Recently translated by Adam Morris, the novel With My Dog-Eyes (Melville House, 2014) by Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) is narrated by a mathematician-poet. That fact of narration is what first drew me to the book. (See also this July 3 posting.) And then there is (related in Morris's introduction to the translation) Hilst's sad life, perhaps mirrored in her characters. These are the opening lines from the novel's narrator:
The cross on my brow
The facts of what I was
Of what I will be:
I was born a mathematician, a magician
I was born a poet.
Showing posts with label vertices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vertices. Show all posts
Monday, August 11, 2014
Friday, May 27, 2011
The Bridges of Konigsberg
From the August 1997 issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer, we have this poem by Judith Saunders about a long-standing puzzle solved solved by the mathematical giant, Leonhard Euler (1707-1783).
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Poems starring mathematicians - 2
Published a century later than William Benjamin Smith's "The Merman and the Seraph" (see April 14 posting) we have Crossing the Equal Sign (Plain View Press, 2007)--a poetry collection by Marion Deutsche Cohen. Cohen lives in Philadelphia and teaches mathematics at Arcadia University where she has used her literary interests to develop a new course, "Truth and Beauty: Mathematics in Literature." I have chosen several excerpts from Cohen's collection that offer internal snapshots of her sort of mathematician:
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