FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.
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KARIM-COOPER: Many Shakespeare fans don’t consider themselves math people. We’re theater kids, poetry lovers, bookworms—right?
But maybe that’s a false choice.
People in the early modern period saw deep connections between math, astronomy, music, and poetry. And Shakespeare’s plays overflow with math concepts. They might even help you get over your traumatic memories of AP calculus.
That’s what mathematician Rob Eastaway argues in his new book, Much Ado About Numbers.
According to Eastaway, reading with our math glasses on can give us fresh insights into some of Shakespeare’s most puzzling metaphors.
Here’s Rob Eastaway, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.
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BOGAEV BOGAEV: So, this book started in Stratford-upon-Avon, like Shakespeare. What happened there?
ROB EASTAWAY: It did. It happened by accident. There was a conference happening at a hotel in Stratford for maths teachers. I was asked to go and do a workshop and just knowing it was in Stratford, I thought I should somehow wedge some Shakespeare in there just as a joke because math teachers love puns. So, I was going to do this workshop with a friend of mine, Andrew Jeffrey. We brainstormed; it was things like, you know, “Two B or not two B: the algebra of Hamlet.”
BOGAEV: Oh, groan. [laughter]
EASTAWAY: Andrew came up with, “Henry V or Henry the 20%.” It was just as a hook to talk about some maths ideas, and I thought, “You know what? I will just check and see if there’s actually any maths words in Shakespeare.” And I found the word—
BOGAEV: Just in case
EASTAWAY: Just in case—and I found the word “mathematics” in The Taming of the Shrew in the context of music and mathematics.
It’s like I pulled on this thread and out of it came something that was far from a joke. It was just an absolute fascinating immersion. I spent about two years just following my nose into every mathematical idea to see if it featured in Shakespeare’s world, in his work, and it kept on doing so. It was like the gift that kept on giving. So, the book came out of that. In a way I don’t think it would ever have happened because it’s not an obvious pairing, you know, mathematics and Shakespeare are not two things you would ever put together. So, it needed serendipity really to make it happen.
BOGAEV: Well, that’s true. It sounds like, like you say you had a finger in the dike and you just take it away and then an enormous flood of math pours out of Shakespeare. Why, though, so much math and Shakespeare?
EASTAWAY: I think first thing: let’s throw away our perceptions of what math is today because that comes with a lot of baggage. Let’s go back 450 years when it was a much simpler field, and a field of discovery too.
All sorts of mathematical innovations were happening around him, and they seep into his work in so many fascinating ways. So, you know, the first thing I’d say about Shakespeare, just from reading through and researching, is he’s really a numbers guy. He loved numbers. He fills his plays with numbers. He exaggerates and plays with numbers. And you know, someone who’s really into numbers and plays with numbers, that is a pretty fundamental part of being whatever we want to call a “mathematician.” You know, however we define a mathematician, numbers and patterns are at the root of it.
BOGAEV: Well, what kind of mathematical education would someone have in Shakespeare’s time?
EASTAWAY: Well, first of all, let me just define what mathematics was in Shakespeare’s time. If you went to university at the age of 14, the mathematics you would learn was four things:
It was arithmetic, which was not much more advanced than you’d learn up to the age of about 10 these days.
It was geometry. Euclid and all of the classic stuff to do with triangles and so on.
It was astronomy. A very important field, astronomy, discovering the phases of the planets and so on. That was important for navigation or would prove to be.
And then, music was the fourth one. Music was a mathematical subject, and if you read Shakespeare, so many references to music, but often with a little hint of mathematical ideas in there.
When it comes to Shakespeare, his training, his education, would have been purely arithmetic. That’s all he’d have ever formally learned and not much of that at school.
BOGAEV: Right. Not even multiplication, right? There wasn’t even a sign for multiplication.
EASTAWAY: There was no sign for multiplication. He did multiply; in fact, there are lovely examples of him multiplying. But that’s it. Addition. Maybe a bit of division. He refers to division in Romeo and Juliet.
So, that’s the background but let’s look at some examples for numbers. Actually I’m going to give you my absolute favorite, which is from Othello, where Bianca—her boyfriend is Casio, he’s been away for a week, and he comes back—she’s been sad he’s been away, so she says, “What a week away? Seven days.” And you think, “Yeah, yeah, okay. We get the point.”
