{"id":833,"date":"2026-02-02T15:04:26","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T20:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/?p=833"},"modified":"2026-02-03T16:57:20","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T21:57:20","slug":"a-disappearing-number-a-mathematical-path-to-the-hereafter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/a-disappearing-number-a-mathematical-path-to-the-hereafter\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A Disappearing Number’: A Mathematical Path To The Hereafter?"},"content":{"rendered":"

You could count the prizes \u201cA Disappearing Number\u201d won in England in 2007: Evening Standard Award for Best Play, Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, Critics\u2019 Circle Theatre award for Best New Play. Or you could just sit back and let the arithmetic wash over you (and the rest of Central Square Theater) as Underground Railway Theater unfurls its quite credible staging of this numerical fantasia created by British polymath Simon McBurney and his troupe, Complicit\u00e9.<\/p>\n

One of URT\u2019s Catalyst Collaborative@MIT<\/a> projects marrying stage to science, \u201cA Disappearing Number\u201d<\/a> intersperses the early 20th-century collaboration of Oxford don G.H. Hardy and Indian math prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan with a fictional, contemporary love story involving a British math professor and an Indian American hedge-fund manager dealing (literally and symbolically) in futures.<\/p>\n

Perhaps appropriately, the threads are tied together by a self-described string theorist who only steps out of the lecture hall at the end, when he and the hedge-fund manager meet on a plane and then on a riverbank in India. This perky professor does, however, inform us at the outset that, while the theater surrounding it is artifice, the math onstage is real.<\/p>\n

As a play, \u201cA Disappearing Number\u201d bears all the earmarks of a work created by committee: it\u2019s cobbled together, marred by random snatches of this and that, and is far from exquisitely written. The beauty, as it were, is in the numbers, which in Elaine Vaan Hogue\u2019s fluid staging hurtle toward us among various expanding and dividing patterns, their pulsing echoed in the Indian music and dance woven throughout the theater piece.<\/p>\n

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Paul Melendy, Jacob Athyal, Christine Hamel and Amar Srivastava in \u201cA Disappearing Number.\u201d (A.R. Sinclair Photography)<\/p>\n

\u201cA mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns,\u201d Hardy wrote in \u201cA Mathematician\u2019s Apology,\u201d adding that \u201cbeauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.\u201d \u201cA Disappearing Number\u201d sets out to demonstrate that not only is math gorgeous but that, stretched toward Infinity, it may also be our closest path to the hereafter.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll admit that I don\u2019t know a Mandelbrot fractal from a Manischewitz wine. But that didn\u2019t stop me from admiring the \u201cpure mathematics\u201d that exercise such a hold on Hardy, Ramanujan and the play\u2019s Ruth Minnen, a Brunel University professor whose lecture on infinite series (culled from an equation of Ramanujan\u2019s) kicks off Complicit\u00e9\u2019s fragmented meditation.<\/p>\n

Among her listeners is brash businessman Al Cooper, who has wandered into Ruth\u2019s lecture from an adjacent conference and hits on her at the end of the talk. He is interested in Infinity, he says, \u201cbecause that\u2019s where I\u2019m going to go when I die.\u201d His more immediate concern, however, is another numerical series: the digits that comprise Ruth\u2019s phone number.<\/p>\n

Al and Ruth\u2019s story is, of course, made up \u2014 and Ruth, like Ramanujan, dies young. (This is no spoiler as we watch both deaths unfold repeatedly and largely wordlessly even before they happen.)<\/p>\n

This leaves Al to contemplate the continuum of space and time, represented by the addition of ever-diminishing numbers, that he hopes will lead him to some posthumous form of Ruth (whose not-insignificant phone number he spends a large part of the play trying to get transferred, via an outsourced, disembodied representative of British Telephone, to his own mobile device). The true story of Hardy and Ramanujan\u2019s collaboration \u2013 which the former called \u201cthe one romantic incident in my life\u201d \u2014 is both more abstract and, in the theater piece, more remote.<\/p>\n

Ramanujan, an unschooled mathematical savant working as a clerk in Madras, was also something of a mystic. \u201cAn equation for me,\u201d he opined, \u201chas no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.\u201d He is easily the play\u2019s most fascinating figure, but many of his scenes are played in silhouette, behind a screen, in one of the upstage blocks that comprise the set (and serve as screens for the ongoing parade of projections). He only comes center stage, briefly, during his ill-fated tenure in Cambridge with Hardy. (A strict vegetarian and workaholic, he contracted tuberculosis and died soon after returning to India.) Paul Melendy\u2019s crisp, obsessive Hardy, too, is often confined to an upstage cubicle. So the production sometimes seems a hypnotic swirl without a center.<\/p>\n

But what a brainy kaleidoscope it is, with God, as Ramanujan might remark, in the details \u2013 some of them, including Ruth\u2019s passport, birth-control pills and dog-eared copy of \u201cA Mathematician\u2019s Apology,\u201d almost fetishistically treated. And when a cosmic barrage of numbers or equations isn\u2019t rushing at us, other projections are: vividly hued temples and the bustle of India, rain exploding like fireworks, scenery speeding by the windows of a train.<\/p>\n

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Christine Hamel in \u201cA Disappearing Number.\u201d (A.R. Sinclair Photography)<\/p>\n

The Indian rhythms, in both the tabla doodlings of musicians Ryan Meyer and Brian Fairley and the dance interludes choreographed by Aparna Sindhoor, lend both precision and East-West atmosphere. There are lively performances, too, especially by Christine Hamel as Ruth, caught between Ramanujan\u2019s spell and Al\u2019s less aesthetic and ascetic orbit, and Amar Srivastava as the ever closing, ever questing Al.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Disappearing Number\u201d may not be a thoroughly satisfying drama, but it adds up to a heady intellectual and emotional spectacle.
\nCarolyn Clay was for many years the theater editor and chief drama critic for the Boston Phoenix. She is a past winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You could count the prizes \u201cA Disappearing Number\u201d won in England in 2007: Evening Standard Award for Best Play, Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, Critics\u2019 Circle Theatre award for Best New Play. Or you could just sit back and let the arithmetic wash over you (and the rest of Central Square Theater) as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2025,"featured_media":865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5218],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2025"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=833"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2229,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833\/revisions\/2229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/core-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}