Keith Devlin, mathematician

On your waiting-to-read shelf? “I rarely read books not connected with my research or my own writing.” This is not restrictive, he says, “since both my research and writing span broad areas, and the books pile grows faster than I can deplete it”. He even wrote about The Da Vinci Code (Bantam, 2003). How was it? “Michael Brown can tell a good story in a formulaic fashion,” he says. “But I found his terse, breathless style annoying, and persevered because I had agreed to write about it.” Devlin reckons Brown got about half of the maths wrong, “almost certainly because he used popular sources…