Math Coming Alive Through Theater, Art, and Exposition

Year: 2023 Authors: Colin Adams

Core claim

Theater, exposition, and art can change how people experience mathematics by making it more approachable and vivid.

Topics

mathematics outreach, theater, expository writing, mathematical art

Domains

mathematics communication, mathematical culture, theater, art, expository writing

Methods

examples from performances, illustrated case studies, public-facing exposition

Media

conference images, theater scenes, book and video references

Paper text

The text below is the locally extracted OCR/Markdown version of the paper. Raw PDF files remain local and are not published here.

Bridges 2023 Conference Proceedings

Math Coming Alive Through Theater, Art, and Exposition

Colin Adams

Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA; cadams@williams.edu

Mathematics is a fascinating field that is a pinnacle of human endeavor. But most people perceive it to be agonizingly boring and a source of immense anxiety. How can we change the way mathematics is experienced? We will consider options like mathematics and theater, mathematics and expository writing, and mathematics and art, and how each of these can help to change people’s attitudes towards mathematics.

Figure 1: “Attack of the hairy ball” in [1].

Figure 2: Figure by Pier Gustafson from “Pythagoras’s Darkest Hour” in [2].

Figure 3: Scene from “Equinox” in [3].

Figure 4: Tom Garrity playing a zombie in [4].

References

[1] C. Adams. Lost in the Math Museum: A Survival Story. Mathematical Association of America, 2022. [2] C. Adams. Riot at the Calc Exam and Other Stories. American Mathematical Society, 2009. [3] Mathematically Bent Theater. Joint Math Meetings, Boston, MA, Jan.6, 2023. [4] “Zombies and Calculus.” NOVA video clip. Season 41, 2015. https://www.pbs.org/video/zombies-and-calculus-qhscsq/