Ramanujan Play to Debut Down Under

November 21, 2008

Simon McBurney's revelatory play about mathematics, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and G.H. Hardy, titled A Disappearing Number, is making it's way around the world. It's latest appearance is in Sydney, Australia.

"The thought of somebody who was completely uneducated coming out with this hugely revealing vision on the world is perhaps a universal story of a kind of hope that we all have that somehow there are people who are capable of extraordinary things and who can reveal to us new facets of our human life," McBurney told the Sydney Morning Herald.

At the same time, "for the story not to feel like it is a relic from the past—even a fascinating one," McBurney noted that he had to find a "character or characters who are rooted in the present modern world."

McBurney's solution was to introduce a contemporary female mathematician fascinated by Ramanujan, while putting mathematics itself in the spotlight. "Unlike a play like Proof, I wanted to see if there was a way for the mathematics to be foregrounded," McBurney said.

In developing the play, McBurney collaborated with Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and musician Nitin Sawhney, an expert on Indian classical music. "One of the fascinating things was to discover the mathematical basis of that music," McBurney said.

McBurney also became fascinated by aspects of mathematics itself. "There is not one infinity, but an infinity of infinities," he observed. "And they are all different . . . some infinities are bigger than others."

McBurney's play also takes on the question of links between mathematics and mortality. "What interested me are the moments where mathematics and human vulnerability or human experience coincide," he said.

"If time is continuous, we are continuously linked to the past and future, and if space is continuous, we are continuously linked to the absent—those who have died and those who are to come," McBurney remarked. "In that sense, the continuity of mathematics provides an extraordinary consolation."

Source: Sydney Morning Herald, Nov. 3, 2008.