Parsons Lecture: The Mathematical Heart of Tome Stoppard

When Tom Stoppard died last November at the age of 88, he was universally remembered as one of the most impactful and important playwrights of his generation. His first major success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead from 1966, opens with the two minor characters from Hamlet puzzling over the occurrence of 90 heads in as many flips of a coin. This iconic moment is actually the start of a long fascination by the British playwright with mathematics. Over the next five decades, Stoppard’s self-education led him to experiment with the dramatic possibilities of Zeno’s paradoxes, Cantor’s infinities, Euclidean geometry, fractal geometry, Euler’s Bridges of Konigsberg, Fermat’sLast Theorem and the Riemann Hypothesis. “I keep trying to find a play about mathematics,” he wrote to a friend in 1985, “There is one somewhere, but I can’t find it.” With the help of some local actors, we’ll follow Stoppard’s mathematical search—from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern all the way to Leopoldstadt, which won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2020—in an attempt to understand the playwright’s belief in the potential of mathematics to tell human stories.

Stephen Abbott is a professor of mathematics at Middlebury College. He has also held visiting positions at Saint Olaf College, the University of Virginia, Cambridge University, and the University of Otago in New Zealand. Trained in real and functional analysis, Professor Abbott has a longstanding interest in the connections between mathematics and theater that culminated in the recent publication of The Proof Stage (Princeton University Press, 2023). He is also the author of Understanding Analysis (Springer, 2015), former editor of Math Horizons, book review editor for The Mathematical Intelligencer, and theater events chair for the Bridges Organization, a professional association dedicated to exploring the intersection of mathematics and art.

Join us on April 2 at 7:00 pm in the Blue Ridge Room in the Highsmith Student Union for this event.

This event is FREE and open to anyone.

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