The Drama of Science Why a new play has theater junkies sitting side by side with physicists and mathematicians.
by Jennifer Guerra
A British play will make its exclusive U.S debut in Ann Arbor tonight. The play is called "A Disappearing Number." It won the British equivalent of the Tony Award for Best Play last year...and it's part of the University Musical Society's season this year.
As Michigan Radio's Jennifer Guerra reports, it's a play that will have theater goers sitting side by side with physicists and mathematicians.
"I'd like to run through some very basic math ideas which are integral to the evening."
Oh no, don't worry, we didn't accidentally stumble into a math lecture. This is the opening scene from "A Disappearing Number." It's the latest play by the British theater company, Complicite.
Now, on a very basic level, the play has two plot lines. One is about the collaboration between two mathematicians – G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. Their story dates back to 1913. That's when the British mathematician – Hardy – was working at Cambridge. One morning he received a letter one morning from an unknown Hindu clerk in Madras named Ramanujan.
As the play's director, Simon McBurney explains, Hardy brought Ramanujan's letter to a colleague, "and they started going through the results and by midnight they knew that the writer of these manuscripts was the greatest mathematical genius they had ever encountered."
So Hardy plucks Ramanujan from India and brings him to work in Cambridge.
The second plot line is about a relationship that takes place in the present. McBurney explains that the relationship is "between a British mathematician - a white teacher - and an Indian businessman who is American. They meet together, and one of the things he says is that he's always had fear of infinity. And she laughs and she begins to explain how mathematics can describe infinity."
"And really," McBurney continues, "what I wanted to do was set to these mathematical ideas within an entirely human context. Because it seemed to me that one of the most extraordinary thing about mathematics is its ability to describe the unknown, the invisible, the apparently impossible."
Which McBurney says in many ways is what artists try to do, too. One of the ideas that pops up throughout the play is taken from a quote by the British mathematician, G.H. Hardy. In the quote, Hardy compares the two seemingly disparate disciplines of art and math:
But a mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. And beauty is the first test.
Jeff Lagarias is a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan. He says he's "used mathematics in my own work that people did 200 years ago. It's beautiful."
Lagarias has poured over Ramanujan's manuscripts and mathematical functions for decades. He doesn't think that a night at the theater is really going to do much in the way of explaining Ramanujan's math.
"But," he says, "theater can explain things about emotions, how one tries to solve problems. And doing mathematics or doing any severe quest where one is trying to prove something for a very long time - that's certainly a fair topic suitable for drama."
It's one that's been played out on the stage for centuries. Theater scholars point to Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus in the late 1500's...all the way up to recent Broadway hits like Proof and Copenhagen.
But for McBurney, it's not enough to just have the theme of the play revolve around science and math. "A Disappearing Number" uses multi-media technology – like videos and projectors and laptops – to transport the audience from modern day Cambridge to 1913 India, and everywhere in between.
"One of the points of that," says McBurney, "is the feeling that I have of continuity with the past. Because in a sense there is – if we think of the numbers in mathematics as being continuous...such as all the numbers between 1 and 2..."
On second thought, maybe we'll leave THAT math lesson for the actors to explain.
"A Disappearing Number" makes its Ann Arbor debut tonight. You can find more details at www.ums.org
