Marcus du Sautoy

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43 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2013 last heard May 2013

Marcus du Sautoy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · The Maths of Mozart and Birds · 6 May 2013 podcast

And interestingly, it seems that Mozart, again, is this planned or intuitive?

I'm not sure.

But the way the Magic Flute is divided up, the first act is divided into eight musical pieces.

The second act is divided into 13 musical pieces.

Eight plus 13 gives you 21 in total, three Fibonacci numbers.

Now, was that just a coincidence?

I think not.

Mozart had joined the Freemasons seven years earlier, and you can see a lot of kind of Masonic ideas running through this opera.

And the Masons, of course, have a lot of connections to mathematics through geometry and numbers.

The Masons, after all, built things, and so mathematics is key to that.

So a lot of their rituals have mathematics in it.

Now we move through to the importance of the number three in this opera.

We find lots of threes.

It's also a very important number for the Masons.

And Mozart uses this number three to indicate kind of the connections with the Masons.

One of the rituals that an initiate has to go through is to knock a rhythm on the door of the lodge.

And it's three notes in a particular rhythm and done three times.

And we hear this triple chord again and again throughout this opera.

So here is the triple chord.

I think sometimes I've chosen to be a mathematician because when you do mathematics, there's a feeling like you can leave something permanent after your death, because the power of proof means that something you've proved will be true forever.

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