Of course creativity is a mystery. We don’t know what drives it or what constitutes it. It’s one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it’s impossible to define.

I was desperate for a friend, and I used to lie in bed at night thinking about what it would be like. My younger brothers and sisters had friends, and I used to watch them...

My family supported me. I wasn’t hot-housed at all as a young child; I didn’t go to any kind of gifted school. They didn’t exist in the very poor parts of England when I grew...

If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is...

I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I’ve been practising it for so long over so many years I’ve almost lost my accent.

Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, ‘Chess is life.’ I would say, ‘Pi is life.’

My mother is not a model. She is not perfect. That awareness is part of learning to love someone. Predicting the actions of someone is an act of love. We persist, even when we get...

My first memory – at about four – was of numbers. The doctors who study me think a combination of mild autism and seizures I had when I was three have made me experience numbers...

Squaring numbers is a symmetrical process that I like very much. And when I divide one number by another, say, 13 divided by 97, I see a spiral rotating downwards in larger and larger loops...