Reading Numbers Like Poetry

      When I come across a title that connects math and poetry, I become interested -- and want to read more. Google helped me discover here, in China Daily, an article featuring German professor Andrea Breard entitled "Reading numbers like poetry: A journey into ancient Chinese math."  She goes on to tell about some algebraic methods that were written as poems -- the rhythm allowing easier and better memorization.  

     Andrea Breard is a German historian of mathematics, specializing in Chinese mathematics.  Her remarks took me back to my childhood when we frequently repeated "counting rhymes" as we dressed or played or whatever.  "One, Two, Buckle my shoe . . ." and "Hickory, Dickory, Dock . . . the mouse ran up the clock . . ." were frequent  parts of my childhood chatter.

     Looking back through my blog for other examples linked to China, I found this posting from 2011 with a poem by Dr. Cai Tianxin is a professor of mathematics (specializing in number theory) at Zhejiang University, China and an accomplished and well-known poet.  Here are the opening lines:  

   The Number and the Rose     by Cai Tianxin 

   Pythagoras played music on the hypotenuse
   while devising the system of rational numbers  
   a labyrinth as transparent as quartz . . .  

                                             For the rest of Tianxin's poem, go here.