{"id":1647,"date":"2018-10-09T07:50:14","date_gmt":"2018-10-09T11:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/inclusionexclusion\/?p=1647"},"modified":"2018-10-09T11:33:32","modified_gmt":"2018-10-09T15:33:32","slug":"converging-on-a-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/inclusionexclusion\/2018\/10\/09\/converging-on-a-solution\/","title":{"rendered":"Converging on a Solution: A Playwright’s Path"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Corrine Yap<\/a><\/p>\n

Uniform Convergence\u00a0<\/em>is a one-woman play, written and performed by mathematics graduate student Corrine Yap. It juxtaposes the stories of two women trying to find their place in a white-male-dominated academic world. The first is of historical Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya, who was lauded as a pioneer for women in science but only after years of struggle for recognition. \u00a0Her life’s journey is told through music and movement, in both Russian and English. The second is of a fictional Asian-American woman, known only as “Professor,” trying to cope with the prejudice she faces in the present. As she teaches an introductory real analysis class, she uses mathematical concepts to draw parallels to the race and gender conflicts she encounters in society today.
\n<\/em>– synopsis that was included in the MAA MathFest 2018 program<\/p>\n

In 2016, at a graduate school open house, I was told by a math professor that I would fit right in because they had \u201ca large group of international students from China.\u201d I responded, \u201cOh, I\u2019m not international; I\u2019m from Missouri.\u201d He replied, \u201cWell, yes, but it would be a good group for you.\u201d Throughout my life, I\u2019ve had many little exchanges like this. Uniform Convergence <\/em>was not born out of these experiences but rather out of my struggle to discuss these experiences (and race in general) with other people.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Kovalevskaya Draft 1: 3\/24\/2014<\/p><\/div>\n

Uniform Convergence<\/em> began as an end-of-term project in my first playwriting class. The assignment was to write a history play: something about a historical person or event. As a math and theater \u201cdouble major\u201d at Sarah Lawrence College (we didn\u2019t actually have majors), I jumped at the chance to be interdisciplinary. I had initially chosen Sophie Germain, but my analysis professor\/mentor suggested Kovalevskaya. \u201cHer life was full of drama. And Sophie Germain has already been done.\u201d My professor wasn\u2019t wrong.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Kovalevskaya Draft 2: 4\/29\/2014<\/p><\/div>\n

At the same time, certain news stories began cropping up: stories of students of color calling out college administrators for their lack of progress in catering to a non-white student demographic. Yale, Oberlin, Claremont McKenna, and eventually Sarah Lawrence, to name a few. In the years that followed, incidents of hate and intolerance seemed to be on the rise.<\/p>\n

In response, I wrote. Not for anyone but myself, at first. I wrote monologues given by characters who were facsimiles of myself on stage, ranting about injustice and emotions and the lack of diversity in my theater department\u2019s play choices and casting choices (this was a source of heated debate and discussion until the end of my time at Sarah Lawrence, and probably still is).<\/p>\n

I was frustrated. I was also taking real analysis. So I wrote a monologue for a professor who was teaching analysis but who was also angry and tired and fed up. I put it in my Sofia play, between a scene of her with Karl Weierstrass and an argument at the train station between her and her husband before they part for the last time. I didn\u2019t know what this professor had to do with Sofia, but I knew that they shared a feeling of powerlessness in a world that was not built for them. I didn\u2019t want my history play to live in the past. It had to give the audience something to take with them when the play was over. I presented this mish-mash of scenes in class, and the feedback was unanimous: this is going somewhere; keep working on it.<\/p>\n

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Uniform Convergence Draft 5.5: 12\/11\/2014<\/p><\/div>\n

In the following year, I studied abroad \u2013 theater in Moscow and math in Budapest. Slowly the play morphed from a cast of 10 to a cast of 2; from pages and pages of dialogue between Sofia and her sister, Sofia and her husband, Sofia and Weierstrass, to \u201cetudes\u201d: wordless physical scenes that are the building blocks of much of Russian theater; from a jumble of monologues relating math and my personal life to the slow progression of a professor reacting to rising tensions on a college campus.<\/p>\n

Its first performance was on April 27, 2016 at Sarah Lawrence College. At the time, it was a \u201csolo show with two people\u201d; a second actor played Sofia\u2019s husband Vladimir. I think of this draft as the one with the most frills and the most self-indulgence. Because I had the resources of a school theater department known for being \u201cexperimental,\u201d I could pull out all the stops: walls made of math papers taped together from floor to ceiling, a character called \u201cFigure at the Piano\u201d whose hands were live-feed projected onto the chalkboard, a semi-dance sequence to the song \u201cStart Wearing Purple.\u201d Looking back, I can see why the Professor character has remained mostly unchanged since Draft 7 while Sofia\u2019s story looks almost nothing like it did before. From the beginning, the Professor has represented what I wanted to say, the things that I wanted the audience to know, and that hasn\u2019t changed. But I had to figure out how to fit Sofia\u2019s story into that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n

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Uniform Convergence Draft 12: 3\/3\/2016<\/p><\/div><\/td>\n

\n

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Performance at Sarah Lawrence College, April 26, 2016\u2028 Pictured: Corrine Yap and Edunn Levy (playing the part of Vladimir Kovalevsky). Photo by Abigail Clark.<\/p><\/div><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

After I started grad school at Rutgers University (I had decided that it would be easier to have a career in math and do theater on the side than to have a career in theater and do math on the side), the play was accepted to the NuWorks Festival at the Pan-Asian Repertory Theater in NYC. This time, I performed on my own \u2013 no director, no second actor, no designers. There were no chalkboards available in the space, so I taped sheets of butcher paper to the walls and danced with a coat rack that played the part of Vladimir.<\/p>\n

