One of my recent poetry-finds has been the anthology Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, edited by Madhur Anand and Adam Dickinson (Scrivener Press, 2009) and in it some small mentions of mathematics. The following poem by artist and poet Erin Robinsong considers things big and small -- and observes some paradoxes. Is math the puzzle or the explanation or . . .?
SEED : CEDE by Erin Robinsong
Looking into the peach-pit, we find a vast spaciousness, as if actually looking into a pit –
A math problem:
A peach pit is weighed against
the year’s yield plus the tree:
30 g, 900 kg.
Which weighs more?
Showing posts with label Adam Dickinson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adam Dickinson. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Ghosts of Departed Quantities
Years ago in calculus class I excitedly learned that an infinite number of terms may have a finite sum. Manipulation of infinities seems somewhat routine to me now but my early ideas of calculus enlarged me a thousand-fold. Algebra was a language, geometry was a world-view, and calculus was a big idea. Like any big idea, even though it had been hundreds of years in formation, it met with resistance. In 1764 Bishop George Berkeley attacked the logical foundations of the calculus that Isaac Newton had unified. Here, from the online mathematics magazine plus, is a description of the attack.
Labels:
Adam Dickinson,
Bishop Berkeley,
calculus,
Cantor,
finite,
infinite,
infinities,
Newton,
number,
plus,
poetry,
relation
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