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Record W4395027519 · doi:10.3138/md-67-1-1319

The Mathematical Heart of Tom Stoppard

2024· article· en· W4395027519 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Stephen Abbott

Bibliographic record

VenueModern Drama · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicChaos, Complexity, and Education
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsArtHistoryLiteratureArt historyVisual arts

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Mathematics represents a conspicuous through-line in Tom Stoppard’s body of work. The allusions to the Riemann hypothesis in the recently produced Leopoldstadt (2020) form a notable bookend with the musings on probability in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) that launched Stoppard’s career. In the intervening decades, the playwright’s ongoing self-education in mathematics surfaces in a series of cleverly staged debates about providence versus free will, the existence of moral absolutes, and the origins of human consciousness. Contrary to expectations, the mathematics in these plays most often serves as a catalyst for the persistence of uncertainty in a rising tide of rationalism. The decision to place a pure mathematician at the centre of Leopoldstadt, an autobiographically-inspired family epic about the Holocaust, reveals the depth of Stoppard’s fondness for mathematics and his faith in its potential to tell human stories. As it has in earlier plays, the mathematics in Leopoldstadt offers a distinctive commentary about the tension between rational order and randomness while also making a quiet case for the perseverance of beauty in the darkest of possible worlds.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.904
Threshold uncertainty score0.222

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.040
GPT teacher head0.297
Teacher spread0.257 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2024
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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