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Uniform Convergence Draft 12: 3\/3\/2016<\/p><\/div>\n

Again, you can see why I continued to edit the Sofia storyline.<\/p>\n

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Uniform Convergence Draft 14.5: 3\/6\/2017<\/p><\/div>\n

This brief off-Broadway run brought two questions to my mind: (1) What is the purpose of this play? and (2) Who is this play for?<\/p>\n

I thought I had always known the answer to (1): the point is to share my experiences with prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination, as a woman and an Asian American in a STEM field. It has taken a while, but I have finally accepted that my story is one worth telling. A worry that I (and I think a lot of other artists) have is about self-indulgence: why should my story matter? Who cares? Offering up something so personal for public viewing always raises these questions for me. Even writing this blog post, I am asking these questions of myself. Over time, I\u2019ve had enough people come up to me and thank me, or tell me a personal story, or ask me to perform at their school that I don\u2019t agonize over the play\u2019s existence anymore. But what is the message of the play? I don\u2019t know that there is one. My hope is that the play starts a conversation, or makes people think about issues that they might not have considered before.<\/p>\n

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Uniform Convergence Draft 15: 5\/3\/2017<\/p><\/div>\n

This answer to (1) doesn\u2019t address approximately half of the play: why Sofia? NuWorks made it clear to me that Sofia\u2019s presence in that version of the play was more of a hindrance, an extraneous plotline, than a necessity. I wanted the play to be about Sofia\u2019s struggle just as much as it detailed my own. In Drafts 1 through 15, however, Sofia\u2019s story was centered around her conflict with her husband. This was supposed to be a play about two women fighting for a place in a male-dominated field, and here I was making half of the play rely on a male character! So that summer, I killed my favorite scene \u2013 the first scene I had written, a scene at a train station where Sofia leaves Vladimir for good, the scene that I had continued to include in every draft only because everyone in my playwriting class said it was their favorite scene. I killed the coat rack and rewrote Sofia\u2019s story to be about her. This was Draft 16.<\/p>\n

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Uniform Convergence Draft 16: 10\/22\/2017<\/p><\/div>\n

That brings me to question (2): who is this for? Before NuWorks, I didn\u2019t think it was for math people. I was worried that my classmates and professors in grad school would think I was weird for having a one-woman show, or feel uncomfortable with the subject matter. Regarding the former, I was flat-out wrong. Each of my performances in the past year has resulted from someone seeing a previous performance and asking, \u201cCan you come to my school?\u201d Even my most recent show at the MAA MathFest was a result of Pat Devlin (former Rutgers grad student, now postdoc at Yale and probably Uniform Convergence<\/em>\u2019s greatest champion \u2013 he has seen the show four times) pointing me in the right direction.<\/p>\n

\"\"Regarding the latter, I\u2019ve come to realize that the discomfort of dealing with subjects like race cannot and should not be avoided. Conversations about stereotyping and diversity and inclusion need to happen. As I mentioned, this play resulted from my struggle to have such conversations: it\u2019s easy to talk to people who agree with me but hard to bring up such topics with people who don\u2019t \u2013 or worse, people whose opinions I don\u2019t know. If I tell them that story about the professor who believed I have more in common with Chinese-born-and-raised students than with fellow Americans, will their response be \u201cWow, that\u2019s awful!\u201d or \u201cWell, he\u2019s got a point\u2026\u201d? I\u2019m horrible with confrontation, and I was scared of receiving a response I wasn\u2019t prepared for.<\/p>\n

So Uniform Convergence <\/em>became my conversation-starter, my jumping-off point, my way of telling people, \u201cHere\u2019s what I want us to be talking about.\u201d I found allies in my classmates and colleagues with whom I had chatted about tensor products and graph embeddings but never dared to broach the topics of politics or race. I still don\u2019t dare, sometimes. But I am using this post to challenge you \u2013 and thereby hold myself accountable \u2013 to have these conversations, to talk about these things that we \u201caren\u2019t supposed to talk about\u201d in math.<\/p>\n

Ask a colleague if they knew that in 2015, women made up almost 1\/3 of math doctoral recipients but only 22% of doctoral hires.[1]<\/a> Ask if they have any female undergraduate students. Ask if they\u2019ve asked any of those female students about attending graduate school. Ask if they know that the number of non-white Americans who earn math Ph.D\u2019s each year has remained at 6 to 7.5% of all math Ph.D.\u2019s granted that year in the U.S., for the past 15 years.[2]<\/a> And yes, that includes Asian Americans. Ask if they know the names of their students. Now ask if they know the names of their east Asian international students. Now ask if they know which Asian students are not international students. (Perhaps they will say none, to which you may respond \u201cAre you sure?\u201d) Ask if they care about representation of women and minorities in mathematics. Ask what they think they can do to effect change. Perhaps they will say nothing. Perhaps it\u2019s because they\u2019re a graduate student with a million things to do and no real power. Perhaps it\u2019s because they\u2019re just a small part of a large and largely unjust system, and it\u2019s hard to figure out what to do, what to say, how to say what to which people to make it matter. That\u2019s okay. You had a conversation about it, and that\u2019s already a step forward.<\/p>\n

Corrine Yap is a math Ph.D student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. For photos, videos, and reviews of the show, visit <\/em>www.corrineyap.com\/uniformconvergence<\/em><\/a>. If you\u2019d like to invite Corrine for a performance, please send her a message at <\/em>www.corrineyap.com\/contact<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> according to the AMS Annual Survey http:\/\/www.ams.org\/profession\/data\/annual-survey\/demographics<\/a><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

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Guest Post by Corrine Yap Uniform Convergence\u00a0is a one-woman play, written and performed by mathematics graduate student Corrine Yap. It juxtaposes the stories of two women trying to find their place in a white-male-dominated academic world. The first is of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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