Crocheted Hyperbolic Plane by Charlotte Henderson
Powerful, what
I hold in my hands;
Friendship breaker because
The Prince judged us unready.
Impossible (yet made with my hands)
So Hilbert proved, at least in our dimension.
Yet I can perceive, enfold, zero-angle triangle,
Contradiction of Euclid's fifth---powerful postulate that led many
Through disbelief, false proofs housing equivalents, to madness
I hold in my hands;
Friendship breaker because
The Prince judged us unready.
Impossible (yet made with my hands)
So Hilbert proved, at least in our dimension.
Yet I can perceive, enfold, zero-angle triangle,
Contradiction of Euclid's fifth---powerful postulate that led many
Through disbelief, false proofs housing equivalents, to madness
or ruin and me to this:
It must be some trick, newspaper stippling, individual stitches
It must be some trick, newspaper stippling, individual stitches
collectively forming this illusion plane.
Charlotte presented this poem at a reading (that I helped to organize) at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston in January 2012. Inspired by the technique of creating crocheted models of hyperbolic
planes, she has said, "Once I had made one for myself, I was able to believe
non-Euclidean properties that I had previously accepted with my head but not my heart. I find both the Möbius band and hyperbolic geometry to be
somewhat unintuitive mathematical constructs, which makes them
particularly appealing as artistic subjects. I have crafted my poem so that the form reflects the subject. In 'Crocheted Hyperbolic Plane' [above] the syllables are treated like stitches in hyperbolic crochet: for every x syllables in the previous line, an extra syllable is added (an "increase" in crochet). In this poem, x = 4."
My own acquaintance with Charlotte began when Sarah Glaz and I worked with her as an editor at A K Peters, Ltd ; over many months she worked cordially and tirelessly with us co-editors to produce a fine collection of poetry-with-mathematics: Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters, 2008). Thanks, Charlotte.
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