A Disappearing Number
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A Disappearing Number is a 2007 play. It was inspired by the collaboration during the 1910s between two of the 20th century's most remarkable pure mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a poor Brahmin from South India, and Cambridge don G.H. Hardy.
It was a co-production between UK-based theatre company Complicite, Ruhrfestspiele, Wiener Festwochen, Holland Festival and Theatre Royal Plymouth. A Disappearing Number premiered in Plymouth, toured the internationally, and played at the Barbican in Autumn 2007. It was directed by Simon McBurney with music by Nitin Sawhney. The production lasted about 110 minutes with no intermission.
[edit] Plot
Ramanujan first attracted Hardy’s attention by proving that the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + ... would equal minus one-twelfth. Hardy realised that this confusing presentation was an application of the Riemann zeta function with s = -1.[1]
The play includes live tabla playing which “morphs seductively into pure mathematics”, as the Financial Times review put it, “especially when … its rhythms shade into chants of number sequences reminiscent of the libretto to Philip Glass’s Einstein On The Beach. One can hear the beauty of the sequences without grasping the rules that govern them.”
The play had two strands of narrative. The show interwove the passionate intellectual relationship between Hardy and the more intuitive Ramanujan, with the present-day story of a man (intitially played by McBurney) and his maths lecturer partner. She travels to India in Ramanujan’s footsteps and eventually dies. He follows, to get closer to her ghost. Meanwhile, 100 years previously, Ramanujan is travelling in the opposite direction, making the trip to England that eventually kills him. Partition (as a maths concept) is paralleled appositely with the partition of India and Pakistan, and diverging and converging series in mathematics become a metaphor for the Indian diaspora.
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[edit] References
- ^ Marcus du Sautoy, The Music of the Primes
