April 23, 2003

Do the math
Ira Hauptman's Partition explores the collision between science and belief.

By Rob Avila

SCIENCE, AS the disenchanter of nature, is often taken for the opponent of religion. But no matter where one comes down in the debate between evolutionists and creationists, the more significant fact today is the extent to which both science and religion have persisted and expanded as violent and volatile tools of social control. If there's an inescapable human need for a sense of reality beyond the mundane, the affirmations afforded by scientists and mystics too easily get stood on their heads when conflated with the pursuit of power. And how then do we reconcile their psychic benefits with the fact that Einstein can lead to Los Alamos, and Jesus to George Bush?

The world premiere of Ira Hauptman's Partition at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre draws on the real-life collaboration at Cambridge, starting in 1914, between English mathematician G.H. Hardy (David Arrow) and the self-taught Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan (Rahul Gupta). The title refers to Hardy and Ramanujan's most successful mathematical collaboration, but also to the various borders that separate the two characters in a story that turns on a cultural divide between East and West, aggravated by both personality and the colonial relationship between England and India. A well-written and witty play, graced with a solid and moving production helmed by Aurora artistic director Barbara Oliver, its nearly mystical appreciation of mathematical theorizing pits a morally neutral "pure" science against the worldly imperfection of organized belief.

Hardy, a socially phobic loner played by Arrow with sheer eccentric glee, is an atheist and pacifist. Confronted with the brilliant but untutored Ramanujan, he also winds up being the left brain to Ramanujan's right, trying with little success to instill "rigor" (the "r" should be rolled) in the welter of inspired equations that pop into the head of the young Hindu thanks to his village goddess and divine muse Namagiri (a strong but compassionate Rachel Rajput).

Mulling over the situation with friend and classicist Alfred Billington (the excellent Chris Ayres), Hardy next tries to introduce "purpose" into the life of an increasingly isolated and despairing Ramanujan by challenging him to prove Fermat's last theorem. (We've already met Pierre de Fermat – Julian López-Morillas – the boisterous ghost of the 17th-century mathematician who appears above the stage, lecturing on his work from on high.) The search for "the Holy Grail of mathematics" – the phrase plays ironically on Hindu lips – becomes an obsession for Ramanujan, pursued to the detriment of his own health and his relationship with Namagiri.

Within this warm, mildly zany drama, Hauptman explores the longing for spiritual sustenance at the heart of scientific endeavor, as well as its social, border-crossing possibilities and limitations. Against the backdrop of World War I, the larger social roles of science and religion become fraught with ambiguity. Each holds out the promise of meaning, but also perverts its own truth when harnessed to human institutions.

The dangers of institutionalized religion had been a truism since the Reformation, but the darker implications of the Enlightenment were just beginning to show with the advent of modern warfare. The age of reason had led to the belief that "in our materialistic age," as Einstein put it, "the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people." But this required drawing Hardy's distinction between "pure" and "applied" reason: the former leads to an Attic truth, the latter to considerable ugliness and waste. "A science is said to be useful," wrote Hardy by the Second World War, "if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.... I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art."

Such idealism, however, is decidedly out of step with the age. Hardy maintains his pacifism, of which Ramanujan intuitively approves, as a deeply felt but lonely protest against the irrationality of war. For Hardy, a rather superstitious atheist with an aversion to mirrors, the epitome of this irrationality is religion, which he sees as a primary engine of conflict.

But religion clearly means more than one thing here. The play acknowledges Ramanujan's religious beliefs as genuine and, as a vessel of inspiration and traditional values, an integral aspect of his genius and character. And Hardy is indebted to the latter, not mathematics, for the modicum of peace and self-awareness he achieves by the end. Ramanujan's friendship acts as a mirror to the soul that Hardy's reason could not touch.

Nonetheless, Hardy's eccentric purity, his essentially aesthetic vision, rings powerfully today. In claiming that the utter "uselessness" of "pure" mathematics is what allows it to be beautiful, he sounds like Oscar Wilde asserting that "all art is immoral" since "emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life." Science, like art, has as its primary purpose the fulfillment of a deep emotional need. In fact, both are avenues to that "cosmic religious feeling" that gives rise in other circumstances to religious belief and practice.

Hardy, the superstitious atheist, looking out on a world convulsed by the insanity of war and its obscene claims to legitimacy, felt with some justification that religion and war were connected. But, as Ramanujan demonstrates for us, religion can't be "useless" in the same way art or mathematics can, since it has by definition a social and moral function. Then again, in an age of global war, Hardy the purist gives uselessness something of a moral claim after all.