Carol Rifelj Lecture Series, Steve Abbott

The Mathematical Heart of Tom Stoppard

The references to mathematics in Leopoldstat, Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award winning play from 2020, form a notable bookend with the musings on probability from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which launched the playwright’s career back in 1966. Mathematics, in fact, represents a conspicuous through line in Stoppard’s writing. Over six decades, the playwright’s self-education in mathematics surfaces in a series of cleverly staged debates about providence vs freewill, the existence of moral absolutes, and the origins of human consciousness. The decision to place a pure mathematician at the center of Leopoldstat, an autobiographically-inspired family epic about the Holocaust, reveals the depth of Stoppard’s faith in the potential of mathematics to tell human stories. As it has in earlier plays, the mathematics in Leopoldstat offers its distinctive commentary about the tension between rational order and randomness, while also making a quiet case for the persistence of beauty in the darkest of possible worlds.

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