Gottfried Leibniz wrote that music’s pleasure consisted of “unconscious counting” or an “arithmetical exercise of which we are unaware.

We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that’s much closer to art and literature than any science.

When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge, and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger’s that year.

I hate textbooks. I hate how they shoehorn even the most incongruous words – like ‘cup’ and ‘bookcase,’ or ‘pencil’ and ‘ashtray’ – onto the same page, and then call it ‘vocabulary.’ In a conversation, the language is always fluid, moving, and you have to move with it. You walk and talk and see where the words come from, and where they should go. It was in this way that I learned to count like a Viking.

Life is going to be complex, and the only way we’re able navigate our way through it at all is by living as best we can and absorbing those experiences and somehow making intuitive responses in future situations that resemble them in some way.

Change appears to us mysterious because it is invisible. It is impossible to see a tree grow tall or a man grow old, except with the precarious imagination of hindsight. A tree is small, and later it is tall. A man is young, and later he is old. A people are at peace, and later they are at war. In each case, the intermediate states are at once infinitely many and infinitely complex, which is why they exceed our finite perceptions.

I can well imagine that certain writers, even writers that we’d consider today very great writers, may not necessarily have tested highly on IQ just because of their numerical skills, or maybe they may not be very good at memory, and are not particularly good at these kinds of tests.

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

I changed my name because it didn’t fit with the way I saw myself.

I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his ‘Raindrop Prelude.’