The Algorithmic Genius of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia”

My favorite play since high school.

Arcadia is amazing. I commented about it on HN years ago, and it seems to be quite popular among this crowd for good reason.

This reminds me of Jackson Pollock's use (or unwitting use) of fractals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock#Fractal_comput...

The attempt to apply science to a plot a story or theme of art reminds me of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair

At the very least, it shows an appreciation for The Two Cultures. It's not possible to reconcile certain generalizations about science and art- that is, one can write about science, but it's not easy to make accurate claims without being an expert, and vice versa- one can try to write a poetry from the perspective of a doctor, but it might sound like bad poetry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKpYBStDLVA

Of course there are some really talented writers and scientists.

I had the immense privilege, for a few years, of teaching this play to classes of university students. (I'm still somewhat proud of the lecture I devised, with maths and pictures, illustrating iteration -- and of the gasps it invariably got when the graphs got colored in, and the Mandelbrot Set leapt off the screen in all its infinite colourful delight.)

Reading and understanding the play then spring-boarded the individual research project and paper that these students were required to write. What I appreciated most about Arcadia was that it provided an almost infinite scope for students to bring their own interests to bear. The only rule was that whatever they did had to, in some way, give a reader a deeper understanding of the play, and/or the world(s) in which it was set. Some highlights:

- The fashion-design student who did a deep dive into early-nineteenth century clothing trends, and explained why Lady Croom should be wearing this in the first act, but that in the second. She got extra marks for submitting swatches she'd hand-stitched to illustrate some kind of revolutionary technique that reached England around that time.

- The "edgy" students who wanted to write something about Sex. I think they got excited about the thought that I'd shoot them down. In the end they usually wrote fairly boring papers about adultery rates, or sexual education.

- A gun nut (I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he stormed the Capitol, or went off-grid and ended up being besieged by the FBI; you know the type), who wrote a creepy-but-fascinating paper about the ballistic properties of dueling pistols, and the expected survival rates of duels conducted at 7 paces, 10 paces, 12 paces, and so forth.

- The "non-traditional" (read, slightly older) student who ran her own franchised dog-walking and training business -- I'm pretty sure she made a lot more money than I did, and really hope that Wag, and the like, didn't drive her out of business -- who researched how hunting dogs were used and trained in the early 19th century.

- Biology majors who wrote about various aspects of population dynamics, and either confirmed or dismantled Valentine's assumption that game books were a valid source of data. After a while I started giving them (anonymized) former students' papers with the opposite view-point to critique.

- LOTS of comp-sci and maths majors (I think either their professors or previous generations of students took to recommending my class) to whom my direction in tutorials invariably reversed Septimus: I'm not going to "give this an alpha in blind faith", though I'm sure your equations / program checks out. Now, explain it in words so a Humanities guy like me can understand.

Arcadia is my favourite play, too.

If I remember correctly, Stoppard was an artist in residence at Caltech while he was writing Arcadia.