Friday, June 5, 2020

Does nothing exist?

     From Montreal mathematician, poet, and artist Alex Ionut, this highly imaginative poem, "The Empty Set Exists."  -- a poem stimulated by his study of the Euler spiral (clothoid) and a 3-D version that he calls "the spherical clothoid."  

       The empty set exists   by Alexandru Ionut

       To see her would be like touching death
       It's axiomatic, the foundation of any metric
       You love her because she's her

       Double entendre across the stanza
       But her hair, only spirals

       My love for her, pure vector
       Imaginary, hypercomplex
       Unmixed evil, I bow to Lord Kelvin
       Maxwell's demon, my Hamiltonian angel  

       Lemaître rolls the globe
       I scour it all
       The absolute framed in the abstract
       Her touch electric, she skirts the real
       The thought of her chases me
       She's the fairest of them all

       I pray for her to the Lord of all men
       Cosmic logic made flesh, restorer of balance
       I praise the giants who lifted me up
       Euler, Thales, Anaximander . . .

My connection with Alex Ionut has primarily been through Facebook -- and some of his art is displayed there at the Bridges -- Art and mathematics site.  Here is a sample:

The spherical clothoid, a 3d generalization of the Euler spiral

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