A First Class Man - Press Kit (.pdf)
Download file
PRESS RELEASE
September 8, 2006
For Immediate Release
ALTER EGO PRODUCTIONS BRINGS TO THE STAGE THE WORLD PREMIERE OF DAVID FREEMAN’S A FIRST CLASS MAN — THE ASTOUNDING TRUE STORY OF RAMANUJAN, THE BRILLIANT INDIAN MATHEMATICIAN
Alter Ego Productions brings together people from many different professional backgrounds sharing a common passion for theater. The company was founded in April 2002 by a group of individuals whose professional focus is not theater but who have a strong interest in theater and significant past experience in directing, acting, or set design.
Alter Ego’s current production — David Freeman’s A First Class Man — is the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a shipping clerk living in India in the 1910’s who possessed an innate genius and a full time passion for producing complex mathematical theorems and equations but who had no formal training. Was he a fraud? Not according to the eminent British mathematician and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, G.H.. Hardy, who recognizes Ramanujan’s talent and invites him to come to Cambridge. One problem: Ramanujan’s strict religious orthodoxy forbids him to travel overseas. A First Class Man explores the complex and dysfunctional relationship between Hardy’s precise world of mathematics and scientific orthodoxy that clashes with Ramanujan’s more intuitive and spiritual relationship with numbers. In the end we discover that the stripped down and sequestered world of mathematics and academia cannot keep out human frailties and cultural differences.
Alter Ego is thrilled to be presenting this world premiere production by acclaimed novelist, essayist, and playwright David Freeman, known for his critically acclaimed and widely produced play Jessie and the Bandit Queen. Director Kareem Fahmy is a graduate of Columbia University’s prestigious MFA program in Theatre Directing. His recent work includes Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Judith Thompson’s Lion in the Streets at the Abingdon Theatre. A First Class Man features a deeply talented cast of ten, led by Amir Arison who recently appeared in Washington DC’s Shakespeare Theatre production of Love’s Labor’s Lost directed by Michael Kahn.
Previously, Alter Ego produced Who’s Afraid of Vijay Tendulkar?, Fatwa, Indian Ink, Chaos Theory, and Hayavadana. Our most successful production to date — the New York premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink — ran at the Soho Repertory Theater from August 16, 2003 through September 7, 2003. It was a critical and popular success prompting us to extend it to a short Off-Broadway run and TheaterMania to list it under the 2003’s category for “Shows You Should Have Seen But Probably Didn’t”.
A First Class Man opens October 5th at The 45th Street Theater, 354 W. 45th St., with performances until October 21st.
Performances: October 5 to 21: Wednesday through Saturday at 8 pm (except Fri Oct 6 at 7 pm); Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 pm
Tickets: www.smarttix.com; (212) 868-4444.
For additional information or to schedule an interview, please contact Alter Ego’s press representative Shourin Roy at sr240@columbia.edu or call 646-662-6057. Photos available upon request. To download our press kit, please visit our website or contact Shourin Roy.
www.alteregoproductions.org
A First Class Man - Press Release (. pdf )
Download file
###
PRESS RELEASE
September 6, 2006
For Immediate Release
Panel Discussion on the Life and Work of Srinivasa Ramanujan
Thank you for your interest in Alter Ego Productions. Our upcoming production, David Freeman’s A First Class Man, is the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, widely considered twentieth century’s most famous mathematical prodigy, and his fortuitous and successful collaboration with the Cambridge don and mathematician, Professor GH Hardy.
A First Class Man will be performed from October 5-21st at The 45th Street Theatre, 354 W. 45th St.
(between Eighth and Ninth Avenue). Tickets are available at smarttix.com or (212) 868-4444.
Alter Ego is delighted that Columbia University’s Mathematics Department along with the Columbia University Arts Initiative has decided to host an Evening on Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan: His Life and Work, on 29th September, 2006. The panel of eminent speakers includes experts on Ramanujan’s field of number theory and in colonial studies, who will examine the context of Ramanujan’s contribution in the time of British colonial India, as well as more ethnographic antecedents of scientific logic in contrast to Cartesian rationalism in vogue in western scientific discourse. The panelists include:
Freeman Dyson: Professor Emeritus, School of Natural Sciences, the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton.
