From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Farah Kareem Cooper,

the Folger director. 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 Bow gave.

So this book started in Stratford on Avon, like Shakespeare.

What happened there?

It did. It happened kind of by accident.

There was a conference happening at a hotel in Stratford for maths teachers.

And I was asked to go and do a workshop. And just knowing that 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 sort of brainstormed. I mean, it was things like, you know, 2B or not

2B, the algebra of Hamlet. Or Andrew came up with Henry V or Henry the 20%. And 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, just in case. And I found

the word mathematics in Taming of the Shrew in the context of music and mathematics. And 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.

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