The Myth about Maths
Letters to the past and the future
It's 1985, a year before I was born. In Belgrade, the winter has loosened its grip, though its memory lingers in the bones and in the rationing of coffee, electricity and fuel. For twenty-four consecutive, blistering winter days in December and January, the daily temperature never rose above 0 °C. It was one of the longest freezing streaks in the city's recorded history. Now the cold and the blackouts have subsided and in an office on 6 Lenin Street, warmed by little more than resolve, someone, or several someones, bend over a page, searching for words of solidarity that Yugoslav women might send to the Palestinian women due to gather in Tunis.
It's the same year, and spring lingers over Tunis as April turns to May. The air is mild and the light gentle. Inside the Hotel Amilcar, the Fourth Conference of the General Federation of Palestinian Women is in session. In attendance are “Palestinian sisters” who spent long years in the Zionist occupation's prisons, freed from captivity in late 1983. Some important men sit in the front row. A representative of the Federal Conference for the Issues of the Social Status of Women of Yugoslavia is about to deliver the greetings that travelled down the Adriatic and across the Mediterranean, a message carried by the same waters that touched different shores. She begins;
“Dear comrades,
I am very pleased to have the honour of conveying greetings to you on behalf of the Conference for the Issues of the Social Status of Women of Yugoslavia, and on behalf of all the women of Yugoslavia I thank you for the invitation you extended to the conference, and I hope that the work of your conference will be crowned with success.
[...]
The people of Yugoslavia and the women of Yugoslavia are aware of your just struggle for freedom and for the establishment of a free, independent Palestinian state, and of the difficulties you face in your popular liberation struggle. The contribution of women to your struggle is immense and an integral part of it. Without it, the goal, which is freedom, cannot be achieved.
The women of Yugoslavia, [...], led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, entered the field of struggle against fascism and Nazism and their collaborators during the Second World War. These days, and specifically on May 9th, Yugoslavia celebrates the victory over fascism, a victory achieved through the common struggle alongside other progressive peoples and nations, in which all the peoples and nationalities of Yugoslavia actively participated, including women on an equal footing. As we mark this anniversary, we highlight the great contribution women made to the people's liberation struggle and to the development of socialism. Since we ourselves have this experience, we sincerely affirm our support for your just struggle. We too lived through the siege of war and the fight for liberation, and at the same time, together with the other progressive forces in our society, our socio-political system declared the principles of a socialist society, in which men and women participate equally in all areas of decision-making. This is guaranteed by the constitution and laws of our socialist self-managing country.
[...]
We still encounter certain difficulties, and we must keep working for the consistent application of the constitution and the law, until the remnants of patriarchal consciousness and traditions are completely overcome, and until all the rights women gained through their contribution to the people's war, the revolution and the rebuilding of the country after the war are fully and lastingly realised. Women, the working class and all working people today take part in carrying out the tasks of completing the development of the political system of socialist self-management, accelerating material prosperity, completing the economic stabilisation program, strengthening brotherhood and unity among our nations and nationalities, and holding firm in international relations on the basis of the principles and aims of the policy of non-alignment, whose foundations were laid during President Tito's lifetime.
[...]
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [...] unequivocally support the struggle of the Palestinian people and insist on Israel's withdrawal, without conditions or restrictions, from all the Arab and Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, and for the realisation of the Palestinian people's inalienable rights to self-determination, independence and sovereignty, and to the establishment of their own state on their own land. [...]
[...]
Dear comrades, I wish once more that your conference's proceedings will be crowned with success, and that you will continue to improve the situation of Palestinian women. I also express our readiness to continue cooperation between the General Federation of Palestinian Women and the Conference for the Issues of the Social Status of Women of Yugoslavia.”
It's October 2026, and the weather in London has turned. The summer was apocalyptic. The heat that pressed down on the city for weeks left the parks faded to a dusty orange I have never seen here before. Now autumn seems to be arriving, and I am relieved by its crispness. My hands are cold.
I sit to read these messages from the past once more. The pages are cream-coloured and slightly skewed in their scans. I am using modern technology to decipher them, feeding the scans into a machine that reads the Arabic lines that I cannot. I am reminded that I really should have committed to learning the language. Maybe it's not too late. I should really do it soon.
I notice that page 3 of the speech appears to be missing. The numbers run 2, then 4, and I wonder whether it’s a typo, a slip of the numbering, or whether a whole page really is gone. Was it lost, misfiled, never scanned or kept? Did it even exist?
