Math can be creative and beautiful | Comments - Sandusky Register

I never expected math to help me become a poet, says Dave Lucas, author of Weather (VQR/Georgia, 2011), which received the 2012 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. 

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When I declared an English major, I hoped I had escaped calculus, trigonometry, and the associated nightmares once and for all.

So I resented my school’s mathematics requirement. I dreaded returning to those enigmatic numbers — and worse, to the letters, the x’s and y’s I found illegible.

Grudgingly, I registered for a course called “Math and Creativity.” I hoped for more emphasis on the creativity, or at least for an easy A.

My first glimpse of just how creative mathematics could be came in our cryptography unit, where we broke basic codes to decipher a message from the poet John Keats: beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Then our professor, the late Dick Horwath, assigned some chapters from the British mathematician G. H. Hardy’s memoir, “A Mathematician’s Apology” (1940). What I found there fulfilled Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetic challenge all over again: it changed my life.

“A mathematician,” Hardy writes, “like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.”...

Sagan used to say that we are all “made of starstuff,” a cosmological truism to imagine ourselves remarkable.

And we are remarkable — in that we exist, in that we express our existence in words and numbers, periodic tables and blots of paint. Why anything exists at all is a bone in the throat of the philosopher and the physicist alike.
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Source: Sandusky Register