Monday, November 19, 2018

Qualitative thinking in a quantitative era . . .

and an advocate of holistic education.
Many thanks to Australian poet and STEAM advocate, Erica Jolly
for reminding me of the importance of Hoffmann's work.

HEIGHT     by Roald Hoffmann

The man
who said
when you're on top
of a mountain
you can't see it
was a miner. 
The tiny poem above is found here on Hoffmann's website.

               Celebrate diversity!
Consider several views!               

     Here is the title -- and a link -- to a paper that shows Hoffmann's multidisciplinary points of view (included are some lines from poet William Blake): "Qualitative thinking in the age of modern computational chemistry-or what Lionel Salem knows."  Hoffmann's "Primo Levi Lecture on Diversity "(given when he was awarded the Primo Levi Prize) is available here with additional commentary on the lecture here.   His poem "Why Does Disorder Increase in the Same Direction of Time as That in Which the Universe Expands?" is featured in the math-poetry anthology, Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/ CRC Press, 2008).  Composed of twenty-two nine-syllable-square stanzas, Hoffmann's thought-provoking poem "Sustainable Development" is available here.

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