Using mathematics in the Pursuit of Happiness

     One of my favorite blogs to visit is Maria Popova's Brain Pickings -- occasionally Popova's posts link mathematics and poetry    Here is a screen-snip of a Brain Pickings posting featuring verse by Lillian R. Lieber (1886-1986) -- one of my favorite math-writers.

From Lieber's 1961 book, Human Values: Science, Art, and Mathematics

Here is a link to this blog's previous mentions of Lillian Lieber.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of ... Mathematics

     One of my favorite mathy authors is Lillian R. Lieber (1886-1986) and one of the websites that has recently featured her work is the energetic and eclectic brainpickings.org (authored by Maria Popova) -- in a posting recommended to me by my Bloomsburg, PA poetry-friend Carol Ann Heckman.  Carol alerted me to a January 2018 brainpickings posting about Lieber -- a writer whose poetic treatise, Infinity: Beyond the Beyond the Beyond (Paul Dry Books, 2007) is a reading I once recommended to her as an aid in understanding calculus.  Originally published in 1953 and illustrated with striking drawings by Lillian's collaborating husband, Hugh Lieber, Infinity also had enriched my own understanding of some challenging concepts.  The Heckman-recommended posting offers ideas from an out-of-print gem by Lieber entitled Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics -- and here are a few opening lines from that collection that seem very relevant today:
   
     This book is really about
     Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,
     using ideas from mathematics
     to make these concepts less vague.  

Lieber's INFINITY -- poetic prose

It has surprised me to discover that some of my best-remembered learning took place at the hands of teachers I did not particularly like.  One of these was a professor who introduced me, via outside reading assignments, to books by Lillian R. Lieber (1886-1986).  Her free-verse-style lines in Infinity:  Beyond the Beyond the Beyond gave me insights into the calculus I had recently completed as well as the set theory of my current course. (Lieber wrote not just as a mathematician but also as a human being, as a wonderfully informed and openly opinionated person.  For this, too, I treasure her work.)

Glances at Infinity

Counter-intuitive notions are among my favorite parts of mathematics and, in considerations of infinity, these are numerous.  Recalling Zeno's paradox, we capture the infinite finitely in this summation:

     1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/2³ + . . . + 1/2ⁿ +   . . .    =  1