Marcus Du Sautoy

Was born in London, grew up in Henley-on-Thames and was educated at local comprehensives Gillotts School and King James's College (VI Form, now Henley College) and Wadham College, Oxford, where he obtained first class honours in Mathematics. He went on to complete his DPhil in mathematics.

In March 2006, his article Prime Numbers Get Hitched was published by the online Seed magazine. In it he explained how the number 42, mentioned in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as the answer to everything, is related to the Riemann zeta function. He has also published an article in the scientific magazine New Scientist.

In December 2006, du Sautoy delivered the 2006 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures under the collective title The Num8er My5teries. This was only the third time the subject of the lectures had been mathematics — on the first occasion in 1978, when the lecture was delivered by Erik Christopher Zeeman, du Sautoy had been a schoolboy in the audience. The venue for the 2006 Christmas Lectures was the Institution of Engineering and Technology's headquarters at Savoy Place, London.