Article by Brenda Etemewei and Sarah Oluwole
On the Friday 25th November, Year 12 A-level maths students went to London’s Gielgud theatre to see ‘The Curious Coincidence of the Maths in the Day Time’: a series of lecture shows based on the best-selling book ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’.
Throughout the roughly three hour show, we were kept both amused and entertained by the jokes of presenter Matt Parker which I found the funniest part of the whole show overall, but not the most interesting- I was more intrigued by the BBC’s Hannah Fry’s mathematics presentation of mazes. To be able to comprehend how the formation of a maze with 1 entrance and 1 exit composed of merely 2 lines meant that you could find your way out if you kept only your right hand on a side and kept turning right was amazing. Hannah also calculated how many cars she would most likely pass on her way to work and the probability of her seeing 4 yellows cars in a row, as main character Christopher Boone considers this a bad day in the novel, which as you can imagine was slim to none (‘unless of course you live in New York’).
The show also featured the incorporation of mathematics within music- demonstrated by Ben Sparks and his not quite up to standard vocals- and the repetition of prime numbers on a keyboard to form the whole theme song of the theatre production.
In the second half of the show, we were given the great opportunity to meet the actor who plays Christopher Boone in the theatre production- Thomas Dennis. Although his character loves maths, Dennis told the audience how, in order to solve the area of a right-angled triangle Christopher’s way, he did not only memorise the lines, but sat down and worked out how to do the maths himself.
The lighting and effects people behind the show displayed a vivid and luminous presentation of his calculations on both the floors and walls of the gridded stage which I found really interesting. It was later that we found out that stairs also grew out of the floor and there was an invisible trap door within the stage which ascended Dennis on a pillar.
Although the mysteries behind the theatre production settings being revealed was interesting, I personally took more of a liking toward the mathematical side of the show. The day was not only fun, but showed a new way to look at situations that you may think do not even involve maths whether it is trying to get out of a maze, a musical piece or three biological siblings being born on the same day, but in different years.
