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

Albert Herring, English National Opera, Oct 2025

October 14, 2025

Once again the English National Opera defy the Arts Council which has stripped them of funding. This semi-staged version of Britten’s Albert Herring was a musical triumph under the baton of Daniel Cohen, and after another performance in London it moves to Salford, which is partly what the Arts Council wants. Great musicality — see …

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Cinderella, English National Opera, Sept 2025

September 29, 2025

This engaging and eclectic new production by Julia Burbach gave us Rossini’s Cenerentola in a form where the pompous father seemed relatively normal. He hides huge insecurity behind a pretentious exterior, but Burbach managed to avoid making him a complete buffoon — see my review in The Article.

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Tosca, Royal Opera, Sept 2025

September 13, 2025

What a wonderful performance to open the 2025/26 season at the Royal Opera. This new production of Tosca by the Royal Opera’s artistic director Oliver Mears is updated to modern times, and superbly conducted by music director Jakub Hruša. It elicited huge applause from the audience — see my review in The Article.

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Katya Kabanova, Glyndebourne, Aug 2025

August 6, 2025

Like the mighty Volga, the music of Janáček sweeps all before it in this short opera based on a Russian play. The production contains incomprehensible allusions such as a red angel, but it matters little. The musical performance was outstanding — see my review in The Article.

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Hamlet, Four Shorts, and Orphée at the Buxton Festival, July 2025

July 16, 2025

This was my first encounter with the Hamlet of French composer Ambroise Thomas, and very moving it was. The Festival also performed a brief seventeenth opera, Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, plus four short operas, two of which were interesting — see my review in The Article.

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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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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