Two Point Seven One

Omar Khayyam, or, Do Poets Count?

2012-01-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

A kitsch depiction of the imagined author,early 20th century.

Has there ever been a genuine poet who was also a mathematician (that is, who has made a real contribution,however modest, to the study of mathematics?) It's a question of some moment for me, since I'm a poet, and I wonder at times whether this doesn't amount to a disability math-wise.

Apparently, there never was a poet mathematician. Lewis Carrol is a wonderful writer, but his humorous verse hardly amounts to genuine poetry. The Greeks, who were the foremost mathematicians as well as the greatest poets of their age, never combined the two pursuits (though there were a number of Greek philosophers who deserved to be considered poets.) In fact, looking over the historical record, the only instance of a poet mathematician is Omar Khayyam.

Or would have been, had Omar written the poems attributed to him.

Khayyam died in the 12th century. Collections of poetry attributed to him did not appear until the 14th. As is so often the case in traditional societies, a body of literature gradually formed around the reputation, then the legend of a notable man. Homer, Hippocrates and Jesus all evince precisely this sort of posthumous productivity. (And, in our time, Harold Robbins and Robert Ludlum have been similarly garrulous from beyond the grave).

Khayyam was a philosopher, and scientist in a society which had little patience with "Greek learning" , that is, philosophy and math — and in fact outlawed both not long after his demise. For later Islamic Persia Khayyam was a folklore figure of skepticism, and around this myth gathered the verses credited to him. Fitzgerald freely tinkered, rearranged, added and altered, to present the west with a Moslem sage so suited to western tastes that he didn't believe in Islam (". . . who justly revolted from (his) Country's false Religion, and false, or foolish, Devotion to it. . . " as Fitzgerald says in his preface.

The Rubaiyat is a work beloved by and endlessly reprinted for English language readers — not surprisingly, it's utter kitsch.

A similar sourcing and success may be seen in the poem Desiderata, written by Indiana Lawyer Max Ehrmann in 1927. Around 1959, the Rev. Frederick Kates, the rector of St. Paul's Church in Baltimore, Maryland, used the poem in a collection of devotional materials he compiled for his congregation. At the top of the handout was the notation, "Old St. Paul's Church, Baltimore 1692." — the year of the church's founding. Thence arose the myth that the document had been unearthed in the church, and bore the date 1692. The 1960's provided an eager audience for the pacific pabulum of the poem: sentiments congenial to hippies emerged miraculously from the mouth of an anonymous dissenter from the age of the Pilgrims .

Another instance of this kind of modern apocrypha is Chief Seattle's speech, transcribed from "notes taken at the time" by a missionary named Smith — thirty years later, despite Smith's having no acquaintance with the language Seattle spoke. This flowery fabrication is now the text of a popular children's book. And indeed, intellectually, the Seattle Speech is whole could with much justice and some charity be denominated Children's Literature.

In any event, Omar Fitzgerald is no mathematiker, and the question of whether I have a hope of succeeding where no poet has gone before remains in suspense.

Keeping the Faith

2011-12-25T13:05:00.000-08:00

Early 7th century BC panther-head Samian coin, possibly designed by Pythagoras.
Looks like an angry cookie.

I am going to try and go easy on the complaints and recrimnnations: they make for dull reading. Having mastered the scriptures of a number of faiths, in the original languages, and done a bit of writing on them, I discovered that the religious have no interest whatever in learning new or even historical things about their beliefs, and that the rest of society doesn't want to hear about religion at all.
     I was a bit surprised to learn this — because (as usual) I took at face value claims that tended to support my rather optimistic opinion of human nature.
     Well, even though all the modern religious people I have ever met were, at best, kidding themselves, I haven't lost my faith. But I do take to heart the dismal state of spirituality, and consider it a symptom of an underlying problem.
     Compelling, credible, obviously true and patently divine cosmology is there for the the taking, but it's all been left in the hands of unlettered boors, who think "Big Bang" a telling term, and are capable of naming planets after cartoon characters. Not that I entirely blame the squints: they do the best they can with their limited English. The business was left to them by the poets, who generally pride themselves on being lazy drug addicts who could never pass a college math course.
      What I envision is a new kabbalah, where the role of the sephiroth is taken by the prime numbers. An astrology that reads the future in the NASDAQ. The old alchemy, had it worked, would only have succeeded in driving up the price of lead. I propose an alchemy that turns gold into more gold.
     Interestingly Pythagoras didn't come up with his mystical numerology through contemplation of musical intervals — that's a Hellenistic myth. The original intuition that the world was a numerical construct came from his work as a financier on Samos — he actually designed the coinage, using techniques he'd picked up from his gem-cutter father. Coinage itself was only invented in the mid seventh century BC in Lydia, so one will understand that the "lump sum" reproduced above was in fact "state of the art."
     Mysticism, money and mathematics are by no means inconsistent interests, at least not if one thinks like an ancient Greek — and isn't that the goal of western education?
I am not proposing a new kook view of the universe based on higher mathematics learned badly and late in life — though I come frighteningly close to matching that profile. I know God is not to be "found" in mathematics, any more that he was in the Torah or the Pyramid texts. What I have in mind is a poetic synthesis of mystical and mathematical imagery to form a new poetic view of existence, with verity and fantasy promiscuously mixed. What Rudy Rucker would have done if he were actually interesting.

