Subject: [HM] Mathematics as Theater
From: Bill Everdell (Everdell@aol.com)
Date: Fri Apr 28 2000 - 07:40:37 EDT
Here is a review (just the first few paragraphs, so as not to clog the list)
by Bruce Weber in the New York Times of a play that is opening in sunny New
York City this week. I thought we all ought to be interested in the steady
progress that 20th-century mathematics is making in the consciousness of
non-mathematicians these days.
I have the whole review on file and can send it to those who ask me in an
e-mail.
Bill Everdell, Brooklyn
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April 27, 2000
'The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem':
M (Mathematics) + E (Expostulation) - C (Clarity) = ?
By BRUCE WEBER
The number to remember in "The Five Hysterical Girls
Theorem," a new play by Rinne Groff at the Connelly Theater in the East
Village, is 147,573,952,589,676,412,927. That's 147 quintillion. Don't think
you can remember it? Well, it's the same as 2 to the 67th power minus 1.
Which is not a prime number, as it turns out, and that is also of some
pertinence, though why it is pertinent I'm not sure. It does, for some
reason, cause a romantic young mathematician to drown himself in the ocean.
"A very terrifying number," he says, before flinging himself into
the surf. "How could one begin to plumb its depths? Our brains are
forever evolving, but to such petty ends: shelter from the rain,
knowledge of the berries, victory over the encroaching predators.
Why could we not develop so as to see reality in a hundred dimensions,
or to grasp an integer as vast as that?"
In this challenging, willfully baffling and finally irritating play,
staged as an absurdist comedy by the Target Margin Theater and the
director David Herskovits, the uncertainty is the point, I think --
that for all their beauty, numbers
don't explain much.
It's a reasonable enough premise, and that mathematicians are prone
to pomposity as they seek to explain the world anyway is an apt focus
of satire. Indeed, there is estimable ambition here, in the
playwright's themes -- a lot of love and death and betrayal -- and
stylized language.
But for all the playwright's obvious research I'm not sure she
understands the math, and I'm not sure she cares, and largely as a
result her play's expostulations on the power and impotence of
numbers are too oblique and disjointed to resonate with coherence.
A little knowledge is, in fact, a dangerous thing.
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