Mark Ronan
Mark Ronan

Professor of Mathematics. Author of Symmetry and the Monster — a popular account of one of the great quests in mathematics. Specialist in Mesopotamian history and literature. Cold-water swimmer. Opera reviews.

Latest Theatre Reviews

Die Fledermaus, Grange Festival, July 2025

July 7, 2025

Hugely entertaining shenanigans on stage, all sung and spoken in a wonderful English version with jokes comprehensible to a modern audience — see my review in The Article. This performance rounded out opera productions at the Grange Festival for summer 2025, though they still have other stage performances in store.

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The Marriage of Figaro, Glyndebourne, June 2025

July 3, 2025

Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro may be a perfect opera, but in the wrong hands it can seem to drag towards the end. Here that was very much not the case, and this new production at Glyndebourne succeeded very well indeed, encouraged by a very receptive audience — see my review in The Article.

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Mazeppa, Grange Park Opera, June 2025

July 3, 2025

Mazeppa himself is sometimes regarded as a Ukrainian patriot against the Russians, but the truth is somewhat more complicated. Sweden was at that time, along with Russia, a great power in the region, but for more details see my review of this furiously compelling opera.

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Merry Widow, Opera Holland Park, June 2025

June 24, 2025

Sadly this delightful Viennese operetta was converted into a story set in New York dealing with the criminal underworld. This necessitated wholesale changes to the libretto, and the performers were required to speak in New York accents, which really didn’t work — see my review in The Article.

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Simon Boccanegra, Grange Park Opera, June 2025

June 19, 2025

Political intrigue, paternity and poison are the principal ingredients driving this Verdi opera. The story, set in 14th century Genoa, may be ahistorical in detail but the ambitions driving it are not, and there really was a pirate turned governor named Simon Boccanegra — see my review in The Article.

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The Flying Dutchman, Opera Holland Park, May 2025

June 4, 2025

A fine but simple staging of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman was given a superb performance at Opera Holland Park. The two choruses sang extremely well, and those from the Dutchman’s ghostly ship appeared in threatening guise like figures from some modern terrorist group. Altogether a wonderful experience — see my review in the Article.

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Latest Journalism

The brilliance of Babylonian Mathematics

The achievements of Babylonian mathematics are still poorly recognised, but the people in ancient Iraq treated numbers in the abstract way we do today, rather than as lengths, areas or volumes. This began before 2000 BC, and enabled them to develop mathematical formulas in the modern sense. In particular they not only knew what we call Pythagoras’s theorem but had a formula for producing side lengths for right-angled triangles, something the Greeks could not do well over a millennium and a half later. See my article in Engelsberg Ideas.

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How modern Numbers came to Europe

Our modern representation of numbers is the result of a complex process that can be traced back to the ancient Near East, via India and the Arab world — see my article in Engelsberg Ideas.

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The Pythagoras Myth

Contrary to popular belief, Pythagoras was by no means the discoverer of his eponymous theorem – it had already been known for over a thousand years. In popular perception however he became the source of the famous theorem about right-angled triangles: The Square on the Hypotenuse is equal to the Sum of the Squares on the Other Two Sides, a great result – serious mathematics indeed. But it has little to do with Pythagoras — see my article in Engelsberg Ideas.

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Feature

Symmetry and the Monster is the story of a mathematical quest that began two hundred years ago in revolutionary France, led to the biggest collaboration ever between mathematicians across the world, and revealed the ‘Monster’ – not monstrous at all, but a structure of exquisite beauty and complexity.

This book tells for the first time the fascinating story of the biggest theorem ever to have been proved. Mark Ronan graphically describes not only the last few decades of the chase, but also some of the more interesting byways, including my personal favourite, the one I called “Monstrous Moonshine”.

John H. Conway, von Neumann Chair of Mathematics, Princeton University

Opera on 3: for the BBC Radio 3 broadcast (on 19 November 2016) of Parsifal from this summer’s Bayreuth Festival, I was the guest with presenter Christopher Cook. We discussed the opera and its production, which I reviewed for the Daily Telegraph on 27 July 2016.

Truth and Beauty: The Hidden World of Symmetry

On the face of it, symmetry may seem simple, but diving beneath the surface reveals a whole new world. Over the last 100 years, the mathematical idea of symmetry has proved to be a guiding light for the world of physics. But what does a mathematician mean by symmetry? How does this link in with the world around us? And could it be the key to the mysterious ‘Theory of Everything’?

This was a BBC Radio programme on Symmetry in the Naked Scientists series. Here is the link