The Puzzle of Time

     Recently I have learned with sadness of the death last February of Romanian-Canadian mathematician Florin Diacu (1959-2018).  Florin also wrote poetry -- and helped to organize seminars in "Creative Writing in Mathematics" at the Banff International Research Station.  I met Diacu when I was privileged to attend these seminars -- and you may find my 2016 posting of his poem "Arnold Diffusion" at this link.  Today I remember him by sharing with readers his poem "Time" -- first published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics in 2012 and also available at this link.

       Time     by Florin Diacu

       Time drifts on the sea of illusions.

       Newton’s image of it was a line,
       unbounded and straight, like desire.
       Einstein called it dimension four:
       the lasting partner of space.

Arnold diffusion (and poets of Romania)

     I have had the good fortune to attend two BIRS Math / Creative Writing workshops in Banff (most recently in January 2016) and one of the organizers of these workshops has been Florin Diacu, a Romanian-Canadian mathematician-poet at Canada's University of Victoria. (For a bit more about my interest in Romanian poets, you may visit this posting from 2012 ; for still more, use "Romania" as a blog-search term.)
     Recently I discovered the following poem by Florin in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics and that online journal's open-access policy permits me to offer it here.  I have wondered whether it is prudent of me to present a poem about Arnold diffusion, a topic about which I have scant mathematical background.  But I like it, even though my understanding is incomplete; I hope you like it too.