I think about the gaps in archives, and about my desire to fill them. I think about time travel and generational disappointments, and I wonder if the women in that hall thought of this too. I scan the photograph of the meeting held at the sidelines of the conference for signs of this. Impossible to know.
Just a few short months following the conference, on 1 October 1985, in an operation they called Wooden Leg, Israeli jets bombed the PLO's headquarters outside Tunis. In Belgrade, the brotherhood and unity named in the speech has a few years left, and the stabilisation programme will give way to inflation, then to war, and the country that sent the greeting will be gone before I am old enough to remember it.
In Celtic Christian tradition, a thin place is where two realms press so closely they almost touch. As I disappear deeper into the letters and speeches, I find myself in the orbit of familiar vocabulary. Time starts to feel like a thin place too. The distance between these pages and today feels more permeable than linear chronology allows. I am caught in the arc of a returning boomerang, suspended in constellations, not timelines.
Today, a free Palestine has yet to arrive. But we promise that it will. We insist that it will.
Prompted by Munira Khayyat, I think about what tense all this belongs in. I think about October. I think about ellipses. You sit in them too. Are the three dots comfortable?
I ask myself if time is a traitor and the archive a trickster. I drift into a daydream about the women at that conference, tasting freedom after years in the occupation's prisons. I think of the letters and poems I have written for almost two years to a friend who is held in one of those prisons today. Letters I cannot send. I think about his freedom as a debt that is owed to the sky.
Outside, the Sunday light is low. The sun slants in through my windows, bringing with it an unnerving sense of calm. I realise that I have already resolved to write in the present. I pour a second cup of coffee, and turn to another letter. I begin;
Dear A,
[...]
Angelina Radaković
London, UK
Marcus du Sautoy is on a mission. The Oxford mathematics professor and Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science (a chair previously held by Richard Dawkins) spends most of his time trying to deconstruct myths around maths. From TED talks and podcasts, to YouTube videos, plays, TV and game shows, the professor has shone a light on subjects from the creativity of AI and its self-awareness, to code cracking and measuring the universe. A Carl Sagan for maths if you will, Marcus du Sautoy takes on some of the big questions of the day.
Why do so many people hate maths?
When I give talks about mathematics I often get the response ‘I didn't realise that was mathematics. I like that!' I often think we should teach two subjects: mathematical language, the boring stuff, and mathematical literature, full of all the great stories of mathematics about infinity, hyperspace and prime numbers. One of the challenges of teaching mathematics is that it is like building a pyramid. If you have one bad year at school, then trying to build anything on top of that becomes impossible.
One of the big influences on me as a student was A Mathematician's Apology (1940) by GH Hardy. Mathematicians are storytellers; it's just that our characters are numbers and geometry. The proofs we construct are meant to have strong narratives which move our audiences in the same way that great literature does.
What's the biggest myth about mathematicians?
That we are good at arithmetic. Actually, most mathematicians are rubbish at multiplication tables. Most people think that research mathematicians, like me, must do long division to a lot of decimal places. But actually, mathematics is the science of patterns, not calculations.
Your latest book Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut (2021) tells us how maths can solve everything from morbidity on a battlefield to measuring the earth, and two points on the globe. How might this apply to our everyday lives?
My book is a celebration of mathematics as the art of the shortcut. I want people to understand that there are wonderful ways of thinking, developed over the last two thousand years, that give us the ability to avoid boring, hard work. I called the book Thinking Better as a kind of homage to Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). In his book, Kahneman illustrates how bad our fast, intuitive thinking is at solving problems; it constantly leads us astray. We need slow, analytical thinking to solve counterintuitive problems. But it doesn't have to be slow. I argue that mathematics gives us fast ways to think analytically.
What's the most exciting mathematical development of the 21st Century?
One of the most exciting mathematical breakthroughs in the last 20 years has to be the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture by Grigori Perelman. This was one of the seven Millennium Problems set at the beginning of this new century and it is the only one so far to be solved. It concerns the possible shapes our 3-dimensional universe might be.
Are concerns about the singularity and AI overtaking human intelligence, warranted?
Talk of the singularity ー the moment when machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence ー has oversimplified the discussion. It implies a very one dimensional view of intelligence 一 something that can be plotted on a graph which can at some point, overtake us. The truth is that intelligence is a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted concept. And this is why in some directions machine intelligence will easily outstrip us, but in others, humans will have the upper hand. The message of my book The Creativity Code (2019) is that it is a combined intelligence, human and machine, that will always be better than either individually.
