Eugenia Cheng was born in 1976 in Hampshire. She is a British mathematician, educator and concert pianist. She is known for explaining mathematics to non-mathematicians often using analogies with food and baking.
What’s your earliest memory?
I have vague memories of a playgroup when I was two, but my first really distinct memory is of being told off unfairly at nursery school when I was three. I was outraged by the injustice of it.
Who are your heroes?
My childhood hero was my piano teacher, the late Christine Pembridge. She taught me not just about the piano, but about music in general, education and life. I don’t think I have heroes any more; I try to learn what I can from everyone around me.
What book last changed your thinking?
I read Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff a while ago, but it had a deep and lasting effect on me, completely changing how I think of myself and talk to myself. Much of my life – mathematics research, writing, making art, composing music, practising the piano, baking – is solitary so I spend a lot of time talking to myself in my head.
What would be your Mastermind specialist subject?
My expertise is in higher-dimensional category theory, but I’d be terrible at answering quick fact-based questions about it. I’m good at seeing large, overarching structures that take months or years to elucidate. So perhaps for Mastermind it would be plots of Agatha Christie murder mysteries.
In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
Twenty-ninth May 1913. I’d like to go to the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and experience the near-riot at the then new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.
What TV show could you not live without?
I don’t watch TV as I just mindlessly scroll the internet instead, but I do re-watch the BBC Pride and Prejudice at least once a year.
Who would paint your portrait?
I think if it’s going to be a painting rather than a photo I’d like it to be something really surreal, where someone depicts me as a lamp post or a packet of crisps or something. I’m not sure who would do that. Perhaps one of my students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
What’s your theme tune?
Currently what’s going round my head is the “Dance of the Seven Veils” from Strauss’s opera Salome, but that could be rather misinterpreted as a “theme tune”.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Almost all the advice I’ve received has been unsolicited and laughably useless. A notable exception is that when I began my PhD I asked my supervisor, Professor Martin Hyland, for his general advice, and he said I should remember that just because someone had published something in a research paper it didn’t mean they were more intelligent than me. That was very helpful.
What’s currently bugging you?
Leaf blowers outside my window.
What single thing would make your life better?
Teleportation.
When were you happiest?
It seems sad and also incorrect to say that some point in the past was when I was happiest, so that means the answer must be right now, which is not what I was expecting.
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
When I was little I really wanted to be a news reader. I still enjoy reading from an auto-prompt, and loved recording my audiobook for the first time. So perhaps I’d be a voiceover artist. That or a neuroscientist.
Are we all doomed?
My gut response is yes, but then I realise that I’m still here making an effort to help, so deep down I must believe there is hope for us.
Eugenia Cheng’s “Unequal” is published by Profile Books
[See also: Mark Hoppus Q&A]
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