Math as culture

2011-12-17T16:25:00.000-08:00

the gardens, Versailles

Mathematics isn't a language, it's a culture. It arose entirely as a means of dealing with physical problems, and thus it falls in the same category as clothing, architecture or medicine.

Culture includes religion of course. And since math, like religion, is a reflection of the physical world in symbols, it poses certain metaphysical problems with urgent clarity. Math, however, offers no solutions. Actually, neither does religion, at least not good ones.

Mathematics is a culture. And every culture has its profound and troubling truths. Even at my very basic level, I have learned that the integers and Euclid no more bring order to the universe than stepping stones actually pave a stream.

Yet one enjoys drawing curlicues and heart-pleasing inane paisley over the "petrific abominable chaos".Another very adequate definition of culture.

Washington's Crossing

2011-12-10T07:54:00.000-08:00

I drove down to the New Hope - Lambertville area the other day to see the place where Washington crossed. There are a series of historical houses, well-informed and personable interpreters, and pleasing vistas for some ways up the Delaware. I would recommend it to anyone pondering a day trip.
     We ended up in Lambertville, a town that used to be much more interesting than it is now. When New Hope became an utterly intolerable tourist trap, Provincetown-grade awful, the good things fled over the bridge and brought odd little shops and street interest to Lambertville. But now Lambertville is pretty much spoilt: the antique shops have jacked their prices, the really recherché little shops are gone, one good bookstore, the Phoenix, still hangs on, as does the one normal non-annoying restaurant, Sneddons — who knows for how long? I've watched what happened to New Hope happen to South Street in Philadelphia, Northampton Mass., Hoboken New Jersey . . . why waste time discussing petty cases, one can say the same of NYC, starting with the Village. As soon as it was realized that any charming, offbeat, arty little locale had magic enough to draw a steady stream of visitors, the rents were hiked, Starbucks and CVS moved in on Main Street, and a thronged, meaningless tourist Mecca rose
     I used to console myself with the thought that this orgy of commercialism would kill the goose that laid the golden egg: once all the features that had constituted the place's original attractiveness were gone, when it was no more than a chain store mall amid the quaintness, the tourist trade would slacken. But no.Quite the contrary. Tourist schlock is exactly what tourists want, and persons who have different tastes are a negligible minority. The most spectacular example of this is the Disnification of Times Square. Though there the analogy is not precise, the sleaze, drugs and crime of that locus were never anyone's bohemia, but what rose in its place makes the same point. Tourists will pony up for the plane ticket and pay a whopping hotel fee so they can stand in the center of Manhattan and be overcharged for the same McDonald's food they could have bought at the strip mall in Iowa.
   The point of this is not simply to complain, but to foster the realization that there is no symbiosis between bohemia and the mainstream. Commercialism doesn't need a cutting edge to provide it with ideas. The last twenty years of relentless rap music, varied only by retreads of various sixties sounds, make that clear. We will never be allowed to live on the margins, for as soon as our work turns them from slum to cafes and galleries, we will be evicted. All the world that can afford to will soon turn into a shopping mall dystopia, till at last eco-catastrophe puts paid to the whole affair.

Though speeding makes you feel you're getting somewhere,

all roads just lead to where you'll wait, to pay.

In the global market sameness there is no more here or there,

and no place left that's sacred or profane —

where the highway and the mall are all in all, one world of plastic,

one styrofoam whitened wave,

one high-speed immobility where supersonic transport

still dumps you in some ersatz USA

Location, location, location. The only solution is to set up one's own monastery or phalanstery or kibbutz somewhere, have it self-support through some useful service or manufacture.Buy an entire town, strictly control the zoning, make it a no-go zone for tourism and all its works. This has all been done before, and where it works out, one ends up, a generation later, with a successful little town with a factory, with little love for the founding ideals.
What I have in mind is a community on the Pythagorean model, of mathematician-poets, supporting itself by financial services and successful speculation, with a membership never inherited, only earned. And say it is never more than what it is today, a crackpot cult with only one member, I will be well content with that. Let me be known as a kook then. As an extremely wealthy kook.
I am not the first to entertain bold improbable hopes on Delaware banks

No, it's not a language.

