day computers or even a calculator. Valentine, on the other hand, does not see the order to the chaos of the natural world in his work on grouse and is constantly complaining that there is too much "noise." It is Valentine who discovers what Thomasina is really up to in her lesson books. Thomasina is attempting to mathematically represent nature through iterated algorithms, something that only the contemporary mathematicians, over 100 years after Thomasina's time, began doing. She also understands the second law of thermodynamics, long before it is invented. Valentine is somewhat baffled by what Thomasina was doing because she was so far ahead of her time. Thomasina wasn't able to finish her work because, as Valentine explains, "there wasn't enough time before, there weren't enough pencils." (Act I, sc. iv, pg. 52) The work that Thomasina was doing without a calculator was so tedious that Valentine feels that a person would either have to have an extremely good reason for doing it, or they would have to be insane. Valentine, like a typical modern day person, gets hung up on the idea that Thomasina actually existed. This eventually leads him to give up on his grouse. The thought that a thirteen year old gir,l who did not have the technological advantages that he does, could make order out of the chaos drives him to the point of abandonment. This is a comment on modern society's lack of patience. Valentine is Stoppard's mirror to show his audience that society is so distracted by the chaos, we no longer have the ability to sift through it. Valentine finally does end up acting on something at the end of the play when he finally accepts the fact that such brilliance as Thomasina's did exist and decides to finish her work for publication. Even then, the modern day character is falling back on someone else instead of doing something new.Stoppard is a modern playwright who uses the comparisons of characters from the past and the present to com...
