Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.

In 1992, when I was 16, I moved to the United States to start working on my Ph.D. at Princeton University in New Jersey.

What interests me is the connection between maths and the real world.

The accuracy of Wikipedia can be dodgy in some places, but in maths, it's really quite good.

When I was seven or eight, whenever I was getting too rowdy at night, my parents would give me a maths workbook to work on to quieten me down.