As the author and editor of 55 books, with a career weaving through academia, teaching, and popular maths writing, professor Robin Wilson has a variety of interests. His books cover topics ranging from graph theory and the history of maths to sudoku, Lewis Carroll, and the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. But he considers himself first and foremost a communicator of mathematics. “I’ve always been a populariser and a publicist for maths, and I’ve always been thought of more naturally as a teacher. But I’ve certainly been involved with research, particularly in graph theory and its history.”
A prolific author
Many of his books lie in the areas of graph theory and combinatorics. He tells us how his first book, Introduction to Graph Theory, came to fruition. Still in print 52 years on, and now in its fifth edition, it began as a series of Oxford undergraduate lectures in graph theory. In those days, course lecture notes were sometimes in the form of booklets, purchasable from the university, so Robin wrote up his notes as a booklet, which was on sale for around £1. “At the time, there were few books in English on graph theory, and they were all too advanced and detailed, so you wouldn’t find someone attending just eight lectures buying one of them.” He continued: “I decided it would be useful to try and turn them into paperback book form.” The first edition went on sale for £1.50. He has also written several other books on graph theory, and also on its history, of which he is an acknowledged expert.
One of Robin’s most popular books is on How to Solve Sudoku, the now well-known combinatorial puzzle. He explained to us that “when sudoku puzzles came to this country in the autumn of 2004, and more and more newspapers started to include them, I enjoyed learning how to solve them. In mid-2005, there was a general election, and all the journalists were writing on political issues. But as soon as that was over, sudoku reached its peak, and all these journalists wanted to write about it, but didn’t know what to write.” A journalist approached Robin, calling him a sudoku expert, to which he replied, “No, I’m not an expert, I’m just an enthusiast.” Robin also recalls that he was asked how sudoku arose and how to solve it, and replied informing the journalist that Euler had not invented it, in spite of the websites that claimed he did. The next day, Robin’s paragraph appeared in the newspaper.
On the very same day, Robin received a phone call from a publisher inviting him to write a popular book on sudoku. Robin’s initial instinct was to decline, but he then spent a few days researching and developing techniques for solving them. The publishers gave him three weeks to write the book, in a race against Carol Vorderman’s book on sudoku. Robin rose to the challenge, writing it in just eleven days, and it was then published ten days later. Within just a few months it was available in twelve different languages. Robin recalls a highlight of the experience: “The BBC launched a puzzle magazine where my book was on the front cover of issue number one as a free gift. It gave me a real buzz, seeing it in the newspaper shops.”
Many of his books, both on graph theory and on the history of mathematics, are co-edited. He has co-edited with Lowell Beineke (from Indiana, US) a set of six research-based books, Topics in Graph Theory, which was initially intended as only a trilogy. Robin explained to us how the aim
One of Robin’s popular books
is to turn research-level work into surveys that are sometimes more readable by graduate students. This involves writing to the top international researchers in a particular area, and collecting their contributions into a single volume in which the expositions are then made more readable where necessary, and where the organisation, terminology and notation are standardised throughout the book. Although “it’s hard work being a good editor,” Robin enjoys this role, and he continues to edit books, often because “they’re books I’ve always wanted to have on my bookshelf.”
He has also published revised editions of some of his written books. We asked Robin how new editions come about. “For my Introduction to Graph Theory, I initially produced a new edition every eight or ten years.” Differences between editions sometimes arose in terminology; for example, “In the first edition I talked about circuits in graphs, but later ‘cycles’ became more standard.” Other changes were improvements to the exposition, or revisions in the exercises and the inclusion of solutions. In the wake of breakthroughs, major changes needed to take place: “When the first edition appeared, the four colour problem was still unsolved, and later editions had to take account of its solution.”
Robin next explained to us a project he worked on for several years. This project involved converting, into book form, an Open University course on the history of maths that was no longer being presented. He worked on this with two OU colleagues, the historians Jeremy Gray and June Barrow-Green. Volume 1 was published in 2019, and volume 2 in 2022, and Robin jokes, “They’re wonderful for door stops; volume 1 is 500 pages and volume 2 is 700 pages.”
These books present a source-based approach to the history of mathematics, with readers working through original sources, translated where necessary. Robin then went into more detail on some challenges of this project: “In many places we had to improve the exposition, and in order to make it more multicultural, we introduced more Indian and Chinese mathematics and strengthened our treatment of Islamic mathematics. We basically reworked the entire course, incorporating the source material where necessary. My role was mainly (but not entirely) on the editorial side, while June and Jeremy reworked the historical content.”
The four colour theorem states that any map can be coloured so that no two bordering countries are the same colour with at most four colours
The university of the air
Robin’s books on graph theory had their origins in his teaching in various universities. After completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford, he went to the United States for his graduate work, being granted a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. For his initial one-year scholarship, “the English-Speaking Union didn’t just want someone who was going to get a first. They wanted someone with other interests, and I’ve always had a great interest in music.” At Pennsylvania, he was then offered the chance to stay on as a teaching fellow: “I taught some calculus courses and thoroughly enjoyed this, and by the time I’d finished my PhD, I’d already presented 150 lectures, which provided me with a lot of teaching experience.”
Back in the UK, he held positions at Cambridge and Oxford universities, and his interest in teaching led him eventually to the Open University, where he was a member of the mathematics faculty for 37 years. The OU had recently been founded as an innovative new model for university education. Originally envisioned as a ‘university of the air’, students with any level of qualification could earn a university degree through distance learning, with specially designed course materials mailed to students and TV and radio programmes broadcast by the BBC. In addition to remote learning, OU students also attended tutorial classes and summer schools, and it was at the OU’s first maths summer schools in 1971 that Robin first became involved.
“I arrived basically sympathetic to the OU and its maths foundation course, and had two weeks teaching at an OU summer school in north Wales. I came back wildly enthusiastic. The students, many of whom had no previous mathematical background, worked from 9am to 9pm, and then went to the bar for a drink where they chatted about linear algebra. I don’t recall any Oxford students chatting in the bar about linear algebra!”
Robin’s experience at the OU summer schools was so positive that he decided to apply for a longer-term job there, and succeeded: “I was getting very enthusiastic about the whole idea. I was really thinking, this is my place.” He joined the OU full-time just as the first pure maths course was being developed. “I found it very exciting, and quite daunting, not least because I had to make five BBC nationally broadcast television programmes in my first three months, in addition to the appropriate training for this. I think that I was always quite a competent presenter, but I was never a natural; I eventually presented around 30 TV programmes, but was always much happier with my radio broadcasts.”
Robin before he realised he could also buy Chalkdust T-shirts
The TV programmes were originally recorded at Alexandra Palace in north London, the former home of the BBC which had been recently vacated with their studios available for use. “Studio A was the larger one where we usually did the recording, and studio B was the smaller one where we had our rehearsals. We once had to record in studio B, and when I remarked that it seemed rather cramped, the producer said: ‘Don’t criticise: in the 1950s we once broadcast Verdi’s Aida live from here!’ We usually
had rehearsals about a week beforehand, and recording was then a two-day job of incessant rehearsals followed by a one-hour recording session when we had to get everything right.”
Not everyone had such a positive opinion about the Open University. In particular, “the academic world was sceptical, saying that ‘You can’t get a degree just by watching the telly!'” In fact, it was the specially written correspondence texts that provided the main teaching resource, and the television was partly to give visual backup for reading them. Robin enthused: “The original staff members were quite remarkable. They came not only from academia, but also from schools and industry, and were sufficiently motivated about the OU concept to give up their previous full-time jobs to try this crazy thing which might not work.”
Mathematics and music
Robin has taken advantage of his position at the Open University to take courses in some of his other interests. He has always had a strong interest in music, and has been a choral singer since his teenage years, as well as taking part in many musical stage productions. “When I joined the OU, I decided to take advantage of its courses on the fundamentals and history of music, and eventually, combining these with other OU arts courses, I was able to complete a second BA degree, an honours degree in humanities with music.”
Music remains a huge part of his life. He regularly performs in musical theatre and operetta. “I recall appearing in Sweeney Todd, when I had to have my throat cut, with blood everywhere! In the coming year, I hope to take part in stage productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, and in Jesus Christ Superstar.”
It’s clear that, from graph theory to showbusiness, Robin Wilson has a knack for finding harmony in all the things he loves.
Robin appears as Euler in a history of mathematics lecture
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