Whether our language is music or mathematics, computer code or cookery -- as we learn to love the language and treat it with good care, we find poetry. Because mathematics is a concise language, with emphasis on placing the best words in the best order, it often is described by mathematicians and scientists as poetry. Alternatively, and more accessible to most readers than poetic mathematics, we find verses by poets who include the objects and terminology of mathematics in their lines.
One of my favorite poems of numbers is the portrait "Number Man," by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), found in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, 2003). This poem also appears in Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters, 2008) -- a varied collection of math-related poems edited by Sarah Glaz and me.
Number Man by Carl Sandburg
(for the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach)
He was born to wonder about numbers.
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