Performing Mime-matics for fun and profit

Having learned the craft from the master, Marcel Marceau, the Chartiers use mime to teach mathematics

Without saying a word, a man walks on stage carrying a case full of small plungers. Each time he reaches in the case to take some plungers out, he tries to array them in order on a table in front of him, but he always has one left over. Five, seven, thirteen: No matter what number, there is still that one left alone, and the man gets visibly, but silently, more exasperated at each turn.

The man is a mime named Tim Chartier, whose day job is associate professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at Davidson College in North Carolina. The plunger skit and many others that he and his wife, Tanya, have developed are part of their Mime-matics business. Having learned from the master of the craft, Marcel Marceau, they use their skills in mime to teach mathematics in a decidedly unconventional way.

How best to teach math and science has, in recent years, worried educators, parents and students alike. The Chartiers do not claim to have a magic bullet to allay that worry, but they hope their Mime-matics business is at least one answer to the math-phobia that seems to pervade the American society.

The combination of that heightened attention and word of mouth has created more demand for their programme than they can handle, given their full-time jobs– which they are not quite ready to abandon.

“Any time math is brought up in a TV show or a movie, there is a groan,” said Tanya Chartier, whose main occupation is as a reading specialist for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. “The way that math was traditionally taught was rote memorisation, which is dull. Some people have a negative experience with that and quickly discount their ability to learn math. It is important to teach people in a way that excites them.”

Tim Chartier is a good example of a potentially bored math student who looked for another way into the subject. He was a confirmed arts student growing up, started doing puppet shows professionally as an adolescent and spent most summers at arts camps. He was also a decent athlete, so he had the idea to teach theater arts and coach for a career.

His mother, though, was good at math and encouraged him to study it so he would have another subject to teach – perhaps doing theater as an extracurricular activity in lieu of sports.

The Chartiers met at one of those summer arts camps after Tim’s junior year at Western Michigan University, while Tanya was a freshman at Denison University in Ohio. She was a gymnast and dancer, but became attracted to puppetry and mime through him. They both eventually studied with Marceau, the famed French mime, and started doing mime performances while Tim got his doctorate at the University of Colorado.

While they were there, the director of the Boulder Public Library received a National Science Foundation grant for math-related activities. “She said, ‘Will you do your mime show? It seems like a math-related performance,’” recalled Chartier, 48. “I didn’t know what she meant – I was just doing entertainment – but Tanya agreed, saying a lot of what I did had to do with math. It has just grown from there, and it is really fun to combine arts and math.”

For the last decade or so, the Chartiers together, or sometimes Tim alone, have done their Mime-matics performances about twice a month and often more than that in summers. They perform mostly at colleges and universities all over the United States, but also at math conferences, festivals and schools.

They typically ask an average of $500 a performance plus travel expenses, and often coordinate the performances where Tim might be delivering a paper or lecturing on his other subject of expertise, sports analytics.

Arthur Benjamin is the Smallwood Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, where the Chartiers have performed. Benjamin himself is a magician and uses magic in his teaching. “I have seen the Chartiers perform and their material can be appreciated on multiple levels. They do provide an antidote to the claim that math is mostly taught without much creativity.”

The Chartiers say they really do no marketing, but get more requests by word of mouth than they can accommodate. In keeping with the social media age, they have put several of their sketches on video-sharing sites, including the one with the plungers and another using an invisible rope to demonstrate the principle of infinity.

They are, however, big advocates that math and science should not be taught in opposition to social sciences and the arts, but in concert with them. “Increasing STEM knowledge is a good goal,” said Tanya Chartier, 46, referring to a rising emphasis since 2006 on improving the science, technology, engineering and math skills of student in the United States.

Creating art with math

“But we like the idea of STEAM – STEM with the arts in it,” she added. “Mime-matics is a shining example. We do not think of ourselves as mathematical artists. We are mimes, and Tim is a mathematician. We are just using math to create art.”

Tim Chartier considers himself an applied mathematician, finding ways to communicate the subject through real-life examples, as opposed to theoretical mathematicians “who are more like philosophers,” he said. At Davidson, he teaches a course called Finite Math, which often fills the math/science requirement for history and English majors.

“It is probably the last time these students will ever take a math course, so I see myself as the last chance they have to have a good experience with math,” he said. “On the first day, I tell them that many of them will one day sit at a table where their kid will ask whether he or she should like math and science. I tell them I want them to get one story to tell that kid that will be positive in the next 16 weeks. It is an important moment in that class. They start looking for a good experience.”

The Chartiers, who themselves have two children, 8 and 12, said they wanted their approach to Mime-matics to deliver the same positive experience. Even when they perform at colleges, the audiences are filled with children and their parents.

“Kids start laughing at the sketches and that frees up their parents, who might have long been afraid of math. The kids break the ice,” said Tanya Chartier, who added that she particularly wants to fight the perception that math is for boys and writing is for girls, and hopes that Mime-matics entices girls to become more attracted to math.

“When you have a parent not fond of math who brings a child because the child likes math, by the end of the show, the parent is energised and comes at math in a different way,” said Tim Chartier. “I have people coming up saying, ‘I didn’t expect I would like it, but we both enjoyed it.’ We want math to have a larger audience – and one not afraid of it.”