Mini-Cast #6 - Proof - First Third

Proof is a play that knows nothing about math and everything about mental illness. In Proof, math is just what Alfred Hitchcock would call the 'MacGuffin', which he defined as the device that sets the plot in motion, and it doesn't matter a dime what that plot device is and can therefore be anything at all. Proof barely mentions math, it shows barely any understanding or atmosphere of the higher level math it's supposed to be portraying, it might as well be about chess or music or even sports.

I don't know much about higher level mathematics either. The last successful math I ever learned was when I was three years old, when my grandfather quite literally taught me algebra, and I have never truly learned any higher level math since then. If Proof had even mentioned math except in passing, they could have put it right by me and I like would believe anything they told me about it. But Proof barely even makes an effort - a couple mathematical anecdotes, and that's it.

Higher level math is not so essential a subject that there needs to be great works of art about it. But insofar as there is a great play about math, just about everybody agrees that it's Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, which is technically about nuclear and theoretical physics. It recreates the mid-WWII meeting outside of Copenhagen between the world's second and third most famous nuclear physicists: the half-Jewish Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Bohr's former assistant who became head of the Nazi nuclear program. The uncertainty of what they discussed in their meeting is a mirror of scientific discoveries they made - like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that atoms and electrons cannot be observed in their natural state because the mere presence of light will change their position and movement. The math itself becomes a metaphor for their relationship's uncertainty, their memory's uncertainty, our uncertainty at what they spoke of, our uncertainty at the lived experience of World War II, for the uncertainty of war, for their uncertain positions in a totalitarian society, and the uncertainty of being itself.

I don't even think the majority of the characters in Proof have a last name, let alone do we ever know the discoveries of Proof's mathematicians.