens that personal contacts are very important in a rigid gap like that.

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I remember one of the things that Roger used to say about some.

148
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But it was the the nonlinear gravity and the possibility of jumping lines and things like this.

149
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And he used to say, oh, jumping lines that was in a T is first paper that anywhere close to the.

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Yeah, I think so. But I remember also Roger came back from a conference in Copenhagen once,

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told me that just think that there are these funny things called instant mobs, which will go down a lot of them.

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And I never heard of them when I was that I had all those for him and then we moved on to them mathematically.

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Yes, it was a very interesting, uh, period where all the ideas were with and,

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and I learnt from him a certain amount of the physical significance of these things.

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And so I was learning physics. They know he was picking up all the mathematical techniques.

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So did Gates theory come to you via Roger, do you think?

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In part number of things. Partly that at the same time is singer who is pally with and churn and Yang,

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Jan and Yang have talked together and realised that get used to the physicists.

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Well, let's say with a connection of five.

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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

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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.

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And so that was independent of the, to the uh, error.

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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.

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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.

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Yes. Well, Yang Mills was around since the fifties. Yes.

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But it would be dormant. Really? Yes. Nothing really. Nothing happened. Visited it didn't really find uses on it.

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And of course, in my one of my contemporaries in Cambridge was Bernard Shaw,

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who really see his independent younger years and his supervisors said it's not worth publishing write for.

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Chap is another one of those independent discovery things that yes, yes it was because it ran at the time.

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But in this case for Gerry, he is in his thesis hidden in the library.

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These are references, people now he wrote, you know, 50 years after the time when his career was rather ruined because,

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you know, sort of making a big step forward and move on.

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He was shunted sideways. Right. Right. Yes. But I knew.

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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.

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Yeah. And I noticed in one of these questionnaires that you put down Hammond violins.

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You're one of your great heroes. Yes. Yes. I'm pretty sure that he's one of Roger's great heroes as well.

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Yes. I only met and never actually met him.

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And while I did actually see him, the Amsterdam Congress in 54, I think Roger maybe there too.

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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.

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So metal thing together. And he was the man who gave the talk giving the feels of out to certain Godard.

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So I saw this big man of their news. I went to Princeton in 55 and and he died just before I arrived.

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So we never actually met. But Influence was aware and I followed his work.

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So over the years, every time I did anything, I him involved with the guy fairly.

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Yes. I think it's things like that isn't it?

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As somebody might be in a similar relationship with Qatar, they find that connections done everything just before that.

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That's right. Yes. Yes. But you know, I haven't involving I last only a few years ago.

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I have to write a obituary for the US National Academy of Sciences.

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I haven't oh gosh, 50 years even longer undone, you know, this year.

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So they asked me and I feel great, but I mean, six years out of the time it's unusual.

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So I used it an occasion to find out what happened in the 50 years, as it usually had to predict.

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This man's work will be here easy. Look what happened in the last few years to see what his influence was.

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I turned around and I was told to pay my respects in that way because he had a conformal theory of gravity as well.

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He had lots of them. He had almost every good idea.

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You find that he and the like. Electromagnetism combined with rage theories.

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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.

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And it's often written down that Glenis was your first student here.

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Is that anything?

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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.

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Some of them were my students officially, but de facto Lou Quadri was one of them.

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Early one Guineas came from Australia, maybe in the first minutes of the new lot of students acquired.

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And then Graham SIEGEL must have been at the time he went first to Cambridge, then moved over.

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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.

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I got a bumper crops. Yes. Yes. Well, the those ones from the seventies, the early seventies, that certainly includes Francis.

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And then on Sam Donaldson and John Rowe and Michael Murray.

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And they were all one at one.

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Yes. Cohort B and Lisa Jeffrey was in that list and he's younger.

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And Ruth and Ruth Lawrence actually have three very bright women students.

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End of my career, you know, Francis and Lisa Jeffries and Ruth, not wholly different.

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Yes, I do think I had students like Peter Kornheiser off of that lot as well.

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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.

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Mm hmm. Most of them came from Cambridge, right?

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Yes. Yes. It was a unique crop.

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Do you have any sense of. Why?

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Why would they suddenly. What was it? Well, um, came.

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We, of course, had a lot of Italian students. Depending on interest, they would naturally work with somebody in that field.

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And that time in Cambridge, there probably wasn't anybody working in some of the fields.

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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?

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But I can't remember. She didn't come to work to give me advice about where she should go.

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I told her, If you go to Harvard, I'm going to Oxford.

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So but tell people this that she come and talk to me.

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And Sam Donaldson first started to work with Nigel and he shifted to me.

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And I think one of the if you've been around long enough, he says, you come back from America,

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you naturally attracts you people, people that send them your way.

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When you first starting off, your young man students are on and yet they're on the ground locally.

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But most of my students will not do that separately on oxygen and the economy is not yet.

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But a lot of the good ones came from get through.

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What led to your first meetings with Ed Witten where whether they know or whether they really clear my mind in the mid seventies

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when we discovered that we Methodists were doing similar things to go physicists were doing in terms of computing anomalies on air.

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I went across to talk with Ramoji Film City and we had a meeting and obviously you have young,

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younger people and one of the younger people there with him and I don't he was that

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type of junior fellow at Harvard even brought in I remember by the end of the meeting,

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it's quite clear to me that he understood more than the other guys. Yes.

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Yes, I know. I was trying to explain what we were doing in mathematical terms.

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And then he was obviously much sharper, follow better.

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And so I ended up by inviting him to come to Oxford, um, same time and invited Grantham to come from Cambridge.

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And he spent two weeks here. He had a lot of lectures.

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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.

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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.

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So yeah,

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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,

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which he did. He hadn't exactly reinvented and he picked it up from Roger.