Where does AI stumble?
Empathy is something that AI will probably always have difficulty with, since this requires understanding the mind of the other. To do this, requires two minds that are built in a similar fashion. We already find it difficult to understand the thought process of an AI because it is so different from our own. At the moment, our ability to integrate many different strands of intelligence is something that AI struggles with. Human General Intelligence is something that AI aspires to, but is still some way off achieving.
If we have written the code for AI, why can't we understand its 'thought' process?
In the past, code was written in a top-down manner. Humans wrote the code, which machines implemented at speed and depth. But ultimately, humans knew what the machines were doing. The last few years have seen a phase change in the way we write code. It is now being written from the bottom up. It is allowed to change, mutate and update itself as it encounters new data. This means that the final code is so complex and opaque that we don't really understand how it makes decisions. Looking at lines of code isn't very helpful. It's like trying to understand human thought by looking at the firing of individual neurons. That is why we need to find ways to probe the code to understand its thought process. As this technology takes hold, this is the challenge for us.
My favourite example is of Deep Dream. Google used machine learning to produce a very powerful vision recognition algorithm, but they wanted to probe what the AI was actually ‘seeing.' So they reversed the process, giving the AI pictures with unclear images asking the AI to accentuate anything it saw in the image. It's a bit like the way we look at the clouds in the sky and see a dragon or a dog. The images that the algorithm produced revealed a lot about the way that the AI had learned to see, and in particular showed up strange, bad learning that had occurred. For example, when the AI reproduced images of dumbbells, the pictures always showed arms attached to them, revealing that the AI had never seen a dumbbell that wasn't held by a human. It thought dumbbells were an extension of human anatomy.
What is the point of AI art and should artists fear losing their jobs?
In The Creativity Code I conjecture that human creativity emerged at the same time as human consciousness. Our art became a fantastic tool to probe and understand this mysterious inner world that was emerging in the human species. We are seeing a new mind emerging in the guise of AI and we don't really understand its inner world. It is certainly not conscious yet, but the code is so complex that we need tools to probe how it is making its decisions. Asking it to create art is a clever way to investigate the thought process of complex code.
The message of my book is that these tools are not going to replace human creativity but enhance it. As creative artists, we get stuck in old ways of doing things, repeating behaviours that were successful in the past. We end up behaving like machines. The exciting thing about emerging AI creativity tools is that they are suggesting new ways of thinking.
What is the largest roadblock to public understanding of science?
One of our biggest challenges is countering the wave of scientific disinformation and false news stories that social media spreads so easily. We have become very tribal in our approach to knowledge. Adopting the same view as a strong member of your group is a powerful way to identify with, and bond with that group. One of the toughest things that scientists must learn is to adopt a rather unscientific approach to this challenge. Often, one story of a child who has had an adverse effect to a vaccine will fuel a whole anti-vax movement. No amount of counter data seems to overturn that story. The only way to undo a story, is to tell another story, such as the story of a child who died of measles because they weren't vaccinated.
More scientists need to step up to the plate and share the stories that science has to offer. Part of the key is to not polarise the debate, and to engage with understanding where contrary opinion is coming from. Alas, this engagement requires nuance and debate, something that social media is not good at.
Can science and religion ever intersect?
My previous book What We Cannot Know (2016) explores this interesting intersection between science and religion. They are inevitably going to collide given that both are trying to answer the big existential questions about our origins. But what I argue in my book is that perhaps religion is about the realm of the great unknown; knowledge that will always be unknowable. I wonder whether there are any questions that science will never be able to answer.
If I have 14 varieties of crisps, 25 varieties of drinks, and 10 varieties of sandwiches, can 'shortcut thinking' lead me to the best combination?
Interestingly you have cooked up an equation in three variables that you are trying to maximise so mathematics is perfect territory for finding the best combination, without trying all (14 x 25 x 10 = 3,500) different possibilities. Of course, learning the maths might take some time, but the point is that soon, someone will implement that mathematical shortcut into an app which can then lead to the best meal deal.
Marcus du Sautoy's book 'Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut (2021)' is published by 4th Estate. The author spoke at the Emirates Festival of Literature 2023.
What We Plant, What We Owe
I grew up in a small village in southern Slovenia, surrounded by forests. My grandmother gathered herbs; my father and grandfather worked in forestry. From our elders, we learned that the forest gives and the forest takes. We also learned to take only what we needed, and to understand that the forest was not ours to possess.
