Special Events

     Monday Night PlayGround (now in its 17th season) is a monthly presentation of 6 short plays written on a common theme.  This coming Monday, the theme will be a mathematical one: "Kingdom of Number".
    
     On February 9, a group of mathematicians at MSRI met with the PlayGround pool of playwrights to talk about numbers, how mathematicians think about them, and the often surprising ways in which concepts of number appear in our culture and in nature.  The playwrights engaged the mathematicians in a discussion of how certain concepts, such as the square root of 2 and pi (and even 1 and 0) came to be thought of as numbers, why primes are so important (and so beloved), and how mathematicians got scooped by plants (by a few hundred million years) and poets (by a few thousand).
    
     The playwrights have now gone away to think about the dramatic possibilities that the topic suggested.  They each have 5 days to write a short play inspired by the topic, and the best 6 of the resulting plays will be presented on February 21, at Monday Night PlayGround at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
    
     It will be quite an interesting evening, so we hope you will make plans to attend both the performances (which start at 8PM) and the pre-show discussion (which starts at 7:10PM) featuring a panel consisting of mathematicians and some of the playwrights who wrote the plays that will be performed that night.
   
     More information, including where (and how) to buy tickets, can be found at http://www.playground-sf.org.
   
     The February PlayGround nights (which are the ones with a mathematical theme) are some of the most popular evenings of the year, so make your plans early.  We hope to see you there!

    Robert Bryant, Director of MSRI
    Jim Kleinmann, President of Monday Night PlayGround

PS:  The title "Kingdom of Number" came from the opening line of "Numbers and Faces" by W. H. Auden, which starts
 
The Kingdom of Number is all boundaries
Which may be beautiful and must be true;