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Boring
Biography
My parents emigrated from the
Punjab in India to Britain in 1950. I grew up in Wellington,
Somerset, and then went to Imperial College London, where I
studied physics, before completing a PhD in particle physics
at Cambridge University and at CERN, Geneva. |
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In 1990
I joined the BBC's Science Department, where I was a producer
and director in programmes such as Tomorrow's World and
Horizon. In 1996 I directed Fermat's Last Theorem, a BAFTA
award winning documentary about the world's most notorious
mathematical problem. The documentary was also aired in
America as part of the NOVA series. The Proof, as it was
re-titled, was nominated for an
Emmy. |
| The story of this
notorious mathematical problem was also the subject of my
first book, imaginatively entitled Fermat's Last Theorem. This was the first book about mathematics
to become a No.1 bestseller in the UK. In America the book was
called "Fermat's Enigma". |
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In 1997 I began working on my second book, The Code Book, a history of codes
and codebreaking. As well as explaining the science of codes
and describing the impact of codebreaking on history, the book
also shows that cryptography is more important today than ever
before. After all, we live in the Information Age, and one of
the best ways to protect information is to encrypt
it. |
| The Code Book has resulted in a return to television for me. I
presented The Science of Secrecy, a 5-part series for Channel 4. The
stories in the series range from the cipher that sealed the fate
of Mary Queen of Scots to the coded Zimmermann Telegram that
changed the course of the First World War. Other programmes
discuss how two great nineteenth century geniuses raced to
decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs and how modern encryption can
guarantee privacy on the Internet. Right now, I am doing more
television and radio. I
have just published my third book, Big
Bang, a history of cosmology. |
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| This is a fairly brief
and staid biography, but if you want to find out more then
please check out my main
biography which has more gossip and
trivia. |
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