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I Is a Strange Loop
Alone in a cube that's glowing in the darkness, X is content within its little universe of infinite thought. This solitude is disturbed by the appearance of Y, who insists on exposing X to the richness of the physical world. Each begins to long for what the other has, luring them into a strange loop.
In this play for two variables, Marcus du Sautoy and Victoria Gould use mathematics and theatre to navigate the known and unknown reaches of our world. Through a series of surreal episodes, X and Y explore some of the biggest questions: where did the universe come from, does time have an end, is there something on the other side, do we have free will, can we ever prove anything about our universe?
I is a Strange Loop was first performed by the authors at the Barbican Pit, London, in March 2019. This book features an introduction by Marcus du Sautoy.
'I is a Strange Loop is a play that plays... with ideas, concepts, abstractions and relationships that are, usually, hidden from the sight of ordinary mortals, articulating the ineffable, incarnating the incorporeal, revealing the inconceivable... it makes us feel we know a great deal more than we do.... and is also very funny, utterly compelling and marvellously human.' Simon McBurney
In this play for two variables, Marcus du Sautoy and Victoria Gould use mathematics and theatre to navigate the known and unknown reaches of our world. Through a series of surreal episodes, X and Y explore some of the biggest questions: where did the universe come from, does time have an end, is there something on the other side, do we have free will, can we ever prove anything about our universe?
I is a Strange Loop was first performed by the authors at the Barbican Pit, London, in March 2019. This book features an introduction by Marcus du Sautoy.
'I is a Strange Loop is a play that plays... with ideas, concepts, abstractions and relationships that are, usually, hidden from the sight of ordinary mortals, articulating the ineffable, incarnating the incorporeal, revealing the inconceivable... it makes us feel we know a great deal more than we do.... and is also very funny, utterly compelling and marvellously human.' Simon McBurney
96 pages, Paperback
Published December 14, 2021
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About the author
Marcus du Sautoy
35 books496 followersMarcus Peter Francis du Sautoy, OBE is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 31, 2024
Really weird but cool.
I want to reread it understand more of the theatrics of the actual maths, but the humour of it and the wider point about imagination and creativity in the arts versus the sciences was the sort of idea I want to store to chew on during train rides. I sort of think you can treat the maths like references in modernist poetry: there to explore, interesting if you want to, but there's a dramatic effect to absorb even if you don't go and follow up as if it were an academic citation.
For me, maybe missing the point, but it put pressure on the divide between the creativity in the arts and sciences by making mathematical originality and theorising into a kind of theatre, performing the way maths offers imagined world of purity or potential possibility, and then by staging that made clear the way that theatre is a familiar way of creating possibility or alternative cloistered and controlled worlds, and that both of these kinds of creativity/world making are dependent on those controlled conditions and defeated by them a bit? It ends with X making a möbius strip of the script and I think that characterised this lovely, lovely little play where they turned a kind of nihilistic futility into something playful, and a bit profound. It made me want to code and build little worlds where poetry and maths coexist and speak to each other. I told about four people about X eating an orange and losing its mind.
I want to reread it understand more of the theatrics of the actual maths, but the humour of it and the wider point about imagination and creativity in the arts versus the sciences was the sort of idea I want to store to chew on during train rides. I sort of think you can treat the maths like references in modernist poetry: there to explore, interesting if you want to, but there's a dramatic effect to absorb even if you don't go and follow up as if it were an academic citation.
For me, maybe missing the point, but it put pressure on the divide between the creativity in the arts and sciences by making mathematical originality and theorising into a kind of theatre, performing the way maths offers imagined world of purity or potential possibility, and then by staging that made clear the way that theatre is a familiar way of creating possibility or alternative cloistered and controlled worlds, and that both of these kinds of creativity/world making are dependent on those controlled conditions and defeated by them a bit? It ends with X making a möbius strip of the script and I think that characterised this lovely, lovely little play where they turned a kind of nihilistic futility into something playful, and a bit profound. It made me want to code and build little worlds where poetry and maths coexist and speak to each other. I told about four people about X eating an orange and losing its mind.
Displaying 1 of 1 review