Victoria Gould: Not Your Average Mathematician-Actress

January 5, 2009

"I've always loved maths," British actress Victoria Gould recently told Plus magazine. "At school I was quite pushed into the arts, and used to secretly go into book shops and read maths books when I should have been studying A level arts subjects," she recalled. "It felt a bit like a guilty secret, that I was so interested in maths and that I found it rather comforting."

"The problem with being an actor," she posited, "is that you're always living on someone else's estimation of you." Whereas "the mathematics is there and it's always right, and it's always solid," she stated.

Gould is perhaps best known for playing a journalist on the BBC television soap opera EastEnders. She has also managed to put her solid mathematical ability to good use. She helped develop A Disappearing Number, a play about Srinivasa Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy produced by Complicite. "I read a fantastic description of mathematics while researching the play," she said. "It's the set of all possible self-consistent structures."

Although the play is about Ramanujan coming to Cambridge and collaborating with Hardy, it is set in the modern world and tells a number of stories while conveying an impressive amount of mathematics onstage. "What we really didn't want to do was an exposition on maths," Gould said. "We wanted to somehow embody the maths in the show, within the music and the rhythm and the space of the show. We wanted it to be a mathematical experience as well as a theatrical one."

Gould's work with Complicite harks back to her earliest theatrical experiences. After leaving school, she and several friends had formed a small theater company and devised a completely original show that successfully toured from club to club around London.

"I really ultimately wanted to act, but I didn't want to stop doing maths and physics," Gould said. She completed her mathematics, physics, and engineering A levels within a year, and went on to receive a degree in physics from the University of Manchester. At the Cranfield Institute of Technology (now Cranfield University), where she received a master's degree, her work involved linear algebra, computation, and signal processing. Gould's thesis was on the use of fractals in generating natural-looking landscapes in computer imaging.

Her postgraduate degree led to a series of research positions. At King's College London, Gould investigated the complexities of synthetic aperture radar. "To increase resolution, to get a better picture," she explained, "you need a larger aperture, which would soon need to be bigger than the actual plane, so you synthesize, or create the effect of a real aperture by applying some complex processes to the data from the single antenna."

After giving birth to her first child, Gould took a break, moved to Brighton, but ended up doing mathematical research at Sussex University, looking at algorithms for weather modeling. This effort involved applying partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, and chaos theory. In "the middle of that," Gould said, she was offered a part in a London production of Hamlet and later auditioned for the TV show EastEnders. "I was catapulted into the weird world of soap land and infamy," she said.

Gould now balances her two careers. "I have an agent and I act as much as I can. I do a great deal of theatre work and develop new writing," she said. "But I also do some supply teaching of mathematics, and I read as much maths as I can. And I also help children one-to-one with their maths, which I hugely enjoy."

"I'll quite often, in a stressful time, go off and do a bit of linear algebra or some trigonometric identities," Gould said. "They're hugely calming for me." Math as stress relief? "Absolutely, it works every time!"

Source: Plus, December 2008.