Peter C Sarnak: Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics, Princeton University
Dorian Goldfeld: Professor of Mathematics, Columbia University
Gauri Viswanathan: Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
David Freeman: Playwright of A First Class Man
Harish S Bhat: Assistant Professor, Applied Science and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University
The evening will begin at 6:30 PM, with a series of short presentations by each speaker followed by a moderated panel discussion open to the audience. The evening will conclude at 9:00 PM, followed by a wine and cheese reception at the Columbia Mathematics Department.
Date: 29th September, 2006.
Time: 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM.
Venue: Room 312, Mathematics Department, Columbia University, 116th Street and Broadway.
Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan, was born December 22, 1887, in Erode, Tamil Nadu, India. He showed a consuming passion and genius for mathematics at an early age. An orthodox Brahmin and devout in his religious beliefs, Ramanujan attributed every mathematical equation to his family deity, the goddess Namagiri. In 1912, he sent his now famous letters containing his equations to Professor GH Hardy, who persuaded him to come to Cambridge. An obscure clerk at the Port Trust of Madras, Ramanujan was to become a Fellow of the Royal Society and of Trinity College, Cambridge, while proving, in association with his mentor, G.H. Hardy, results that continue to astound the world of mathematics to this day. Between 1914 and 1918, Ramanujan produced 3000 theorems, many that are still being deciphered today. However, Ramanujan fell prey to the harsh winters of England and was diagnosed with tuberculosis which was exacerbated by the rigors and stress of academic life, his feeling of isolation in an alien culture and the scarcity of vegetarian food. He returned to India in 1919, and died shortly after, on April 26th, 1920 at the age of 32.
For more information and further enquiries, please contact: Shourin Roy at sr240@columbia.edu or call: 646-662-6057
Ramanujan Panel Press Release (.pdf)
Download file
TRIBUTE
In the Bradman class
GIRIDHAR KHASNIS
The mathematical genius who discovered Ramanujan retained an undying interest in the game of cricket.
"Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry (and I suppose that it is unlikely that he could do better)."
"Bradman is a whole class above any batsman who has ever lived: if Archimedes, Newton and Gauss remain in the Hobbs class, I have to admit the possibility of a class above them, which I find difficult to imagine. They had better be moved from now on into the Bradman class."
G. H. Hardy
An elderly English gentleman sits in a corner of my bookshelf; he's been there for more than two decades now. Impeccably dressed, a cigarette dangling between his fingers, the rim of jumbo black spectacles sliding down his sharp nose, his small frame somewhat dwarfed by an oversized cane chair, right leg crossed on the left knee...
Surprisingly, the photographer who has perked up the telling picture of G.H. Hardy is unnamed both on the covers or the insides of A Mathematician's Apology (Cambridge University Press). Hardy couldn't have cared less; he would have, perhaps, been happier without his picture on the cover. Among the eccentricities of the mathematical genius was an abiding aversion for photographs and mechanical gadgets (in particular, telephone). He never used a watch and couldn't bear the sight of a shaving mirror; when he went to a hotel, his first action was to cover all the looking glasses with towels!
Hardy was brilliant, unorthodox, eccentric, radical, immensely charming with child-like openness, ready to talk about anything, shy and self-conscious in all actions, remarkably honest about his own abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and obsessively heliotropic, trying to catch each ray of the winter sun.
Precise and engrossing
In a postcard to his friend, Hardy (during the 1920s) listed six New Year wishes: (1) prove the Riemann hypothesis; (2) make 211 not out in the fourth innings of the last Test Match at Oval; (3) find an argument for the non-existence of God which shall convince the general public; (4) be the first man at the top of Mount Everest; (5) be proclaimed the first president of the USSR or of Great Britain and Germany; (6) murder Mussolini.
A Mathematician's Apology is an incredibly precise and thoroughly engrossing piece of literature. In no more than 90 pages, Hardy leads the reader through labyrinths of an absorbing mathematical journey. Rich in insight, scrupulous in detail, this part-autobiographical and part-philosophical treatise is a testimony of Hardy's literary scholarship as much as to his own unique personality. When Apology was first published in 1940, Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry James's notebooks as 'the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist'.