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Yes, he spent time here if you have two weeks, which is.

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But that's long enough to pick things up and the easier. But so I must be 74.

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I mean and they were. They might be and yeah, we had a lot of em, right.

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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,

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quickest young man whom he knew so much.

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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.

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That he's as you know as a physicist, he's just an extraordinary mathematician.

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That's right. You know better that more mathematical mathematically.

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And one of the I mean,

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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?

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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.

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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.

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And when we came in, mathematically, we we gave his point of view, Riemannian geometry,

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and we thought he did nicely there and could make a clean result.

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All the instant calculations I knew in principle, of course, it had to think had to do with then too.

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But they were always he would talk about quick rotation on the side and the glib of course,

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and recent times I've got rather than the Benson theory myself and see that I mean, you have subtle things going on there.

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But I didn't, you know, Roger said you have to do with a wrench in case of something that you did on,

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but that times of physics is quite happy that people doing fine and angels were quite happy

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with working with utilisation and doing function and then changing the sine afterwards.

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So it wasn't that we told the physicists generally, you know, the mining case, they they were doing it already themselves and they,

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they were working on it and tons of people in the opinion and but Roger is just

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as he was a bit so there was this long gap but it was different points of view.

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But Richard Ward, whose work with Roger pushed off a bit in that direction.

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Yeah, but it was a. Again, interesting, but it is a bit like a repeat of what happened with Hodges.

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Hodges took back from the great sweetheart Lorensen and took the Romanian counterpart and developed

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honesty and he knew that he was just copying the formula and usually a mathematical way different.

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But formula was very good and he got the right ideas.

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So the transition from the original picture to the remaining picture he did by

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Hodge and in some sense I think had to do the same thing with the right equation.

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We took the right equation, we turned it took a Romanian version of it.

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Nobody done that before. Right. And we made. Make use of that in a way that hadn't been done before.

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I always say that hard, direct talk to each other.

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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.

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He was the notorious that's light hearted, very extrovert, but they were very good crew.

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There were only two of the four professors, and I must admit that their regular basis.

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And how did that make this decision to remain in geology?

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Because it formed you guys waiting for someone to do with the equation.

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Now, there's of course, people aren't responsible for their own Wikipedia page, but I know your role.

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I don't know. But I mean, can't I? I know how to press a button saying Wikipedia.

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Right? But I didn't know. Well, I am yours is has quotations embedded in it.

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And there's one very, very charming one which has you saying algebra is the offer made by the devil to the Methodist?

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Yes. The devil says, I will give you this powerful machine.

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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.

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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.

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And I really believe it has an inspector in algebra. It is definitely a machine.

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Once you've got the rules, you plug in the formula.

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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.

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So it's a black box. It's something you put in the form of a machine, grinds on the geometrical thing.

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You try to understand every stage why this is true, why this is harder work,

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because you have to step every time you understand the whole the machine by cog.

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But you but you don't lose sight of the meaning of things.

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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.

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And I think that was the difference between Newton online. Is he Newton?

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Did all these calculus applications, the calculus for the dynamics in geometrical terms,

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in two pictures, you understand the orbits of the ground and your school for them, calculus.

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Was it a formal algebraic operation, you know, and they were very successful.

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And subsequently, of course, it took over the conventional way of thinking of Newton's Duke of Edinburgh.

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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.

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But you didn't go too far down that route. You you lose contact with another reality.

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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.

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Oh, algebra isn't like it at all.

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No, no, no. But the but I mean, it's it's is I could imagine Roger making essentially the same statement.

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Yes. Yes. I mean, he he is he thinks I mean, geometry and physics.

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Are people like Roger or does it have to be like Newton or ask because they think you think in terms of physical.

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Well, we think of the physical world as the through grade and when they put things in it.

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And geometry is the natural language for dealing with physics, at least some level, obviously.

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And Roger, is that kind of physical geometry, I have to say, view from the other side of the mathematician.

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My understanding of physics is that one violent on an Einstein.

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You know, Roger and I both share unbridled admiration.

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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,

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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.

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So when people say, well, it was it was was Einstein right with Niels Bohr right.

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And quantum mechanics to tell we've got another century? Yes.

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Because quantum mechanics is is not devoid of geometry.

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But, you know, but the I still didn't like the fundamental quantum mechanics.

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They always tried to argue it out. And people think that he lost the battle with Niels Bohr.

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But I, I think the coalition is still open.

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I think it's. There are still. So I think Einstein will, you know, come back in.

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Yes. And give another century. Yes. But that should be in a hurry.

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The frontier of physics has this kind of scorched earth feeling behind it.

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And you feel that perhaps there are these many problems that the frontier has left behind this?

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I well, I think, you know, because you have the physics big that is is a kind of bandwagon effect.

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You know, you get on the latest. Machine, his cutting his way through.

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And you forget everything else, except for a few oddballs like Roger and others who think outside the box.

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And that works very well, but it can miss out on the future.

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And you have to go back and pick up the ideas left behind.

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And so I think there's a in the present system of very fast moving subject matter,

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also university appointments and publishing papers with a lot of pressure on people to keep up with the front line to follow the leader.

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And that's not a good for the science of the whole. You won't have diversity of inquiry.

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You want people following up on bold ideas. And if there aren't enough of those you'll be stuck with.

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Your marching column will hit a brick wall. A monoculture.

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You'll have a monoculture. Exactly. So no diversity.

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We are biodiversity of idea is actually because you have the people have taken that idea of selection,

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natural selection and into the world of ideas that they want a lot of ideas and the best ones survive and so on.

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So I think that's true. Okay. Well, I think we have to stop now because the your birthday conference.

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That's right. For us. I want to say thank you very much. Well, thank you.

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And join me for my next birthday. Oh.