2024-25 UTM-JHI Annual Seminar: Mathematics - David Auburn Proof, Turning Math into Theatre
When and Where
Description
Guests: Alexander Offord/Nicole Wilson, Artistic Co-Directors Good Old Neon
This session will feature another Pulitzer-Prize-winning play (in 2001). It is related to the foundational discipline of mathematics, in its dual role as a scientific tool and a distinct mode of sense-making and word-building in its own right. Our guests will be the Co-Directors of the Good Old Neon theatre company Nicole Wilson and Alexander Offord who, in addition to their theatre work, have academic backgrounds in mathematics and the history of science respectively. The seminar will, among other things, explore the meaning, process and significance of the mathematical proof as well as its connections to mathematicians and the world around them. For this session we will also reach out to the UTM Mathematics department to attract further interest from both students and faculty.
Lunch will be available from 12:30 p.m. onwards
About the Series
The recent pandemic has made it abundantly clear that scientific insights must be communicated clearly and effectively so that the public understands and ‘buys in’ by changing its behavioural practices collectively. Persuasive social theatre and suggestive performance techniques are crucial parts of scientific communication strategies — the sciences need the theatre! This need for ‘self-theatricalization’ will only grow in the future, as most key sciences in the 21st century will be ‘embodied sciences.’
On the other hand, there is (and continues to be) a rich and important history of playwrights putting science and scientists on stage, thereby creating interfaces and highly visible public discourses at the intersection of society, religion, politics, knowledge creation, and ethics.
In this series, we’ll examine some of the manifold modes in which sciences and theatre-and-performance art continue to interact. We’ll explore key areas of contact between science/technology and theatre/performance; which sciences and scientists currently attract theatrical interest; where and how scientific knowledge begins and ends — and who needs to know it; and how theatre and performance can best contribute to such re-conceptualized ‘scientific knowledge.’
