Martin Wood, Olivier, and Lyttelton

[terrykb]

While the Glastonbury attendance may have outnumbered us 750:1 last weekend, those of us who went back to Oxford for the Mathematical Institute reunion event did get an Acheson and du Sautoy guitar and trumpet duet which I suspect wasn't to be heard at the Festival...

About 200 people turned out for the event (including a surprising scattering of families). Because of the numbers attending, the lectures had been moved from the Mathematical Institute to the (rather more impressive) Martin Wood lecture theatre at the Clarendon Laboratory; because of the weather, the garden party moved indoors at St Cross College. Despite the numbers, there were few from my contemporaries, but I did run into a couple of faintly familar faces (Keble doing well because the event coincided with the college's own Old Members' event).

The lectures were, as promised, non-taxing (thankfully), although they both brought back memories of Waves and Diffusion, one of my less favoured first-year lecture courses. (One might have expected it in a talk on applied mathematics, but it came as more of a shock when we got to number theory.)

Dr David Acheson spoke on Mathematics, Magic and the Electric Guitar. The main topics were the vortices generated by a disturbance in a fluid and the conditions under which they could leapfrog each other, how the harmonics of guitar strings work (complete with an impressive electric guitar solo), and the possibility of oscillating an upside-down system of pendulums so that it remains "hanging" upwards (again with demonstration, and an old Tomorrow's World recording). This was leavened with a scattering of mathematical curiosities, including Malfatti's Problem, why the series 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - ... relates to circles, and the significance of 1089 (other than featuring in the title of his book).

Professor Marcus du Sautoy then spoke on the Music of the Primes (proving more adept at getting the title of his book lodged in the audience's mind). It opened with a largely familiar introduction to the primes, their unpredictability, and the relationship between the primality of a footballer's shirt number and their performance on the pitch. Then we examined the prime-counting function π(n), and saw how it (like a guitar string's vibrations) could be expressed as the sum of a series of simpler functions (which I hadn't seen before).

At a theatre of a different sort a few weeks ago, I enjoyed the National Theatre's production of Cyrano de Bergerac with helenbr (who also commented on it; huskyteer also has a review).

Reading the cast list, we realised we'd missed a talk on (apparently) rich artistic history of the nose. Trying to think of noses of note ourselves (and with additional subsequent suggestions from addedentry), we did come up with Cyrano himself, Pinnochio, a hypothetical Cleopatra (Pascal's "Le nez de Cléopâtre: s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé"), and Tycho Brahe, with the possible addition of Julius Caesar (since I've not been able to find whether the Roman nose is connected specifically to him or more generally to Roman aristocracy).

And last night I saw Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis. Fortunately it was in translation: while the circle's being one-third empty on a Saturday evening surprised me, I suspect it would have been even emptier if Iphigeneia he en Aulidi were being staged. (One is reminded of the story - possibly apocryphal - of Harold Wilson's suggestion at the 1964 general election that, as well as moving Steptoe and Son from peak time on polling day, the BBC could "replace it with a Greek drama, preferably in the original".)

The language was modern but without any jarring anachronisms that stick in the memory (unlike Cyrano with its "breezeblock" and "Euros"). The production, on the other hand, had 20th century touches to it, with 1920s-ish music and occasional microphones, loudhailers, and helicopters (in sound effect only - no Miss Saigon extravaganza here!). The lighting was often dim, and the play ran relentlessly in a single act of two hours, resulting in an intense and slightly claustrophobic experience.

(Here be spoilers. While I'm not sure of the importance of spoiler warnings when discussing a play first performed some 2400 years ago, some readers might be planning to see it at the National, hence this warning. It did make a change to hear a listener write in to Radio 4's Feedback a week or two ago requesting that arts programmes give away more information about the films/plays/books they review, while the normal complaint is from listeners wanting less. I suppose that on the radio, the closest one can get to an lj-cut is "If you don't want to spoil the ending, turn your radio off for the next five minutes", which doesn't quite have the same flexibility.)

Agamemnon, commander of the Greek army preparing to sail to and attack Troy, is told that he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia if he is to have favourable winds for his voyage. Iphigenia and her mother Clytemnestra arrive at the camp, not knowing Agamemnon's plan, with foreseeably tragic consequences.

Fortunately the lights went down before I had finished reading the translator's notes in the programme, so I wasn't expecting the twist at the end: a messenger, returning from the sacrifice, tells Clytemnestra that, as Iphigenia was about to be sacrificed, the goddess Artemis substituted a deer in Iphigenia's place and carried her away to live among the gods. Because the sacrifice takes place off-stage, we don't know whether this is intended as truth or as a story to appease Clytemnestra. And I couldn't work out whether having that ambiguity left hanging was intriguing or annoying.

(Since then, my handy Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature points out that Euripides did also write Iphigenia in Tauris, answering the question in showing Iphigenia later serving as Artemis' priestess (and, later, discovering that she is required to sacrifice her own brother - this does not appear to be a family blessed with good fortune). Aeschylus, on the other hand, depicts her (in his Oresteia) as having been actually killed. If Ancient Greek Culture were a modern media property, the fans could be arguing over which version counted as "canon" for years to come...)

Comments

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Thank you for attending the Maths Institute reunion on my behalf. I hadn't encountered Malfatti's Problem, and its MathWorld entry shows that it has an interesting history.

a play first performed some 2400 years ago

Did the programme describe it as a 'revival'?

If it truly were a modern media property, there would be a continuing series of plays called 'Iphigenia at X', collectively 'The Continuing Misfortunes of Iphigenia'.

[helenbr.livejournal.com]

this does not appear to be a family blessed with good fortune

Indeed not - see their family history.

I did Iphigenia in Aulis as my Greek A-level set text and very cheery it always seemed. As an exercise for the reader, compare and contrast with Troy (if you can do so without actually going to see it, that is, as I'm not sure it's really worth it). Somewhat differing views of Achilles for a start, as I remember.