To infinity and beyond ... Firdous Bamij as Srinivasa Ramanujan in Complicite's A Disappearing Number. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
With Complicite's A Disappearing Number on stage at the Barbican, theatre critics across the land are once again dusting off the calculators they optimistically hoped never to use again after leaving school. Mathematics - that seemingly most untheatrical of subjects - is back in the spotlight in this visually stunning play inspired by the life and work of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (who was "discovered" by Cambridge's GH Hardy in 1913).
Complicite's artistic director Simon McBurney isn't the only artist who sees Ramanujan's tantalizing story of East meets West as a tale that needs telling now: a play about the Brahmin clerk recently premiered off-Broadway, a novel based on his life is soon to be published, and there are no fewer than two features about him in development.
But Ramanujan is just the latest mathematician to capture the imagination of writers. The past decade has seen a steady stream of maths-obsessed protagonists, whether in films like Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind and Pi or plays like David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning Proof, Humble Boy and Fermat's Last Tango.
At first glance, it seems counterintuitive that so much maths is popping up in the mainstream at the same time that we receive warning after warning that numeracy is in decline. Upon closer inspection, however, it is clear that many of these movies and plays - Complicite's A Disappearing Number included - aren't bridging the divide between science and art so much as reinforcing it by perpetuating the myth that maths can only be understood by geniuses.
There are plays about mathematicians and science that have avoided patronising their audiences. For me, the best play to combine the science with theatre was Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, which used Heisenberg's uncertainly principle as a metaphor to explore the unknowable nature of a person's intentions. Tom Stoppard's plays Arcadia and Hapgood - much emulated by playwrights, but rarely matched - have also struck a fine balance.
But in terms of avoiding portraying mathematics as accessible to everyone, I'm particularly fond of playwright John Mighton, who is also a fellow at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences at the University of Toronto. He has explored the idea of infinite universes in his play Possible Worlds, which was turned into a film by theatre guru Robert Lepage, and explored artificial intelligence in Half Life, which toured to Glasgow and Perth (and which Alan Rickman reportedly tried to bring to London). His next project is a collaboration with Lepage on adapting The Elegant Universe, physicist Brian Greene's book about string theory.
While most writers lazily lump maths in with madness, Mighton spends a good deal of his time trying to demystify the discipline. He believes that genius is made, not born, and to that end founded a school programme (adopted in the the London borough of Lambeth) called JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) that takes children who are falling behind in maths class and teaches them work that is grade levels ahead.
It's this pervasive "myth of ability" that productions like A Disappearing Number keep alive. More than one person has told me their reaction upon walking out was: "That was really great... but I didn't understand any of it." Too bad, because maths should really be more than just a spectator sport.
