Poetry as Pure Mathematics

A recent email from Portuguese mathematician-poet F J "Francisco" Craveiro de Carvalho brought a 40-year-old stanza to my attention. First published in the May, 1974 issue of POETRY Magazine, we have these enigmatic lines by William Virgil Davis.  Enjoy!

       The Science of Numbers:  Or Poetry as Pure Mathematics

       Whatever you add you add at your peril.
       It is far better to subtract.  In poetry,
       Multiplication borders on madness.
       Division is the mistress we agree to sleep with. 

Poems starring mathematicians - 6 (Mandelbrot)

More familiar than the name Benoit Mandelbrot are images, like the one to the left, of the fractal that bears his name.  Born in Poland (1924) and educated in France, Mandelbrot moved to the US in 1958 to join the research staff at IBM. A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity.