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 reviewer who once served on the Olivier Awards Committee.

Latest Theatre Reviews

Peter Grimes, Royal Opera, May 2026

May 7, 2026

A first rate performance under the baton of Jakub Hruša, but a second rate production by Deborah Warner. It was however elevated by Allan Clayton’s superb performance of Grimes himself. With Bryn Terfel as Captain Balstrode it should all have been more engaging, but the dull production with annoyingly irrelevant dancers spoiled it — see …

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Flying Dutchman, Welsh National Opera, April 2026

April 18, 2026

This was a musical treat under the baton of Tomáš Hanus, who is sadly leaving the WNO after ten years. He fully brought out the energy and inspiration that Wagner put into this work — the first of his extraordinary music dramas — which changed the face of opera. See my review in The Article.

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Turn of the Screw, Royal Opera Linbury Studio, March 2026

March 28, 2026

This was a great disappointment. Ambiguity is the essence of this Benjamin Britten opera. Are the ghosts real or are they figments of the young governess’s imagination? A production may point one way or the other, but this one used clever lighting to simply make everything very spooky. It missed the ambiguity completely — see …

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Siegfried, Royal Opera, March 2026

March 20, 2026

This was the third instalment of Barrie Kosky’s new Ring for The Royal Opera. It’s an opera that can drag a bit in Act I, but under the baton of Antonio Pappano and the stage direction of Barrie Kosky there was never a dull moment. Added to this, Andreas Schager was superb in the title …

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Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, ENO, February 2026

February 17, 2026

This opera emerged from an earlier Singspiel, and was created by Kurt Weill and Bertoldt Brecht, who wrote the unsettling libretto exposing a dark side to capitalism, where anything goes as long as you can pay. It was produced in 1930 before Hitler came to power, an event that compelled Weill and his wife the …

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Boris Godunov, Royal Opera, January 2026

January 31, 2026

This second revival of the Royal Opera’s production from 2016 was a triumph for Bryn Terfel who gave a beautifully nuanced performance in the title role. The opera features a densely packed sequence of events in a formative period of modern Russia at what in England would be the Tudor period. See my review in …

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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