Jun 15, 2020
In 1572, when William Shakespeare was 8 years old, a large supernova streaked across the sky making a lifelong mark in the memory of not just a young William Shakespeare, but across the consciousness of all of England who saw it that night. At the height of Renaissance thought, and during the time Galileo was presenting his ideas in Italy, William Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, King Lear, and other plays which not only allude to the work of famous physicists and astronomers of the 16th century, but in some cases, including the stars they studied, and even some family relatives of these astronomers, by name.
We do not often connect William Shakespeare and his work in theater with Euclidean Geometry, or the Copernican theory of the universe, but when we study the life of the bard, we discover that he was not only well educated in both, but contemporaries to the bard like Thomas Digges, and Tycho Brahe, were publishing works right alongside the plays of Shakespeare that captured the attention of England, and Europe, during the 16th century. Our guest this week, Dr. Michael Rowan Robinson has published extensively on the topics of mathematics, astronomy, and Shakespeare, and he is here today to explain the mathematical history of the bard, including the influence of Copernicus and Kepler on plays like Hamlet and King Lear.