It’s hard to imagine an artistic strategy more daring, since when it comes to math the audience’s attention, it is often assumed, is very precarious. Or as Mr. McBurney put it, “There’s a great fear of obscurity and misunderstanding.”  The most successful portraits of mathematicians, like the award-winning dramas “A Beautiful Mind” and “Proof,” go to great lengths to avoid technical discussion. Mr. McBurney said he enjoyed these works, adding, “I don’t think they have anything to do with math.”  In a discussion about the roots of artistic inspiration, his friend Michael Ondaatje, the author “The English Patient,” told Mr. McBurney about the mathematicians and their friendship. “I have always thought it could be a great novel or film, but I have seen nothing in those forms — in a novel or a film — that has fully worked for me,” Mr. Ondaatje said. “It seemed to need Simon to add the contemporary story to Ramanujan’s. That story of the two mathematicians was a very moving intermingling of the two cultures, ‘A Passage to India’ reversed and updated.”  He recommended that Mr. McBurney read Hardy’s book “A Mathematician’s Apology,” which compared the creative work of the mathematical proof to that of a painter or a poet. That notion challenged Mr. McBurney, since he had long considered math a rigid discipline with a strict sense of right and wrong.  As a child he was intimidated. “I was very bad at mathematics in school, and I always had the feeling as a kid that when I worked on problems, that I would be wrong,” he said. “Hardy suggested that math is different, that it is instead a series of patterns, beautiful patterns.”  In 2007 he sank himself into the subject, reading a stack of books (like David Foster Wallace’s “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity”) and attending academic lectures where he could barely decipher a word. He relied on the assistance of Marcus du Sautoy, a professor of mathematics at Oxford and longtime admirer of Complicite. (Mr. du Sautoy even participated in a workshop in the late 1990s.) Mr. McBurney said that as he immersed himself in the subject, the math became increasingly clear. As he started to grasp snippets of proofs and the evolution of ideas, he noticed something else interesting: he was actually enjoying himself.  The difficulty of understanding an esoteric subject is at the heart of “A Disappearing Number,” though it is linked to the seemingly unbridgeable distance between cultures. Hardy finds it difficult to grasp the methods of his friend, who doesn’t use traditional proofs to solve his problems. As Hardy put it in a Harvard lecture, “I suppose it is difficult for an Englishman and an Indian to understand each other.”  The play is also just as much about the challenges of love. In what he calls an attempt to avoid a “Merchant Ivory”-style drama, Mr. McBurney juxtaposes the plot about these famous mathematicians with a contemporary story that follows a man coping with the death of his math professor partner who traveled to India to retrace the footsteps of Ramanujan. The theme of connectedness has been a constant in Complicite’s shows since “Mnemonic,” and it is striking how the way Mr. McBurney talks about his own work discussions resembles a kind of intellectual connect-the-dots.  For instance, when asked how the discussion of infinity at the beginning of the show relates to modern-day relationships, he paused before slowly building a formulation.  “Infinity is a way to describe the incomprehensible to the human mind,” he said. “In a way it notates a mystery. That kind of mystery exists in relationships. A lifetime is not enough to know someone else. It provides a brief glimpse.”  A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2010, on Page AR3 of the New York edition with the headline: There’s Nothing to Fear From Infinity. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Simon McBurney’s new play, “A Disappearing Number,” at the Lincoln Center Festival, doesn’t shy away from a discussion of mathmatics.