Books &Mathematics Entropy | 22 Mar 2011
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.– G.H. Hardy A Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form- By Paul Lockhart The first thing to understand is [...]
Mathematics &Poetry Entropy | 17 Apr 2009
J. V. Cunningham, poet, critic, editor, and general man of letters, gained the high regard of his literary colleagues for his concise, witty, epigrammatic poetry. His epigrammatic lines range from the solemn—”Life flows to death as rivers to the sea / And life is fresh and death is salt to me”—to the humorous—noting that a [...]
Mathematics &Nature &Poetry Entropy | 14 Jan 2009
Inger Christensen, a distinguished Danish poet whose work — lyrical, philosophical, self-referential and exquisitely mathematical — was a cornerstone of modern Scandinavian poetry, died on Jan. 2 in Copenhagen. She was 73 and lived in Copenhagen. Read N.Y.Times obituary Inger Christensen wrote her masterpiece poem “Alphabet” in 1981.(Being reproduced below) She uses the alphabet (from [...]
Mathematics &Poetry Entropy | 31 May 2008
Philosophic in its complex, ovoid emptiness, a skillful pundit coined it as a sort of stopgap doorstop for those quaint equations Romans never dreamt of. In form completely clever and discrete—a mirror come unsilvered, loose watch face without the works, a hollowed globe from tip to toe unbroken, it evades the grappling hooks of mass, [...]
Mathematics &Philosophy &Poetry Entropy | 08 May 2008
Relationship(s) of Quantity to Quality Where did Quantity and Quality come from? Some Cosmic or Existential Sum? It may sound simply dumb. But it may have come from a Mathematicians rule of thumb… Or A plumb line not very fine, or mine, But Divine. Quantity – Quality => Imposiblé. Quality – Quantity: They may say, [...]
Mathematics Entropy | 21 Mar 2008
After 38 Years, Israeli Solves Math Code A mathematical puzzle that baffled the top minds in the esoteric field of symbolic dynamics for nearly four decades has been cracked — by a 63-year-old immigrant who once had to work as a security guard. Avraham Trahtman, a mathematician who also toiled as a laborer after moving [...]