The writer is professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and author of ‘Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity’
Our kitchen at home is decorated with a series of coloured tiles. We installed it just after I’d seen Gerhard Richter’s exhibition “4900 Farben”, where he filled 196 canvases with five-by-five grids of coloured squares placed according to chance. Wanting to mimic this, I decided to arrange our tiles using the decimal expansion of pi which starts 3.14159 . . . and then heads off to infinity with a string of numbers that satisfies all the criteria for a random sequence.
However, when my wife reviewed my plan, she was unimpressed because: “You can’t have three red tiles next to each other.” I protested that randomness creates these unexpected clusters, but her artistic eye prevailed. The result is a kitchen that looks random but subtly avoids repeated colours, shaped more by her design than by mathematical chance.