Marcus du Sautoy's Book Recommendations (Updated for 2026)

1

The Glass Bead Game

Hermann Hesse, Richard Winston, Clara Winston, Theodore Ziolkowski

4.1

The final novel of Hermann Hesse, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, 'The Glass Bead Game' is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.

Set in the 23rd century, 'The Glass Bead Game' is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow an

Recommended by Tyler Cowen, Ari Iaccarino, Igor Debatur, and 1 others.

Marcus du Sautoy

There’s the ideas of mathematics, of philosophy, of music all brought together in this game, the glass bead game. [source]

Tyler Cowen

Founder/Marginal Revolution University

This is about the beauty of organised structures and how we play them in game-like fashion and how much they entrance us. [source]

Ari Iaccarino

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse played a pivotal role in helping me decide to become a teacher and in further pursuits afterwards. There are various interpretations of the text and many conclusions I could personally draw from, but the general theme entails following the life of a man in an institution of academic-like monks who study various subjects for the sake of knowledge itself - nothing done for money, “progress”, or technological advancement. In an age where academics is constantly pressured to lead students towards a job, I found that to be refreshing for me, especially as I had been living in Spain post-college trying to find some purpose beyond teaching English. Learning to learn is beautiful and meaningful by itself, and in terms of how that relates to Ridj-it, this attitude has helped me to engage with the company in finding it to be rewarding for what it is, not because it serves some other external purpose. Investors don’t want to hear that, nor does anyone else relying on your existence, but thinking as such helps defend against dwelling on future scenarios and thoughts that inherently have no reality because, quite honestly, they don’t exist. The consequence of this commitment to the “now” is focus on the task at hand and the inevitable quality that follows. I’m not sure if I could have personally gotten to that point if I hadn’t committed myself to education via Hesse’s book. [source]

2

A Mathematician's Apology

G. H. Hardy, C. P. Snow

3.9

Written in 1940 as his mathematical powers were declining, G.H. Hardy's apology offers an engaging account of the thoughts of a man known for his eccentricities as well as his brilliance in mathematics.

Recommended by Marcus du Sautoy.

Marcus du Sautoy

Yes, it really appealed to me when I read it as a kid because I was interested in music, I played the trumpet, I loved doing theatre, and somehow GH Hardy in that book revealed to me how much mathematics is a creative art as much as a useful science. In fact he probably goes further, he really revels in the beauty of the subject and says he’s not particularly interested in the applications. That really appealed to me at the time – I was still hankering after something that made a lot of logical sense and wasn’t too ambiguous but was creative. That book really brought mathematics alive for me. [source]

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3

A Disappearing Number

Simon McBurney (Theatre Complicite)

4.3

Winner of the 2008 Olivier Award for Best New Play

“With touching emotion and unnerving disquietude, A Disappearing Number forces the spectator to consider the fact of love, death and belonging, within the space of his or her own personal universe.”—New Statesman

Recommended by Marcus du Sautoy.

Marcus du Sautoy

The captivating thing about this story is it’s really a mathematical love affair between GH Hardy – Cambridge mathematician, English – and this Indian mathematician, Ramanujan, who had no formal training but somehow had this extraordinary way of thinking about mathematics. And they saw it in such different ways and they came from such different cultures, yet mathematics was this common language which brought them together. It’s a kind of tragic story because Ramanujan comes to Cambridge to work with Hardy but falls very ill, gets very depressed from being away from home and eventually when he goes back to India he dies from a combination of malnutrition and something he probably picked up in India. It’s an extraordinary story of this coming together of the East and the West through mathematics. [source]

4

One, Two, Three...Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science

George Gamow

4.3

". . . full of intellectual treats and tricks, of whimsy and deep scientific philosophy. It is highbrow entertainment at its best, a teasing challenge to all who aspire to think about the universe." — New York Herald Tribune
One of the world's foremost nuclear physicists (celebrated for his theory of radioactive decay, among other accomplishments), George Gamow possessed the unique ability of makin

Recommended by Marcus du Sautoy.

Marcus du Sautoy

Yes, one of the things that really excited me when I read this – again when I was at school – was this idea of infinity. Gamow was a physicist first of all: Mathematics is the language of physics and you can see that through this book. It was where I read for the first time the idea that there could be different sorts of infinity and that was just mind-blowing. I thought infinity was something you just couldn’t understand. [source]

5

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou

4.4

An innovative, dramatic graphic novel about the treacherous pursuit of the foundations of mathematics.
This graphic novel recounts the spiritual odyssey of philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his agonized search for absolute truth, he crosses paths with thinkers like Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert & Kurt Gödel, & finds a passionate student in Ludwig Wittgenstein. But his most ambitious goal—to establi

Recommended by Marcus du Sautoy.

Marcus du Sautoy

This is quite a recent publication and I saw the first inklings of this graphic novel when I went to a meeting in Mykonos on maths and narrative and it really looked an incredibly exciting project. I enjoy the graphic novel as an art form and I’ve always enjoyed Tintin and this has a very Tintinesque line to it, the illustration. But it brings alive one of the great stories of 20th-century mathematics, which is the crisis that happened when Gödel proved that there are statements about numbers which are true but which will never be proved. And this went against the whole ethos of mathematics since the ancient Greeks. If something is true, we should be able to prove why it’s true. If there are infinitely many primes, we can prove that there are infinitely many primes. But we don’t know that there are infinitely many twin primes: Primes that are two apart, like 17 and 19. Maybe that’s a true statement that doesn’t have a proof and we’re trying to chase something that doesn’t exist. Gödel’s theorem, proved in the 1930s, was a real bombshell for the philosophy of mathematics. [source]