Making Connections: Thomasina Coverly & Ada Lovelace

Join screenwriter Diane Lake in exploring the connection between Arcadia’s Thomasina and Lord Byron’s own daughter, Ada Lovelace, who is widely considered the founder of scientific computing.

Diane Lake is a screenwriter who has been commissioned to write films for Columbia, Disney, Miramax, Paramount, NBC and numerous independent producers. Diane’s film, Frida, which opened at the Venice Film Festival in 2002, was named one of the 10 Best Films of 2002 by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute, and was nominated for 6 Academy Awards. Her script Hemingway in Paris recently sold to French producer Phillippe Chausse. Current projects under option include Ada, a biopic of Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter, and Hard-Boiled, a film noir featuring Raymond Chandler. Her script Monetis is in development as a French/Australian co-production. Her short fiction has appeared in the Grey Sparrow Review and she is currently adapting Thomas H. Cook’s novel Instruments of Night for producer Tony Greenburg.

A Stoppard Symposium

Join us for a Post-Show Conversation with MIT Professor Diana Henderson as we discuss everything Tom Stoppard, the playwright of Arcadia.

Diana Henderson is Professor of Literature and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT.  Her areas of research and interest include Shakespeare, gender studies, early modern poetry and drama, modernism, media studies, and world drama. Her publications include the books Alternative Shakespeares 3, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media, A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender and Performance, as well as more than forty scholarly articles. In addition to nine years as MIT’s Dean for Curriculum and Faculty Support, she has served as the President of the Shakespeare Society of America, worked as a dramaturg, was a principal participant in MIT’s collaborations with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is co-editor of Shakespeare Studies.

Join the cast & creative team of Arcadia to learn more about how they tackled this highly academic and classic work!

The Science behind Arcadia

Join us for a special post-show Sunday Symposium with MIT Professors David Kaiser and Seth Lloyd as we discuss the history behind the science in Arcadia! 

David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Department Head of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and also a Professor of Physics at MIT. His books include Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005), which received the Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society for best book in the field; and How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011), which was named “Book of the Year” by Physics World magazine and also received the Davis Prize from the History of Science Society for best book aimed at a general audience. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Kaiser has received MIT’s highest awards for excellence in teaching. Other honors include the LeRoy Apker Award from the American Physical Society, and the Edgerton Prize from MIT. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, theNew York Times, and Scientific American, as well as on NOVA television programs, NPR, and the BBC. He is currently writing two books about gravity: a physics textbook with his colleague Alan Guth on gravitation and cosmology, and a history of research on Einstein’s general relativity over the twentieth century.

Dr. Seth Lloyd received a Ph.D. in Physics from Rockefeller University and a postdoctoral fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked on applications of information to quantum-mechanical systems. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked at the Center for Nonlinear Systems on quantum computation. Since 1988, Dr. Lloyd has also been an adjunct faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Lloyd is a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon’s noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction. Professor Lloyd is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Arcadia: A Cosmologist’s View

Join us for a Post-Show Conversation with Dr. Margaret J. Geller as we explore the universe of Arcadia! We’re excited to have Dr. Geller back after her contributions to our Central Conversations last season during the run of Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight.

Dr. Margaret J. Geller is a world-renowned and multi-award winning astrophysicist best know for her pioneering maps of the distribution of galaxies in the nearby universe. These maps opened the era of mapping the universe. Dr. Geller is member of the National Academy of Sciences. She has been widely recognized for her technical and public contributions to science including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. She has received 6 honorary degrees, including one recently from Dartmouth College in 2014.

Dr. Geller’s Website: www.cfa.harvard.edu/~mjg