A recent email request sent me looking for a one-page article / quiz I had published in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1992 -- a list of 17 statements (quotations) each with a word missing. The missing words are either "mathematics" or "poetry" (or a related word). My claim is that, without using the author's name as a clue, it is difficult to decide which of these arts is intended. I offer here the first four of the statements and suggest you reflect on missing words and then, if you wish, follow this link to a file with the entire list -- including also the author of each quote and (afterward) a list of the missing words.
_____ is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. (Mathematics/Poetry)
To think the thinkable -- that is the ____'s aim. (mathematician/poet)
All _____ [is] putting the infinite within the finite. (mathematics/poetry)
The moving power of _____ invention is not reasoning
but imagination. (Mathematical/Poetic)
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