A mathematician who finds poetry in math and math in poetry | Hacker News Reader

A mathematician who finds poetry in math and math in poetry

quantamagazine.org

93 pointsColinWright21 comments

In the video she mentions there are only 17 different wallpaper designs. As it turns out, there are only 17 possible planar symmetry groups [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallpaper_group

As above, so below ;)

>"Thousands of years ago in India, poets were trying to think about the possible meters. In Sanskrit poetry, you have long and short syllables. Long is twice as long as short. If you want to work out how many there are that take a length of time of three, you can have short, short, short, or long, short, or short, long. There are three ways to make three. There are five ways to make a length-four phrase. And there are eight ways to make a length-five phrase. This sequence you’re getting is one where every term is the sum of the previous two. You exactly reproduce what we nowadays call the Fibonacci sequence. But this was centuries before Fibonacci."

Ambuda: "Building the world's largest Sanskrit library":

https://ambuda.org/

I liked the bit about the hobbit, even if it was a bit out of the blue.

those interested in the link between math and literature might be interested in the link between narratives and linear logic.

Can you recommend any resources to learn more about this link?

On the surface: The world would be premises and stories would be proofs.

Linear Logic for Non-Linear Storytelling by Anne-Gwenn Bosser and Marc Cavazza and Ronan Champagnat has an example.

Then generating proofs means generating valid stories. Linear logic is tough though, it is a logic that admits contradiction so straightaway most logicians are clueless in how to handle it.

I do not think the last sentence is an adequate description of what linear logic is, or how it's used and understood.

It is interesting in itself, I admit that. But I don't see how it would admit contradiction, or how logicians are clueless how to handle it. It is in fact well understood, and used in many places, e.g. computer science [1,2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_logic

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-linear/

There are lots of mathematicians, and statisticians and the like, who become interested in literary analysis. They may even go on to publish articles and books with their findings, applying mathematical or computational techniques to the study of literature. The problem is, they're usually only interested in their own insights, and shy away from the existing conversation that surrounds a given work of literature. These researchers seem to be unaware that literary scholars have been thinking about their same problems for years. Their bibliographies often contain hardly a single work of literary criticism. You wouldn't try to write a book about physics, or mathematics, without consulting a physicist or a mathematician, but somehow these scholars think that you can write a book about literature without being in dialogue with literary scholarship.

Recent and related:

Mathematical journeys into fictional worlds (2021) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39576156 - March 2024 (10 comments)

Not sure if Decimas poetry could be considered an example of this. Personally I always believed everything is related to everything.

Math and Physics equations are full of beauty capable of transmit the same joy as poetry. The main difficulty is that they require more study.

For me, looking at Maxwell equations is a source of pleasure. Also, after improving my understanding of the Laplacian, I came to appreciate the heat equation.

It's not very surprising to find math in Perec's work, he deliberately put it there.

Math poetry is a pretty active genre.

What examples would you suggest?

Degenerate poetry:

  There once was a man from Verdun

Or, from https://www.ultimate.com/phil/pdp10/quux.poem :

  "...and so  the line  connecting the points  Ga and  Gb in gradient space,
  which correspond  to the planes A and B  in image space, is the
  set of points representing  positions of a plane see-sawing around the
  line of intersection between A and B..."

  Now I see; then I saw;
  The planes of a cube have a linear law.
  The endpoints of lines in the gradient space
  Show where the see-sawing planes fall into place.

  Macrakis, sitting beside me, half-asleep: "COFFEE!"

  Caffeine doesn't help me composing this verse.
  It only awakes me; my thoughts all disperse.
  One thinks better dozing, collapsed in a heap;
  Why else are most students in classes asleep?

  "...the lines in gradient  space are perpendicular to  the lines in
  image  space.   This  doesn't  provide  enough  constraints,  however.
  Additional  equations may  be derived from  the intensity information.
  One  can get  one or  more solutions for  a trihedral  vertex.  If the
  vertex  has more  than three planes,  then there  are more constraints
  than necessary, and one may have to resort to least squares..."

  Alone, the geometry isn't enough:
  You also require intensity stuff.
  We get enough data if points are tri-planed,
  While four leave the gradients over-constrained.

I count the following as more mathematical than physical; maybe I'm just a sucker for double dactyls — YMMV:

> [f] I once read that space has three dimensions because orbits aren't stable in 4-space.

  I often have wondered in
  What kind of orbit a
  Planet proceeds in a
  Tesseract space?
  Multidimensional,
  Hyperelliptical,
  Dizzying spacemen in
  Trans-solar chase.

From Verdun or Nantucket?

Maybe its neighbours would help for context:

    "There once was a man from Peru
    Whose limericks stopped at line two"

and

""

There's also this funny/cheesy poem, quoted in full in the second Harold and Kumar movie:

“The Square Root of Three”(written by David Feinberg)

I’m sure that I will always be A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right, Why must my three keep out of sight Beneath the vicious square root sign, I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick, with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321 Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see, Another square root of a three

As quietly co-waltzing by, Together now we multiply To form a number we prefer, Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued Your love for me has been renewed

source: https://allpoetry.com/poem/4721391--The-Square-Root-of-Three...

Journal of humanistic mathematics (https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/) is a good source. Their semi-annnual issues usually have a few poems.

Hart flexes from her home office

They edited the title since: "The Mathematician Who Finds the Poetry in Math and the Math in Poetry"

And I agree it's better :)

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