The Mathematics of Change
The son of a math teacher and born with an innate sense for numbers, monologist Josh Kornbluth grew up your protoyipcal math whiz. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, he hit the wall, failing out of freshman calculus at Princeton. That experience ultimately came to form the foundation for Kornbluth's monologue, "The Mathematics of Change," being performed this Friday and Saturday, April 1-2 at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (17 Gauss Way, Berkeley). The show's ostensibly about failing at math, he said. but it's also "about who we think we are and who we think we are going to be." In that way, it's universal. Math makes for a surprisingly pliable metaphor, and he delivers the monologue like a lecture — in front of a blackboard, chalk flying — using the vocabulary of calculus to stand in for all kinds of bigger, broader concepts: integration, limits, variables and constants, curves of all kinds. You don't need to be a math genius to be able to relate. 8 p.m., $25. 510-642-0143 or MSRI.org.