The title of this posting ("Topology for Poets") comes from Maryland Poet Amy Eisner's poem "Lure" (offered below) -- a poem that plays with math concepts. (In mathematics, "topology" is a variant of geometry in two shapes are "equivalent" if one could be obtained from the other by stretching or bending.)
It was my pleasure to meet Amy when she read in the Takoma Park Third Thursday Poetry Series earlier this year. I like her work. Enjoy!
Lure by Amy Eisner
1.
My friend is crocheting a fishing line. This is not a gift and keeps no one warm.
This is withdrawing. Persisting in a flaw. Forfending.
She knows there’s something perverse in it. Like growing a mold garden.
Fishing does involve a hook, a line, and a net. But not like this.
Showing posts with label topology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label topology. Show all posts
Monday, October 21, 2013
Topology for poets
Labels:
Amy Eisner,
infinite series,
line,
mathematics,
net,
poem,
Takoma Park,
topology
Monday, September 23, 2013
A poet re-envisions space
University of Pennsylvania professor Robert Ghrist, in his September 19 lecture ("Putting Topology to Work") at the MAA's Carriage House, credited poet John Milton (1608-1674) with the first use of the word space as an abstract entity -- and, Ghrist asserted, by so doing, Milton opened a door to the study of abstract space (known in mathematics as topology).
The following material is a 24 September correction
from my 23 September posting. For I discovered -- in a thoughtful email from Ghrist --
that the proper citation of "space" was not from line 50 of Book 1 but from line 89 of Book 7.
(I invite you go to Project Gutenberg for Paradise Lost in its entirety.)
Here, below, I have replaced my original posting of lines 44-74 of Book 1
with lines 80 - 97 of Book 7 -- lines taken from my shelf copy of Milton's Paradise Lost,
the 1968 Signet Classic Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks.
In the selection below and throughout his epic, Milton replaces past visions of hell down-in-the-earth and heaven up-in-the-sky with more complex and abstract configurations.
Labels:
abstract,
Cassius Keyser,
John Milton,
Karl Patten,
MAA,
mathematics,
Paradise Lost,
poet,
poetry,
Robert Ghrist,
space,
topology
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Portrait of Max Dehn
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