PRECISION vs. IMAGINATION

     In the creation and development of both mathematics and poetry both PRECISION and IMAGINATION are important.  Recently I came across the announcement of a book entitled Poetic Logic and the Origins of the Mathematical Imagination -- written by Canadian professor if semiotics, Marcel Danesi, and part of the Springer-Nature series, Mathematics in Mind,  Here is a link to an overview of Danesi's book.  And, in the publisher's summary of the Danesi book, we find this:

The aim of this volume is to look broadly at what constitutes the mathematical mind through the Vichian lens of poetic logic. 

Reading Danesi's ideas and thinking about my own poetic musings has reminded me of a long-ago poem of mine, "Can A Mathematician See Red?"  I posted this poem in this blog long ago (in August 2011, at this link) -- and I offer it again, below.    

Mathematics and Poetry ARE Similar

        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) 

The magic of mathematics (in art)

     Australian teacher and  poet Erica Jolly is convinced that breaking down the barriers that make silos of sciences and humanities subjects will promote better education systems and improve job prospects for students.  She brings mathematics into this engaging poem found in Holding Patterns, an online book of physics and engineering poems, part of the "Science Made Marvelous" project.

Sculpture at Questacon (Australia National Science and Technology Center)      

                                                                                by Erica Jolly

     It looks like magic --
     children are turning
     a great stone sphere
     this way and that
     smoothly, easily.  

Women's History -- celebrate Caroline Herschel

     In the sixties when I spent a year at Bucknell University, I was a member of the "Department of Astronomy and Mathematics," a pairing of related disciplines. In past centuries, Mathematics was included in the liberal arts. In the twenty-first century often it is paired with Computer Science, and Astronomy is paired with Physics.  And so it goes.
      Poems by Laura Long tell of the pioneering work by astronomer Caroline Herschel -- a discoverer of eight comets, a cataloger of stars.  Long describes her recent collection,  The Eye of Caroline Herschel:  A Life in Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2013), in this way:      
                  This is a work of the imagination steeped in historical siftings 
                         and the breath between the lines.  
Here is the opening poem: