The Mote in God’s i : Fourier, Fractals, and Imaginary Numbers in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia

Scholars of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia have long recognized its deep interest in science and mathematics as well as its complex use of scientific and mathematical concepts to illustrate its thematic concerns. But Stoppard criticism has often overlooked several important concepts, including the imaginary and complex numbers of fractal geometry, Brownian motion and chaos, and the Fourier transform. This article fills in these historical and contextual gaps and argues that critics of Arcadia should take a more integrative approach by examining these ideas as they relate to and reinforce each other rather than in isolation.