With all of the major advances that have taken place since the The Scientific Revolution, it can be easy to forget how impactful and, indeed, revolutionary the time period was for playwrights like William Shakespeare. The bard was being influenced by high level mathematics, and a very Renaissance minded way of thinking that spills off the page into his productions. Here to help us explore some of the places in Shakespeare’s plays where we can see the bard’s education in germ theory, atomism, and even algebra, is our very special guest, Dr. Natalie Elliot.

Natalie Elliot is a writer and college professor at St. John’s College, where she teaches cross-disciplinary courses in classics, history of science, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and music. She writes about the many ways that scientific theories, experiments, and technologies shape what it means to be human. In addition to her appointment at St. John’s, Elliot has held research and teaching positions at The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions, Indiana University’s Hutton Honors College, and Southern Methodist University. She lives in Santa Fe, NM and New York.

She joins us today from her sabbatical in beautiful Montana where she is working on her latest book, and she’s here now to be our exclusive tour guide into some of the research she recently completed for her work, Shakespeare’s Theater of the Universe, where she examines the intersection of math, science, literature, art, and theater that makes William Shakespeare a true Renaissance man.