Sandra DeLozier Coleman
Having just completed the English translations of Sofia Kovalevskaya’s
two parallel plays, HOW IT WAS and HOW IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, the plays
and the mathematics behind them were on my mind as a hand-drawn,
unmeasured, algorithmic image of key elements in the plays took form.
Kovalevskaya, the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics, also
gained significant recognition as a writer. She explained in a
prologue to the two plays that she intended the parallel plays to
present how the idea of extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, as
demonstrated by Poincaré in his research on the three-body problem,
relates to the way an alternate choice, made at a critical moment in a
person’s life, can redirect all future events.
In each play, the lives of a set of six characters are
intertwined. The characters in the two sets are almost, but not
entirely, the same. Slight dissimilarities are sufficient to lead
them to make significantly different choices at critical moments,
leading to very different endings. The image, like the plot,
unfolds from the fires of an Ivan Kupala’s Eve celebration. From
there, a 60° rotational symmetry pattern represents both sets of
six characters, who are understood to have traveled parallel paths
until a crisis leads to radically different responses. The
resultant opposite endings appear as two contrasting, overlapping
120° symmetries, where the shapes of the outer curves reflect a
change in how the characters have been paired.