About
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.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”.
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.
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im on ma cool jay