But Shakespeare decides to take it one step further and have Bianca tell him how many hours that has been. Now, why would you put that in unless you are really into working it out which Shakespeare has done. So, he’s put 168 hours in there, except it’s better than that because it’s not 168. What he says is, or what Bianca says, is, “Eightscore eight. Eightscore eight hours.” A beautifully symmetrical and nice pattern, score, of course, being 20—and that’s the way shepherds would count. A lot of historic counting in twenties. Eight times twenty plus eight, 168. So, it’s like a double whammy of word play and number play in one line. How lovely. I suppose it’s because I’m a numbers and mathy person that I notice that. Because I deal with people all the time dealing with numbers you just get an instinct for saying, “You don’t do that unless you’re into numbers.”
BOGAEV: So, he was a numbers guy. And you point out that he did love the word “score.” He always used “score.”
EASTAWAY: He loved “score.”
BOGAEV: It sounds nice. Is it a poetic choice or do you think it’s because he’s a math guy?
EASTAWAY: I think we have to blur the edges here between being a words and a numbers guy because people were kind of both, you know? Walter Raleigh was a mathematician by trade. He had good mathematical training, but he was a poet as well. People thought nothing of crossing the divide then. Shakespeare had less formal education or no education beyond school. But you know, no one was telling you, “You’re supposed to be one thing or the other.” Poetry often worked very mathematical patterns, and within that, that’s when you get creative. You know, you’re constrained by iambic pentameter, but then you play with it. You’re constrained by music rules, but you play with that.
BOGAEV: Well, I suppose the big background to this is the explosion of knowledge and sciences that was going on at the time.
EASTAWAY: Actually, what’s really interesting is because they’d broken away from the Catholic Church, England was kind of a bit of a loner, and it was behind things. The Renaissance had really taken off in Italy, and all this knowledge and advanced thinking, England was really late to the party and it only really joined the party—you know, Shakespeare’s right in the middle of when the English Renaissance is really happening.
It turns out that Shakespeare’s dad, John Shakespeare, the guy who made gloves, was the last generation in England when they only learned Roman numerals. Shakespeare, incredibly, is the first generation of the wider public who are learning the new Indo-Arabic numerals that we use today. 1, 2, 3, 4, you know, written in that way. Now these ideas had been around for hundreds of years, starting in India and the Arab world, and finally, through Italy. They knew about this in the 1400s. But in England, it was very little known until the mid-1500s.
So, Shakespeare’s right in there to be, you know, the early ones to discover, particularly the invention of the little circle that represents nothing, zero, and he’s very excited by this. He refers to it several times, you know. His plays are full of references to nil, naught, and nothing. But also, some references to the actual symbol that we now call 0. But in Shakespeare’s time, that symbol was called the “cipher.” What a wonderful word for it.
BOGAEV: So evocative, yeah, and Shakespeare uses it a lot. “Nothing will come of nothing”—Lear and its famous play on the concept of nothing and the heartbreaking play on that word. I have so many questions about this because it is so mind-bending that the concept of zero came to England just so long after other countries in Europe. Was it because England was a backwater? An island? The Middle Ages got in the way of a lot of knowledge? What was it?
EASTAWAY: All of the above. I’m not saying no one knew about it. Merchants, anyone, you know, having to deal with trade internationally would be encountering this, but it wasn’t common.
If you look at accounts, any numbers written up to the 1550s, almost everywhere, it’s Roman numerals. In fact, that continues for another hundred years. Partly what’s wrong with Roman numerals, you know, they’re recording numbers, that’s fine, but what’s changing is you start to need to do more calculations for two things. One of them is navigation. But much more important, it’s money and trade, and trade is taking off under Queen Elizabeth who wants international expansion. So, it’s market forces that’s encouraging people, you know. If they want to keep tabs and work out all of this stuff, especially with finance, then the new Arabic numerals are the way to go.
So, you know, Shakespeare has been swept along with all of this. Actually, I was lucky enough—where I live in London is very close to Dulwich College which is where Philip Henslowe’s diary is kept. This is a diary of what was happening at the Rose Theatre, the rival of the Globe. The manager, Philip Henslowe, is keeping accounts of how much money he makes every evening for different plays, odd references to Shakespeare’s plays and stuff. But in real time, you can watch him recording the amounts in Roman numerals, and then at different points through it, he’s playing with learning how to use the new number system.
At one point, I found this thing that no one had ever commented before in all the research. Maybe no one was looking for it. But he’s written in a margin, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times 1, 2, 3.” He hasn’t got the multiplication symbol, but that’s what he’s doing. He works out by long multiplication what this is, and it’s clearly him just playing or practicing because nothing in real life would be, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times 1, 2, 3.” I mean, it’s almost unheard of. So, that’s him playing. What’s even more charming—
BOGAEV: Wow, that’s so exciting for you as a researcher, isn’t it? Like, to see this change happening in real time?
EASTAWAY: To see it happen in real time. This was news to everyone. We did a video about it, in fact. You know, what was particularly charming is it turns out Philip Henslowe makes a mistake. One of the digits is wrong. He forgot to carry a digit across. But no one’s checking. He just did it for himself, you know. Good on him for trying. That’s the way mathematics was at that time anyway. People didn’t know how a lot of things worked and they were just experimenting and trying it out.
BOGAEV: Maybe this is a really dumb question because we’re talking about zero as a new concept, but what did people use for zero before?
EASTAWAY: They didn’t. The way they dealt with zeros is they were doing all their calculations prior to the new system on an abacus. They were using counters. So, in The Winter’s Tale, I think it’s the shepherd boy—Is he a clown in that?—who comes on joking about basically a math problem, you know, “How much is the wool worth on all these sheep?” But the key thing is, because he’s not been to school, he says, “I cannot do it without counters” because that’s how people counted. They counted with little buttons or little jetons or pebbles. They did it on an abacus. Therefore, zero is just when there’s an empty line on the abacus so you don’t write anything down, and when you’ve got the answer, you then record the answer counting up the pebbles in Roman numerals.
BOGAEV: No wonder it was so mind blowing. We’ve mentioned some of the other examples of how Shakespeare expresses his fascination with this concept but you bring up one I hadn’t really thought about and it’s in Henry V. Remind us of how “nothing” shows up in that text.
EASTAWAY: Right. At the beginning, when the Chorus comes on stage—and let me paraphrase because it’s about the Battle of Agincourt—he says, “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, you’re going to have to use your imagination because there’s not many of us and we have to represent an army of a million. But that’s okay. Think of me as the one and the other actors as zeros, ciphers, and that way, lined up, we make a million. So, let us ciphers to this great account on your imaginations work.” Shakespeare can only get away with that line if the audience knows what he’s talking about, or at least some of the audience do.
By the way, there are some great films made of Henry V and they tend to drop that line. Modern directors think, “No one will understand the math. Let’s leave it out.” But Shakespeare didn’t leave it out. It’s all in there in that opening scene and I just love that Shakespeare’s playing with the idea of nothing being this tiny thing that makes numbers really big. Nothing makes things big and that’s a beautiful paradox.
BOGAEV: I love throughout your whole book how you really place us in Shakespeare’s time and how people did encounter math at the time. One of the ways, of course, was, as you mentioned already, dealing with money and how complicated it was because it was all coins. So, give us a sense of how actually diverse English coinage was then.
EASTAWAY: So, English coinage was made up of pennies, shillings, and pounds. In fact, this system continued in the UK until 1971. So, when I’m speaking to older audience members, they say, “Yeah, we know this system.” The idea was that the basic unit, a penny—in the US, there’s a penny as well, of course—but there were 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound. And why have 12? Why not 10? There’s 10 fingers. But actually, 12 divides up in lots of different ways, you know. A maths person would say it’s got lots of factors so you can halve it and quarter it and so on. So, half of a shilling is sixpence. A quarter is threepence or thrupenny bit. A tuppence, a penny, and then you’ve got a half a penny, which is a ha’penny, and a farthing, which is a half of that, a quarter.
So happily, Shakespeare and all of society were dealing with these fractions, numbers that sort of divide into 12 and so on. Then, you know, five shillings is a crown, and crowns tend to be—that’s the biggest unit that Shakespeare typically talks about. He doesn’t talk about pounds, really. He talks about a crown, which is a quarter of a pound or five shillings, and half a crown.
There’s one other word as well, a third of a shilling which is called a groat. Now, most people have heard of groats, but most people, including me, always thought they were the tiniest coin of all, and they’re not. They’re actually fourpence. There’s a scene, I think it’s Henry IV, Part 2, where Falstaff asks his assistant, his page or whatever, how much money is in his purse, and the value of it is 30 pennies, which is a pretty standard amount.
There were lots of situations where 30 would crop up in life. But if you ask people used to that currency, they would call it two shillings and sixpence. Two and six. My mum used to say two and six. Or half a crown. Or 30 pennies. Or ten threepences. Lots of different ways.
But Shakespeare chooses to have this money represented in a really quirky way. He says instead: seven groats and tuppence. If you work that out, “Seven fours is 28 plus two, oh, it’s 30.” After all that, it’s a standard amount of money, and I wonder if he’s playing with the audience saying, “Okay, figure out what seven groats and tuppence are. Oh, it’s thirty pennies. Why didn’t you say half a crown?” Because it’s quite funny to have seven groats and tuppence. There’s something funny about the word groat, I think, and perhaps it’s Shakespeare playing with the number seven, which was culturally very significant number in those days, still today, but even more so in those days.
BOGAEV: The other thing that really puts us there in your book is you talk about the daily math of telling time and how most people couldn’t afford a clock in Shakespeare’s time. How did people even know when to arrive at the theater? Was it by church bells?
EASTAWAY: Well, exactly, exactly.
BOGAEV: I never thought about this but you look at the sun, right? You just kind of know.
EASTAWAY: Yeah. You’re at the Globe and the prologue to Romeo and Juliet talks about, “This two hours passage on the stage.” And, well, how do they know? I’ve had some kids say to me, they knew because when the play’s finished that’s two hours. I thought, “That’s not quite the way.”
But how do they know? Plays typically started at two o’clock. They’re all in daylight. They’re not going to be having candlelight because they’ll burn the place down. So, it’s a bizarre thing to think tens of thousands of people every week taking the afternoon off to go to a play, absolutely incredible to think of, but yes, there are ways, like the sun position. People will get used to the sun position and some people have a pocket sundial. Shakespeare talks about a dial in a pocket, a sundial.
BOGAEV: Oh, they were very hot, right? They were a hot, trendy item.
EASTAWAY: They were a trendy item. And you know, walls might have a sundial on them. But in the Globe, you are probably not going to get that. And it’s got to be sunny. It doesn’t work on a cloudy day or at night.
But the way almost everyone is telling the time is they’re listening out for the bongs on the hour from the churches. So, you know, halfway through Romeo and Juliet, there will be three bongs. They will hear the church, what’s now Southwark Cathedral. They might hear St. Paul’s Cathedral. “Bong, bong, bong.” Three bongs. Clock means bell—in French, it’s still cloche. In Macbeth there’s a little line, “I have not heard the clock.” Well, the key word there is “heard” because there was nothing to see, you just heard. So, it’s a charming sense of knowing the hours and maybe the half hours, but no minutes. For most people, they didn’t mind.
The one clock that Shakespeare would have seen—there were very few clocks with faces—but there is one still to this day at Hampton Court and Shakespeare went to Hampton Court to perform. It’s a beautiful clock, a 24-hour clock which was put there in Henry VIII’s time in the 1530s–40s, and it’s all in Roman numerals of course, and it’s only got one hand, an hour hand. You know, when I show it to people, I say, “What time is it?” and they’re all looking for the minute hand. I say, “Well, there wasn’t one.” Partly because nobody cared, you know, the hour hand is pointing close to six, so it’s nearly six o’clock, six in the pm or 6 in the am, post meridiem period depending on position. That’ll do.
BOGAEV: And they didn’t care because the clock wasn’t very precise, right? The timekeeping wasn’t all precise.
EASTAWAY: Well, that clock was okay. That was reasonably accurate. What was really inaccurate were watches, pocket watches, which were around. Shakespeare could have afforded a pocket watch.
BOGAEV: Only the wealthy though?
EASTAWAY: Only the wealthy, which he became. But 90% of the reason to have a pocket watch was to show off because it was a classy, trendy thing; to tell the time, it would be losing an hour a day or something. They were hopelessly inaccurate.
BOGAEV: So, that also only had one hand?
EASTAWAY: In the early days, one hand. The minute hand is coming in. It does exist in niche areas. But within decades all clocks have a minute hand. So, it’s another thing changing.
The idea of a second, I don’t think Shakespeare refers to seconds at all. He instead, in one play, King John, he talks about the hour, the minute, and then, a breath, or you know, a tiny moment. A second’s too short. Because we have to put ourselves in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. Life was just laid back and quiet, you know. Even a minute is over so quickly. It’s all about the hours. It’s a slow pace of life, which is a wonderfully charming thing. But these days you imagine how much we’re driven by the minute, by the second.
BOGAEV: I know it’s hard to wrap your head around this as a modern person. It really gets hard when you talk about measurement because this was such an imprecise period. But it was again, a period of transition, and of course, measurement is another part of daily life that requires math. So, how imprecise was Shakespeare in his plays? What are some examples?
EASTAWAY: So, I think one way of seeing his imprecision is in a very healthy way. You know, when someone has a sense of number and knows that being too precise is pointless because it doesn’t really matter, you’ll say you’re not “Five minutes away” but “Four or five minutes.” You’ll pick two numbers together.
Shakespeare does this all the time. He’ll say, “One or two or three or four,” even when it’s instruction for how many people come on stage. He’ll say, “Seven or eight people come on stage.” He’s beautifully vague because he wants to give you a sense of number without saying it really matters that it’s exactly this.
I find that as someone who loves, you know, feels for numbers, rather than always being spiritually precise with them, a word that he likes, that’s not an official measurement but it has a meaning, is “league.” I thought, “What is a league?” I didn’t know. Turns out a league is three miles. It’s how far you can walk in an hour. So, three miles-ish. So, when Shakespeare’s talking about leagues, now you can picture what a league is. People might be traveling at most, by any means of transport, 20 miles a day, you know. So, distance was smaller but the length of a mile depended on where you were in the country. There was a Dorset mile, a Hampshire mile, and they were all a bit different. But everyone knew a mile’s quite a long way. So, you know, there’s lots of such measures mentioned in Shakespeare but he’s not ever expecting you to take it literally. He’s giving you a sense of “Ah, that’s a long way” or “That’s close.”
BOGAEV: Looking at Shakespeare through the lens of math yields so much richness because, as you were saying at the top of our conversation, so much was included under that heading of math. That umbrella, music and astronomy and astrology, which were literally considered the same thing back in Shakespeare’s time. But the music part illuminates some text that I hadn’t thought about in this way. You quote The Taming of the Shrew, the scene in which Hortensio disguises himself as a tutor cunning in music and mathematics. So, it’s just in one breath that they think of these two things.
EASTAWAY: Yes, and it’s not because it’s a jack of all trades, but because they are the same thing, you know, he’s an expert. And why is it mathematical? Because you make notes with a string, for example, by plucking it in half or a third. You know, if you divide it into whole number ratios, it makes pleasant harmonies. This had been known since Pythagoras in ancient Greek times. That whole Pythagorean approach to mathematics was still very much the way it was thought about and taught at university in those days. They were very mathematical, and the word used to describe, for example, dance was “measure.”
Poetry—I think it’s Hamlet, you know, “Poems are numbers” —and we still to this day (maybe it’s died out now)—but pop songs, you know, in the charts were often called “numbers.”
Then, you know, another math music reference comes from Juliet in that famous scene after Romeo and Juliet’s first night together. She talks about the lark making sweet division. Now there’s two interpretations of “sweet division.” By far, the main one is the note. It was a trendy thing in Elizabethan times to add a sort of jazzy element to tunes, so, a tune written in Shakespeare’s lifetime, “Three Blind Mice,” if you were doing that in division you’d break it up into nice, even rhythm and you’d just add all these little extra divisions within it. That was known as division and that’s partly what Juliet’s talking about. But, of course, to make the notes you are dividing. You are splitting a pipe, or a string, or whatever into a third, or a half, or whatever. So, you can interpret it that way as well. Either way it’s a mathematical reference just slipped in by Juliet. Not because she’s a mathematician, but because that’s the way people thought about it. They just operated together, you know, mathematics and language in harmony—literally, in the case of music.
BOGAEV: And likewise with astronomy. Shakespeare was really interested in astronomy. We could cite so many references. But did Shakespeare know about Tycho Brahe and the heliocentric theory of the universe?
EASTAWAY: Right. So, lots to unpack there. When Shakespeare is a child, it’s pretty much everyone, 99% of people, believe that the earth is static and everything in the universe rotates around us. And there’s indication that Shakespeare thinks the same way, or certainly goes along with the flow, you know, “the glorious planet sol.”
So, the sun is a planet, a thing that goes around the Earth, but there’s also a sign that he kind of becomes aware that the thinking has changed. Copernicus, pre-Shakespeare, is the first person who has put his name out there saying, “I don’t think the Earth’s at the center. I think the Sun’s at the center.” Then, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, Tycho Brahe in Denmark, away from the Church and all the authorities clamping down on him, is experimenting. He’s got a huge protractor to measure angles very precisely in his garden, in his backyard. With all these people measuring, you know, suddenly precision is coming into life and is spotting things that are inconsistent with the Earth being the center. He’s able to confirm Copernicus’s theory.
Did Shakespeare know of Tycho Brahe? Who knows? Except there’s a really tantalizing clue that maybe he was aware because there’s a famous portrait of Tycho Brahe. It names members of his Danish family around the outside that he’s giving tribute to. His ancestors. Almost certainly, copies of this portrait would have been sent to England, to London, and Shakespeare moved in royal circles and wealthy circles, so might well have seen it. Two of the relatives on this portrait are called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and you think “Woah.” Shakespeare’s looking for some Danish names. “I’ve seen this picture. Yeah, ‘ll take those two.” Now, who knows? But it’s kind of plausible. So, little hints that he’s aware of what’s going on.
Of course, the guy who really we remember for revolutionizing the way we think about the planets and gravity and everything else is Galileo. By beautiful coincidence, Galileo was born in the same year as Shakespeare, 1564, and it’s like their lives are going in parallel. In 1610, 1609 or 10, is when Galileo using his telescope—something no one else had—spotted the four moons of Jupiter.
What’s really intriguing is later that year Cymbeline comes out as Shakespeare’s play. There’s this really weird scene with Posthumus lying asleep with four ghosts walking around as if in orbit around him and from the ceiling descends Jupiter. Is this a reference to the four moons of Jupiter? It’s surely too much of a coincidence to say he’s picked this up on, you know, the intelligent chat going on in the pubs or whatever else in his social circle, this little nod to it in his play without ever saying why but it’s there.
So, I love these clues, you know. Of course anyone researching Shakespeare, it is full of these tantalizing clues. But there’s so many of them that are mathematically related which is joyful. You know, every time I look for something, I was amazed to find it. It was there.
BOGAEV: Just stepping back for my last question. Looking at a bigger picture some people have trouble finding an in to Shakespeare. Is there a message for teachers, looking at Shakespeare through the lens of math?
EASTAWAY: I think there is. I really do. For a start, a lot of people listening to the podcast will tend to not think of themselves as math people. But one way to get into any subject is to approach it from the thing you are interested in. So, if you love Shakespeare, that’s a great entry point for mathematical ideas.
Something I say to all audiences, especially young audiences, is if you think that you are not very strong at anything mathematical, I’ve got a solution for you that will make you brilliant. All you have to do is travel back in time, 500 years, and then you are one of the top 1% in the world, because you know stuff that almost no one else knows, which is quite reassuring really.
So, maths was just much easier then. People were discovering stuff. They were discovering how probability worked. They were playing games with dice, and they didn’t know what the odds were. Shakespeare talks quite a bit about odds. He’s clearly playing games. He doesn’t know what the odds either, but he knows that some things are more likely than others. So, it’s a wonderful sense of uninhibited discovery going on.
As much as anything, this book is a history book. It’s about Elizabethan history and how richly it was enhanced by mathematical innovation and theatrical innovation. They’re all going on, and they’re all connected. It says a lot about our education—it must be similar in the USA to how it is in the UK and everywhere—where subjects are all defined in little silos. They’re unconnected to each other and often that makes them abstract and difficult and, you know, boring. How much better they are and how much truer it is to life if you connect subjects together and you see that they’re related. I’ve always liked to think that way. If you like Renaissance thinking, it’s connecting everything. That’s how they thought in Elizabethan times. I’d love to get back to more of that kind of thinking and that kind of education as well.
BOGAEV: Well, that’s really inspiring, and the book and you are so much fun. Thank you.
EASTAWAY: Thank you so much.
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KARIM-COOPER: That was Rob Eastaway, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.
Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times is out now from The Experiment Publishing.
This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from London Broadcast Studio and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.
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