This knowledge has stayed with me. It shapes how I think about our relationship with the living world, and how I approach the history of the Non-Aligned Movement: not only as a political project of decolonisation and independence, but also as an unfinished experiment in imagining how we might live together, across differences, without submitting to the centres of power.
At the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, political leaders planted plane trees. Similar ceremonies took place at later summits, with trees chosen for their particular meanings and origins. Flowers, too, were carefully arranged for meetings and diplomatic encounters. These gestures might seem ceremonial, even ornamental. Yet a tree is never only a symbol. It takes root in a particular place, draws water from the earth, grows through time, and outlives those who plant it. It reminds us that political futures, like forests, require conditions in which different forms of life can exist together. But still, we must ask. Who plants, and on whose land? Who decides what should grow, what must be cleared, and which forms of life are considered expendable? The planting of trees, like the language of conservation itself, can also carry the legacy of colonial control over land and people. Colonial forestry turned forests into sources of timber and revenue, closing them to those who had lived from them for generations. Many protected areas were created by displacing the very communities who had cared for the land.
Environmental concerns were not at the centre of the Non-Aligned Movement’s early programme. Gradually, however, ecological balance became inseparable from issues of sovereignty, development and global inequality. The point was larger than protecting nature: it was to ask who profited from its destruction, who controlled its resources, and who was expected to pay the price. These questions remain urgent.
From oil extraction and poisoned landscapes to deforestation and the destruction of ecosystems through war, environmental devastation follows the unequal distribution of power. In Gaza today, the destruction of land, water, farms and olive groves, what many describe as ecocide, shows how the erasure of a people and the erasure of their living environment go hand in hand. To uproot an olive grove is to undo the act of planting, and with it a people’s claim to a future on their own land. There is only one Earth, but we do not inhabit it on equal terms.
Perhaps flowers and trees offer a way of thinking about solidarity beyond political declarations. Not as a universal language that erases differences, but as a practice grounded in specific places, histories and responsibilities. A seed carries the possibility of a future, but never guarantees it. What grows depends on the soil, the climate, the hands that tend it, and the forces that threaten its survival.
To return to the Non-Aligned Movement today is not to restore an idealised past. It is to ask what remains of its unfinished promises, and what new forms of solidarity they might make possible. What would it mean to treat the Earth not as property or an inexhaustible resource, but as a shared condition of life?
We are guests here.
Bojana Piškur
Ljubljana, Slovenia
About the Non-Aligned Constellations Working Group
Grounded in the concept of ‘constellations’ and derived from the Southern Constellations exhibition series (launched in 2019 at Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia), this research explores the intersection of art, history, and geography, with a particular focus on the global relationships fostered through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The project investigates the legacy of the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries Josip Broz Tito (Titograd, 1981–1995), whose collection, comprising 800 works from 56 NAM countries, is now housed at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro. Curators Angelina Radaković, Bojana Piškur, and Natalija Vujošević (the initiator of the Art Collection of Non-Aligned Countries Laboratory project at MSUCG) aim to revive the collection through participatory, experimental, and interdisciplinary methods. By engaging with its historical and political context, they seek to reestablish connections with cultural actors from the Global South. Tracing the exchanges of solidarity, this project will reframe the artworks, offering new perspectives on the cultural and political dialogues that shaped both the past and present.
Bojana Piškur is a senior curator at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana. Her research and curatorial work focus on the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav context, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the evolving concept of the ‘East(s)’. Since 2019, Piškur has curated and co-curated Southern Constellations exhibitions at institutions such as Moderna galerija (Ljubljana), Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (South Korea), Filodrammatica Gallery (Rijeka, Croatia), Museumof Contemporary Art of Montenegro (Podgorica), the Qattan Foundation (Ramallah, Palestine), National Opera and Ballet (Skopje, North Macedonia), and The Mosaic Rooms (London, UK).
Bodies expanding, bodies contracting
I will tell you exactly where the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries is located in my memory, in my body, and in the body of the building itself.
