More from BRIDGES poets . . .

     The 2016 BRIDGES Math-Arts Conference is currently taking place at the University of Jyväskylä in Jyväskylä, Finland.  Poets on this year's program include: Manfred Stern, Vera Schwarcz, Eveline Pye, Tom Petsinis, Mike Naylor, Alice Major, Emily Grosholz, Carol Dorf, Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya, Madhur Anand and the organizer, Sarah Glaz.
      Although he is not a participant in this year's BRIDGES, the name of Portuguese mathematician, poet, and translator Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho appears near the top of the conference's poetry page for his translation of these lines that have become a sort of motto for BRIDGES poetry:

             Newton's binomial is as beautiful as Venus de Milo.
             What happens is that few people notice it.

                        --Fernando Pessoa (as Álvaro de Campos)
                          translated from the Portuguese by Francisco Craveiro  

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.