I was born in Milverton in the southwest of England, where my parents had emigrated from a village near Phagwara in Punjab. Even though my family has been farmers for generations, my mum always emphasised the importance of education and my dad got me interested in how things work. My elder sister made sure I did my homework. As a child, I became passionately interested in science and maths and it was not long before I was doing well at the primary school and ? at the age of nine ? I declared that I wanted to become a nuclear physicist.

I was attracted to science because I was growing up in an era when people were landing on the moon and the use of computers was becoming widespread in the UK. Besides, I always loved watching TV, and the 1970s was great for scientists on the box. Astronomers like Carl Sagan and Patrick Moore had become prime-time TV stars. I’d stare at the sky and ask questions like why the sky is blue or why the sun seems to shine forever. However, the one disappointing thing about England was that it was very urbanised. All places were so well-lit ? very unlike my parents’ native place in Punjab, where you could see stars in the night sky.

I was fortunate to get excellent teachers at school who would never get annoyed at my inquisitiveness. Then there was our maths teacher who told us about wondrous mathematical problems that nobody could crack. For instance, I got to know about the most notorious problem called Fermat’s Last Theorem (FLT) which is a bit like the Pythagoras theorem you learn in school. It seems so simple but no one could solve it for 350 years.

Later when I grew up, I did a doctorate in physics. But I was restless to know more. So I broke into the television world with a stint at BBC TV. That was in 1993, when US-based mathematician Andrew Wiles cracked FLT. Immediately I planned to make a documentary on the mathematician. When the programme became a big hit, I followed it up with a book called Fermat’s Enigma. Ever since, there has been no looking back, and I started out on a fascinating career in science writing.