Ian Stewart Audiobooks

When Terry Pratchett wanted real science threaded through his Discworld, the mathematician he turned to was Ian Stewart. Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, a Fellow of the Royal Society since 2001 and a winner of the Society’s Michael Faraday Prize for communicating science to the public, Stewart is one of Britain’s foremost popularisers of mathematics.

Born in 1945, he has combined serious research on symmetry, chaos and pattern formation with a stream of joyous popular books. With his colleague Jack Cohen, a reproductive biologist, he formed one of popular science’s great double acts, and Pratchett famously made the pair Honorary Wizards of Unseen University in 1999, the same year their collaboration produced The Science of Discworld.

The result is a one of a kind marriage of comic fantasy and hard science, in which wizards and quantum physics share the page as naturally as chalk and blackboard.

All four Science of Discworld volumes sit in our catalogue, every one narrated by Michael Fenton Stevens, whose nimble handling of the books’ unusual structure keeps them flowing beautifully in audio. Each alternates a Pratchett storyline, in which the wizards of Unseen University create and then meddle with our own universe, with chapters by Stewart and Cohen unpacking the real science behind it.

Listeners’ favourite is The Science of Discworld II, rated 4.6 stars from nearly 800 ratings, while Darwin’s Watch is the most reviewed at close to 900. Newcomers should still start with the revised first volume, where the Roundworld experiment begins, before following the series in order.

Scroll down to explore the whole set, wizards, physics and all.