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Azfar Hussain, Associate Professor of Liberal Studies/Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University says, I think I've always loved mathematics in my own ways.
Mathematics and Poetry: Some Impressions
Photo: The Daily Star
True, given the kinds of options that were available in my high school, I enthusiastically opted for what was then called the "Humanities Group." But I enrolled in that group—and later majored in literature—not out of my fear or dislike of mathematics as such.
In fact, very early on in my life, I used to look at mathematical symbols—or, say, at certain mathematical "compositions"—as I would look at paintings or even poems with a sense of awe and wonder. The symbols arranged in certain order on a page—or for that matter, patterns rendered visible—simply looked beautiful to me. They still do. Once in my dream, a dream that I vividly recall, I saw how an entire Shakespearean sonnet morphed into a 14-line mathematical equation right under my eyes!
Indeed, way before I began to read the French philosopher Alain Badiou—whose love of mathematics is unmistakable—I had realized in my own way that mathematics is more than just logical proofs; that mathematics cannot always be reduced to conventional logic; and that mathematics at a certain level does not have to do with even computational accuracy but it surely involves the power of our imagination...
To begin with, basic things like rhythm, rhyme, order, pattern, symmetry, symbols—ones that variously obtain in poetic production—immediately involve the mathematical itself. Moreover, while both poetry and mathematics deliver their "truths"—as Emily Dickinson once put it: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant"—it is also true that both mathematics and poetry also continue to suggest and provoke all possible combinations and configurations of symbolic and tropic phenomena, which, however, remain anchored in the material world in the final instance.
And, of course, music and mathematics—as many musicologists have shown—speak to one another in various ways. But their exchanges do not merely reside in how they symbolically represent our world, but also lie in the ways in which both 'make' and mobilize abstractions that—however heightened and 'pure'—cannot simply free-float out of the horizon of human history.
Source: The Daily Star
