Hot for Teacher: Erin Weaver and Cody Nickell get excited about math in Aaron Posner’s new production of “Arcadia.”

A few years after Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld dominated network television with their “show about nothing,” Tom Stoppard astonished the theater with a play about everything. More specifically, the mathematical conceits that govern the ultimate predictability of everything. Or don’t. Learned opinion varies about the math.

Not so vis-à-vis the play: Arcadia was hailed as a masterpiece upon its London premiere in the spring of 1993, and time — not to mention a sparkling new Folger Shakespeare Library production helmed by the ever reliable Aaron Posner — has confirmed the rightness of that early verdict. Structurally, Stoppard’s comic-literary-mystery-romance is a luminous jewel, brilliantly reflecting light from every angle. The light in this case being not reason, or not just reason, but all that arises from human curiosity. As literary scholar Hannah Jarvis (Holly Twyford, managing once more to be prickly and endearing simultaneously) puts it late in the evening, “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.”