'A Disappearing Number'

It is no wonder that Complicité’s A Disappearing Number, a play loosely based on Hardy’s admiration for Ramanujan, has won several awards in the west and continues to run to packed houses in the West End of London. It was recently brought to Mumbai and Hyderabad through the good offices of the British Council and Prithvi Theatre. Its excellent stagecraft provides a magical evening during which the mysteries of life and death intertwine with the mysteries of mathematics, the queen of sciences, made even more heady with dashes of Bharatanatyam, a glimpse into the incomprehensible beliefs of a strict south Indian brahmin, and videography of old Madras, while flight numbers and telephone numbers reel relentlessly in the background.

Ramanujan’s life was enclosed within the theory of numbers, not only loved by pure mathematicians for its sheer beauty, as believed by Hardy, who lived within the privileged cloisters of Cambridge, but as the recently held International Congress of Mathematicians proclaimed in Hyderabad, it is intimately involved in several practical applications, and even in elucidating the very nature of the Universe. It was quite in the fitness of things, therefore, that the assembled mathematicians of the world should view this postmodern theatrical reprise of the un-understood tragic life of a genius, lost as soon as it was found.