In a stimulating and comprehensive foreword, C P Snow seems to agree with Greene's opinion about Apology: "Yes, it is witty and sharp with intellectual high spirits: yes, the crystalline clarity and candor are still there: yes, it is the testament of a creative artist." Snow also confesses his association with Hardy as "intellectually the most valuable friendship of my life". He tells us how the brilliant mathematician possessed a character as beautiful and candid as his mind; how he was one of the finest mathematical thinkers, and `for a short time, the fifth best pure mathematician in the world'; how Hardy's association with Littlewood was "the most famous collaboration in the history of mathematics" and how Hardy-Littlewood researches dominated English pure mathematics, and much of world pure mathematics: "Together they produced nearly 100 papers, a good many of them in the Bradman class."
Hardy remained a bachelor all his life. Besides mathematics, Hardy had another passion; an undying love for the game of cricket, which he quite literally sustained to the very last minute of his life. Snow recalls that Hardy "had a horror of persons, who devotedly studied the literature but had never played the game (of cricket)." Hardy himself clarifies in Apology: "Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry (and I suppose that it is unlikely that he could do better)."
Hardy had no faith in intuitions or impressions; "his own or anyone else's". Snow evokes the mathematician's refusal to go into any college chapel even for formal business, like electing a master. "He had clerical friends, but God was his personal enemy." By the way, Hardy was, for two years (1924-26), President of the Association of Scientific Workers; though he sarcastically admitted to being "an odd choice" and "the most unpractical member of the most unpractical profession in the world."
Romantic incident
Hardy acknowledged that discovery of Ramanujan was "the one romantic incident" of his life. That historic morning, early in 1913, is recounted delightfully by Snow, when Hardy found, among the letters on his breakfast table, a large untidy envelope decorated with Indian stamp: "He glanced at the letter, written in halting English, signed by an unknown Indian, asking him to give an opinion of these mathematical discoveries... Hardy was not only bored, but irritated... Wild theorems. Theorems such as he had never seen before, nor imagined. A fraud of genius? A question was forming itself in his mind (throughout the day)... He sent word to Littlewood ... By nine o'clock or so they were in one of Hardy's rooms, with the manuscript stretched out in front of them... Before midnight they knew, and knew for certain. The writer of these manuscripts was a man of genius."
Hardy suffered a coronary thrombosis in 1939 (a year before he wrote Apology). He recovered, but the physical activities he loved were over for good. Snow recognises Apology being a book of haunting sadness. "
When the War began, Hardy was further depressed. Like his friend Bertrand Russell, he too believed that the War should never have been fought. In early 1947, driven by despair and depression, Hardy tried to kill himself. The attempt failed, but his condition only got worse. In the nursing home, he got a black eye, hitting his head on the lavatory basin.
"After that, I went to Cambridge at least once a week," writes Snow. "I dreaded each visit ... he talked a little, nearly every time I saw him, about death. He wanted it: he didn't fear it: what was there to fear in nothingness?...Mostly, though - about fifty-five minutes in each hour I was with him - I had to talk cricket. It was his only solace..."
Snow remembers his last visit to Hardy, four or five days before he died. There was an Indian test team playing in Australia and they talked about them. "It was in that same week that he told his sister: `If I knew that I was going to die today, I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.' He managed something very similar. Each evening that week before she left him, she read a chapter from a history of Cambridge university cricket. One such chapter contained the last words he heard, for he died suddenly, in the early morning. "
I must have read the Apology and Snow's foreword at least a dozen times. Each time I have finished, I have come a bit closer to realising what it takes one to be in the Bradman class.
From the Hindu, 17/07/2006
(http://www.hinduonnet.com/mag/2006/07/16/stories/2006071600230400.htm)
For more information on Alter Ego productions, please contact Shourin Roy at sr240@columbia.edu or call 646-662-6057 or Amrita Rajagopal at amrita.rajagopal@gs.com or call 520-548-0402.