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Top Comments: Notebook #70- Open thread...with a comment about math [1]

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Date: 2023-04-07  

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Traditionally, the first Friday of the month is a designated Open Thread night here at Top Comments and I will not break with tradition this evening.

But I will not leave this Friday Top Comments diary hanging with absolutely nothing to talk about (as is also tradition).

Amid all of the dreck of The New York Times Opinion page, I found this lovely essay by British mathematician Sarah Hart about the connections between mathematics and literature.

The idea that one would have to choose between mathematics and literature is, I think, something of a tragedy — not only because the two fields are inextricably, and fundamentally, linked, but also because understanding these links can enhance your enjoyment of both. The perceived boundary between math and literature is actually a very recent idea. For most of recorded history, mathematics was part of every educated person’s cultural awareness. Plato’s “Republic” put forward the ideal curriculum of arts to be studied, which medieval authors split into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). Together, these are the essential liberal arts. Indeed, mathematical references in literary works go back at least as far back as Aristophanes’ “The Birds,” first performed in 414 B.C. […] There is a deeper reason we find mathematics at the heart of literature. The universe is full of underlying structure, pattern and regularity, and mathematics is the best tool we have for understanding it — that’s why mathematics is often called the language of the universe, and why it is so vital to science. Since we humans are part of the universe, it is only natural that our forms of creative expression, literature among them, will also manifest an inclination for pattern and structure.

I’ve discussed once before here at Top Comments how much I love math even though I am very much a literature geek.

In fact, one of my favorite all time essays is Alexander Nazaryan’s “Why Writers Should Learn Math” from a November 2012 issue of The New Yorker. That article solidified for me one of the reasons why David Foster Wallace is one of my favorite writers.

(I do need to update that I never did complete that Intro to Calculus course that I started to take way back when; there was simply too much going on for me to give a class like that the full attention that it deserved. Ut I am willing to try it again, maybe sooner rather than later.)

I do think that it’s tragic that, for the most, it is “something of a tragedy” that mathematics is largely taught (at least nowadays it seems) as strictly as a “STEM” subject as opposed to a subject with historically deep connections to all of the humanities.

Comments below the fold.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/7/2162665/-Top-Comments-Notebook-70-Open-thread-with-a-comment-about-math

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