Mathematics, Poetry and Beauty

What does mathematics have to do with poetry? Seemingly, nothing. Mathematics deals with abstractions while poetry with emotions. And yet, the two share something essential: Beauty. “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare,” says the title of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

A winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2015, “Mathematics, Poetry and Beauty” tries to solve the secret of the similarity between the two domains. It tries to explain how a mathematical argument and a poem can move us in the same way. Mathematical and poetic techniques are compared, with the aim of showing how they evoke the same sense of beauty.

The reader may find that, as Bertrand Russell said, “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty hold and austere, like that of sculpture … sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.”

Contents:

• Order:

  • The Curious Case of the Ants on the Pole
  • Hidden Order
  • To Discover or to Invent
  • Order and Beauty
  • Mathematical Harmonies
  • Why √2 is Not a Rational Number
  • The Real Numbers
  • The Miracle of Order
  • Simple Conjectures, Complex Proofs
  • Independent Events

• How Mathematicians and Poets Think:

  • Poetic Image, Mathematical Image
  • The Power of the Oblique
  • Compression
  • Mathematical Ping-Pong
  • The Book in Heaven
  • Poetical Ping-Pong
  • Laws of Conservation
  • An Idea from Somewhere Else
  • Three Types of Mathematics
  • Topology
  • Matchmaking
  • Imagination
  • A Magic Number
  • Reality or Imagination
  • Unexpected Combinations
  • What is Mathematics?
  • Deep Tautologies
  • Symmetry
  • Impossibility
  • Infinitely Large
  • Cantor's Story
  • The Most Beautiful Proof?
  • Paradoxes and Oxymorons
  • Self-Reference and Gödel's Theorem
  • Halfway to Infinity: Large Numbers
  • Infinitely Small
  • Infinitely Many Numbers Having a Finite Sum
  • Twists

• Two Levels of Perception:

  • Knowing without Knowing
  • Content and Husk
  • Change
  • Estrangement
  • An Endless Encounter
  • Appendix A: Mathematical Fields
  • Appendix B: Sets of Numbers
  • Appendix C: Poetical Mechanisms Mentioned in the Book

Readership: Those interested in Mathematics, those interested in poetry, and the general public.
Key Features:

• It presents laymen and mathematicians alike with beautiful pieces of mathematics, and studies techniques of both poetry and mathematics that contribute to beauty