I was terrible at maths, but I could grasp science, and I used to love to read about the lives of the scientists. I wanted to be a scientist or an inventor.
Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.
I'm writing a book called 'The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus' about the maths of Christmas: how to set up a secret Santa so it's totally fair; how to decorate your tree mathematically; how to win at Monopoly.
There's barely any aspect of our modern lives that hasn't had a mathematical contribution at some point and yet, if you asked the average person, they might think that maths is just difficult, irrelevant and uninteresting.
I think people have this hang-up from school that maths is this dusty old textbook that was finished hundreds of years ago, and all the answers are in the back. Whereas in my job I struggle to find anything that maths can't offer an interesting perspective on.
One of the problems maths struggles with is that it's invisible. We haven't got explosions on our side.
If you go to Africa and you're white, you're probably not going to get that much work either. But the fact is that there is a longer history of black integration in the U.S. I don't have any resentment about this: I did the maths, calculated it against my ambition and decided to leave England.
I'm not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths - grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic.