The title of this course is taken from the following passage in Arcadia, act one, scene three:
THOMASINA: Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God's truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?
SEPTIMUS: We do.
THOMASINA: Then why do your equations only describe the shapes of manufacture?
SEPTIMUS: I do not know.
THOMASINA: Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet.
SEPTIMUS: He has mastery of equations which lead into infinities where we cannot follow.
THOMASINA: What a faint-heart! We must work outward from the middle of the maze. We will start with something simple. (She picks up the apple leaf.) I will plot this leaf and deduce its equation.1
I invite students to reflect on what Thomasina means by the phrase ``outward from the middle of the maze,'' in the context of this scene, and on why this phrase is an appropriate title for this course.
1 Stoppard, Tom, Arcadia (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 37.
This document is available on the World Wide Web as
http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~stone/courses/stoppard/outward.xhtml
created May 30, 2000
last revised August 25, 2002