Marcus du Sautoy Does Creative Dance Calculations

May 23, 2008

Writing in The Guardian on April 29, Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy said he had spent a month with a group of musicians and dancers exploring "how ideas of mathematics can be woven into a piece of theatre that has ended up pushing all our boundaries."

Collaborating on a work with Sautoy were choreographer Carol Brown, composer Dorothy Ker, and sculptor Kate Allen. "For all of them," said Sautoy, "questions of navigating space are of central importance." Called "The 19th Step," their work refers to a story by Jorge Luis Borges, who showed, according to Sautoy, an "obsession with mathematical ideas of infinity and the nature of space."

In "The 19th Step," dancers "explore a prism of hexagons as a shape to navigate," according to Sautoy. As he and his collaborators spent one morning learning the tango, Sautoy's "mathematical eyes couldn't help seeing a dance full of geometry." By following the lines drawn on the floor by a tango dancer, Sautoy indicated that he saw the "arcs of circles and lines that the Ancient Greek geometers used. I found myself performing a tango-inspired dance to bring alive the mathematical construction of a perfect hexagon, surely a first in the history of mathematics and dance."

Sautoy is the author of Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician's Journey Through Symmetry, which was the subject of "Math in the News" (2/20/08).

Source: Gaurdian.co.uk (April 29)