Prof. Dylan Hewit is a former Principal Teaching Fellow in Experimental Design in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London, where he also served as one of the College’s Tutors. Renowned for his clarity of teaching and his wry sense of humour, he attracted generations of students to one of the Department’s most popular courses, Games, Risks, and Decisions, which blended probability, behavioural economics, and strategic reasoning.
Hewit’s research contributions lie primarily in the field of Experimental Design, where he developed frameworks for adaptive experiments that were later adopted by departments as diverse as Medicine, Chemical Engineering, and even Music Technology. He has a knack for bridging abstract mathematical principles with practical applications, often remarking that “the true elegance of mathematics is revealed when it solves a messy problem in the real world.”
During his tenure, Hewit was a sought-after collaborator. He co-designed clinical trials with the Faculty of Medicine, consulted on aerodynamics experiments in the Department of Aeronautics, and even advised on the design of cognitive psychology studies examining decision-making under uncertainty. His published work is frequently cited not only in mathematics journals but also in applied sciences, testament to the wide reach of his methodology.
Outside of research and teaching, Hewit played a quiet but significant role as a mentor. Many former students recall his open-door policy and his tendency to recommend books that lay far outside the mathematical canon – ranging from Marcus Aurelius to Jorge Luis Borges – as a way of broadening their intellectual horizons.
Upon retirement, Hewit settled on a modest farm in Donnithorpe, where he has cultivated a quieter life centred on beekeeping, viticulture, and the study of local folklore. His fascination with systems and equilibria, once applied to human behaviour and scientific trials, now finds expression in the delicate balance of hives and orchards. He occasionally writes essays for obscure agricultural journals, applying mathematical insights to questions of hive dynamics and sustainable farming.
Though he has stepped back from full-time academia, Hewit continues to give occasional guest lectures at both Oxford and Imperial College, where his talks – mixing technical precision with philosophical reflection – remain popular. Rumours persist that he is drafting a book tentatively titled Games People Play, a hybrid of memoir, mathematics, and cultural critique.
Colleagues sometimes joke that he has become “a gentleman farmer-philosopher,” but those who know him well see the continuity: a lifelong search for patterns, whether in data, in human behaviour, or in the rhythms of nature.
A Conversation with Prof. Dylan Hewit
On mathematics, archives, and the shadowed legacy of Paul Gordon James
Interviewer (I): Professor Hewit, thank you for inviting us to your farm in Donnithorpe. It’s an unusual setting for a discussion of forgotten diaries and Victorian ciphers.
Dylan Hewit (DH): (laughs) Well, yes. Most people expect dust, libraries, and leather armchairs. Instead, they get bees. I like to say the hives are my living archives — complex, humming, ordered but inscrutable. Much like Paul Gordon James’s notebooks, actually.
I: Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you first stumble upon James’s diaries?
DH: Quite by accident. During my years at Imperial, I had access to certain departmental archives — boxes of forgotten papers, abandoned lecture notes, examination scripts dating back to the College’s early years. In one corner of the Mathematics Department’s basement was a neglected cabinet. Inside, among routine minutes of faculty meetings, I found a bundle of leather-bound notebooks, faintly marked with the initials P.G.J..
At first, I thought they were student scribblings. Then I realised these were diaries — densely written, alternating between mathematical speculations, accounts of London life in the 1890s, and what can only be called… confessions.
I: Confessions?
DH: Yes. James was not only a mathematician but also a witness to some extraordinary — and disturbing — events. His diary from 1892, which we published as The Night’s Cipher, recounts his entanglement with secret societies, Jack the Ripper theories, and the shadowy experiments of Reginald Dixon. It read less like history and more like a fever dream — yet the precision of detail, the references to College laboratories, even to specific streets in South Kensington and Docklands, convinced me there was truth woven into the gothic fabric.
I: Some critics argue you are blurring scholarship with sensationalism. How do you respond?
DH: I understand the unease. But to dismiss James’s testimony as “mere sensationalism” would be like dismissing Newton’s alchemical papers as irrelevant. Every age conceals truths in forms we later find intriguing. My task is not to sanitise but to present. I make no claim that James was always reliable — indeed, I suspect he himself was unsure where the line between reality and dream lay. But unreliability itself is data. It tells us something about the intellectual climate of late-Victorian London.
I: What persuaded you to publish The Night’s Cipher rather than leave it as an archival curiosity?
DH: Retirement. (smiles) I had spent decades designing experiments for others — neat, bounded, conclusive. The diaries were the opposite: sprawling, contradictory, maddening. They demanded interpretation. In some ways, I think James was speaking directly to us, to posterity. He writes in one entry: “If these pages survive, they will not vindicate me, but they will at least trouble the waters of certainty.” That felt like a challenge I could not refuse.
I: Were you ever concerned about reputational risk — that colleagues would see this as eccentric, even fringe?
DH: (pauses) Of course. Mathematicians like clean theorems. Diaries about opium dens and artificial beings don’t fit our mould. But I suppose I had earned enough eccentricity credit by then. And perhaps… I wanted to rebel, a little. After years of teaching probability and rational choice, to confront something irrational and undecidable was liberating.
I: When you read James’s writing, what impression do you have of the man himself?
DH: That’s the question I ask myself every time. (leans forward) If I’m honest, I admire his courage and wit. James would never have written of himself in heroic terms — he was far too self-critical for that. But as a reader, you can’t miss it. In the margins, between his mathematical speculations and his accounts of danger, he comes through as a real hero.
I: What can readers expect from future volumes?
DH: We are preparing the second diary, provisionally titled The Mechanist. It follows James deeper into the underworld of Victorian science, with new figures — hypnotists, engineers, political conspirators. If The Night’s Cipher was about the boundary between man and machine, The Mechanist is about spectacle and control.
I: Do you believe James intended these writings as literature, memoir, or coded record?
DH: All three, perhaps. He was mathematician enough to leave puzzles, poet enough to dramatise his own fears, and confessor enough to lay bare his soul. The diaries refuse to sit still. That’s their genius.
I: One final question: Do you ever dream of James?
DH: (smiles faintly) Yes. Sometimes I wake convinced I have been walking with him through fog-bound London, listening to his voice, half mathematical, half prophetic. And then I come here, to the hives, and think: perhaps the dream is still going on, only the actors have changed.