The opening poem of Uneasy Relations by mathematician-poet Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is concerned with similarities and differences between mathematical and poetic cultures -- a topic of immense interest also to me and one that I too try to address in my verse. I wonder -- HOW can I show non-mathematicians that good mathematics is poetry??!! And, moreover, how can I (mostly a mathematician) write (as advocated by Wallace Stevens and agreed with by other poets) of things rather than (as mathematics wants) of ideas. OR, may one make poetry of ideas?
Two Cultures by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
Graves claimed there isn't
much money in poetry:
and none vice-versa.
The first part stays true
if we replace poetry
by mathematics.
Showing posts with label relation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label relation. Show all posts
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
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.
Labels:
Adam Dickinson,
Bishop Berkeley,
calculus,
Cantor,
finite,
infinite,
infinities,
Newton,
number,
plus,
poetry,
relation
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