Guest Post by Ricky Coates, Artistic Director of Matheatre and History Science Theatre
Math is breaking. Space and time are fracturing. Someone or something is erasing numbers, rewriting equations, and opening a dreaded “ArithmeRift.” Thankfully, agents of the government’s Situationally Unstable Mathematics Mitigation (SUMM) Division have it secured. For now. They need researchers — like you! — to enter the Fracture, confront whatever horrors await, and save our existence.
So begins FRACTURE, an immersive experience that is part haunted house, part escape room, all theatre, and entirely SCARY!
I’m Ricky Coates, the artistic director for Matheatre (and History Science Theatre). Our company creates live theatre that inspires audiences in math and science, and we met Lauren Siegel and the MathHappens folk many years ago when they hired us to perform our live show Calculus: The Musical! for high school students in California.
In 2023, Lauren contacted me with a proposal. She wanted to build a math-themed haunted house and was wondering if I would consult on some ideas. Little did she know whom she had poked! I grew up creating and performing in haunted houses and was bursting with ideas. After a few meetings, it became clear that this seed of an idea was growing into a beanstalk.
With the blessing, support, and creative help of the MathHappens Foundation, my partners K. Brian Neel, Sadie Bowman, and I started crafting the experience that would become FRACTURE. But what kind of haunted experience should we have? Mathematical duels akin to those of the 16th century? Wronged mathematicians like Gottfried Leibniz back from the grave for revenge? Or cultists fervently obsessed with numbers? That last proposition stuck out as the most fruitful.
Back in ancient Greece, Pythagoras was not only proving the ancient formula of a^2+b^2=c^2, but he was also busy crafting a religious and personality cult. Like most cults, the Pythagoreans had some strange beliefs. Purportedly, they didn’t eat beans because they thought every time they “passed gas” they lost a little bit of their soul. They avoided white roosters and wouldn’t eat broken bread. Most intriguingly, a large portion of their beliefs revolved around math. To the Pythagoreans, math was a holy practice. They revered numbers, especially the number 10, and thought reality, from music to the planets, was composed of numbers, much like atoms. To their minds, the gods had created the universe out of numbers, and so everything could be expressed as a ratio of one number to another.
This gave rise to a myth about one follower, Hippasus. According to the stories, he used the Pythagorean Theorem to prove the irrationality of the square root of two. This proof was an affront to the Pythagoreans and their gods, so Hippasus was taken out to sea and drowned for his mathematical hubris.
What a juicy idea for a haunted house! So Brian, Sadie, and I got to thinking, what if the Pythagoreans still existed? What if they have been lurking in the shadows, trying to erase all of math that would be considered blasphemous? What would the world look like without negative numbers, imaginary numbers, and all irrational numbers? What would happen to physics – and our world – if those numbers were erased from existence? And thus, FRACTURE was born…
Drawing inspiration from novels like Annihilation and Roadside Picnic, we crafted the “ArithmeRifts,” unstable areas where math is broken, and the agents of the Situationally Uncertain Mathematics Mitigation (SUMM) division, who exist to contain and eliminate the rifts. (Fun fact: the SUMM agents were inspired and played by our 2023 and 2024 producing partners, the Seattle Universal Math Museum.) Audiences are sent into the ArithmeRift as “researchers” to find out what’s happening inside and hopefully make it out alive.
Not to spoil too much, but while exploring, the groups of “researchers” quickly find and rescue a Guide, a mathematician lost in spacetime who has their own personal demons to battle. Led by the Guide, the audience infiltrates the cult of Pythagoras, revealed to be the cause of the rift, and solves increasingly difficult challenges to reintroduce abstract numbers back into reality. Finally, they come face-to-face with the Pythagoreans. Helped by the Guide, the audience uses their newfound knowledge to prove the irrationality of the square root of two and destabilize the math-annihilating ritual. Most of them make it out alive…
Fast-forward three years, and FRACTURE has performed to around 900 audience “researchers” and sold-out runs in both Seattle and Portland. We’ve built the show inside a theatre building, a gigantic 1905 steam plant, and the basement of a science museum. Audience reviews have been overwhelmingly about how fun, scary, and math-positive the experience was:
“It was SO GOOD!! As a college math instructor and a theatre kid, I was totally delighted by this immersive theatre experience.”
“Had a great time! The scariest part was the room with the numberlines – I loved it!”
“We LOVED it! Fast but not hectic, and a great history lesson.”
Now that the dust has settled on FRACTURE 2025, we are looking forward to 2026. After working the past three years to really hone the script and puzzles, we have new ideas for building a more unsettling environment for a more holistic experience. We are also working toward putting up FRACTURE in multiple cities, growing its creepy (and fun) reach to exponentially more people around the states – all thanks to Lauren’s vision and the MathHappens Foundation’s support!
So beware, mathematicians. The FRACTURE may be opening up near you…