It was sometime around 1986, and I was a ten-year-old girl. As part of a school activity, we visited the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito.” The Gallery was housed in the Petrović Palace, in Kruševac Park. We are in the attic, and it is crowded. The air is stuffy, my sweater is itching, I can feel myself sweating, and my feet hurt because of my flat arches. We are having a music lesson, looking at a collection of musical instruments from Indonesia, Burma, and Congo. Our teacher tells us that we belong to the Non-Aligned Movement. She explains that these instruments were gifts to the Gallery from friendly countries. She tells us that, together with these countries, we form a community committed to peaceful coexistence, one that refuses to join military alliances seeking to dominate others through the law of the strongest. She speaks about anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics, and about how the community of non-aligned countries holds a different vision of the world, one in which relationships are built on mutual support, respect for others, and recognition of differences.
I do not know how much of the political language our teacher used to explain non-alignment I understood at the time. But I clearly remember the feeling that came with realizing that we belonged to something much larger than the country we lived in. My itchy, sweaty body expands from within, and I am filled with a joyful sense of belonging, pride, and responsibility.
Today, this memory feels like an abandoned utopia. But that utopia had its own public infrastructure. The building has shrunk and fallen into neglect. Since the 1990s, three different institutions have occupied it. Behind it, a new and much larger building housing the American Embassy has appeared. For decades, the collection has remained largely out of public view, while the struggle to bring it back into public life continues, with uncertain outcomes.
For years, researchers supported by grants from European, Canadian, and American universities have been visiting the museum to study and write about the non-aligned collection. Their interest often makes an important contribution to the collection’s visibility and understanding. Yet the question remains of how the resources, authority, and outcomes of such research are distributed. Who gets the opportunity to produce knowledge, build an academic career, and determine interpretive frameworks, and who remains the custodian of archival materials and a provider of information? Do the methodologies and principles underpinning these research relationships reflect the very values that are the subject of the research itself? Are these relationships anti-colonial, reciprocal, and grounded in solidarity?
Young people from the local community who visit the museum know almost nothing about this heritage, or about the Non-Aligned Movement. Their political education takes place within the horizon of Euro-Atlantic integration and the market economy, while historical experiences of alternative forms of international relations have almost disappeared from public education. At the same time, cultural heritage is increasingly valued in terms of its tourism and market potential.
In the post-Cold War order, marked by new forms of neocolonial domination, the heritage of non-alignment is becoming increasingly visible within international academia, while remaining difficult to access for the communities from which it emerged. It acquires new value as an object of research, but not necessarily as public knowledge or social practice. Today, narratives surrounding the political imagination of non-alignment circulate predominantly through the channels of Western academia and within the specialized discourse of contemporary art, in publications and at panels where access is restricted by class, economic, and institutional barriers.
These barriers determine whose bodies can expand from within today, and whose contract. They are not merely obstacles to accessing information, but part of a broader asymmetrical distribution of resources, knowledge, and the possibility of imagining the world differently. In postsocialist societies, where decades of privatization have transformed material and collectively held goods, the question arises whether a similar fate threatens heritage, ideas, and political imagination itself.
I wonder how we can learn from the Non-Aligned Movement today without turning its heritage into yet another resource for academic and market valorization. How can we re-establish the principles of solidarity, reciprocity, and collective action as practices, beginning with research exchanges and the production of knowledge themselves? How can we once again create places where bodies can expand from within, where knowledge can generate a sense of belonging, solidarity, and the possibility of imagining the world differently?
And who will have access to those places?
Natalija Vujošević,
Podgorica, Montenegro
About the Non-Aligned Constellations Working Group
Grounded in the concept of ‘constellations’ and derived from the Southern Constellations exhibition series (launched in 2019 at Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia), this research explores the intersection of art, history, and geography, with a particular focus on the global relationships fostered through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The project investigates the legacy of the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries Josip Broz Tito (Titograd, 1981–1995), whose collection, comprising 800 works from 56 NAM countries, is now housed at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro. Curators Angelina Radaković, Bojana Piškur, and Natalija Vujošević (the initiator of the Art Collection of Non-Aligned Countries Laboratory project at MSUCG) aim to revive the collection through participatory, experimental, and interdisciplinary methods. By engaging with its historical and political context, they seek to reestablish connections with cultural actors from the Global South. Tracing the exchanges of solidarity, this project will reframe the artworks, offering new perspectives on the cultural and political dialogues that shaped both the past and present.
Natalija Vujošević is a curator, researcher and cultural organiser based in Montenegro. Her work is particularly concerned with Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cultural and political histories and with the relationships between historical material, institutional memory, and contemporary conditions. In 2024, she received the Igor Zabel Grant, awarded in recognition of outstanding achievements by curators, art historians, theorists, writers, and critics working in the field of visual.
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