2011-12-02T15:40:00.000-08:00

Redon, Silence

Before I began to study math, I thought it might be a language. It does after all have its own punctuation, it describes the world, numbers are a kind of vocabulary . . so I thought. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

When I first strayed into math from ancient literature, the first thing I noticed was the silence. There are no stories. There is no small talk. There aren't even any words. It all unfolds as pure shapes and relations: like a soundless music. You'd might think it was the world of the dead, and indeed there are a few points in common. But take it from someone who's read a few tombs, the world of the dead feels far more familiar.

Also, the world of math is less local. Everyone who comes here sees the same. Some glimpse more, some less, but the agreement is entire. No translation is needed, just a diagram will do. Uncolored.

And of course, not being a language, Mathematics speaks without a trace of an accent.

Do the Math

2011-11-26T04:04:00.000-08:00

Me, with Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa:treated photograph by Meryl Gross

After a lifetime devoted to ancient languages, poetry, and history of religions, I have turned away from fable and phantasmagoria: today I devote myself wholly to number.This blog will be a journal of my explorations of the mathematical realm. I expect that as a man of letters, an Egyptologist, Classicist, Sinologist &c. &c., already on the cemetery side of the semi-century, I may have a few perceptions that are of general interest — and not such as would occur to someone who was trained for this pursuit from early youth, who absorbed without surprise all the strangeness of this world. And I venture to suppose that I shall express my observations with a polish not usually met with among the mathematical gentry.
   I was never good at math, which is to say, never at all interested in it, during my schooling. I remember finding, with a sense of vindication, Robert Musil's proof of the existence of the soul. "It is that within man that shrinks at the thought of algebra."
In our time mathematicians tend to be unlettered geeks, without verbal facility, fashion sense, or social skills. The math teachers I had, though for the most part very nice fellows, were a poor advertisement for the wonders of this discipline. I didn't see why one would care to fiddle one's sums so long as a French novel remained to be read.
    I was finally drawn to math by a combination of factors, positive and negative. On the plus side, my reading in philosophy finally made clear to me that no one without a mathematics background is in a position to say anything very worthwhile philosophically. One cannot speak of the nature of reality in ignorance of all the doings on the frontier of physics; freedom cannot be discussed without mentioning the last hundred years' work in probability. Such examples could easily be mulitplied.
   On the negative side, the humanities have ceased to exist as a discipline which has a place in our world. The triumph of Capitalism has brought this about — along with much else which, admittedly, we are very glad to have! The advances in science and particularly medicine would never have taken place in a traditional society. The old prejudices against religion race and gender have pretty much evaporated in the broad day of the almighty Dollar. But we should not suppose these gains came without corresponding losses.. Science has flourished for as long as it has, not because of a Promethean curiosity about the world: that was only true at times for individual scientists, and rarely if ever true for those whose funding made science possible. Our tech grew high because people were willing to pay for its benefits.
     Similarly, the social equality we now enjoy is due to Jews, Blacks, Women and the rest being viewed as consumers, with all the rights to which one is entitled when one represents a market share: Locke, Tom Paine and the rest provided high ideology for the low facts of the matter.
     The humanities in general have no part in the high tech Millennium. For fifty years now there has been no mainstream and no avante garde.The only culture that is really and widely considered now is Pop culture. Its funding depends on the preferences of the lowest common denominator, who are now the only significant statistic. (The hyper-inflated art market does not contradict this: Warhols are there simply instruments of trade, and might as well be stock certificates, or herrings.)
   One might also mention in this context the Internet. The freedom to write and post I enjoy at this minute only exists is because people like me pay a nice monthly sum for the privilege.And the privilege in question has little to do with commitment to free speech or an interest in new ideas and art forms: people pay and post because it fosters the illusion that anyone cares what they have to say. In the maelstrom of e-publishing, the universal right to publish goes together with an equally total unlikelihood of being read.
   I wasted a lifetime deserving recognition in letters and in academia, a recognition which neither field is any longer in a position to confer. Thus, in order to survive, I have turned to math, with a particular eye to its applications in the world of finance. My belief in the value of culture and spirituality is unshaken. I have however a sober awareness that the kind world I want to live in will exist to the bare extent that I can pay for it. To be a Renaissance man today, one must be a Renaissance prince.
   Wealth, and all that it can do for human culture, is not, I opine, so difficult of attainment for a man of abilities, application and realism. A mind that has mastered the choruses of Aeschylus will not be overtaxed by multivariable calculus or the business of predicting in which direction the terrified poultry of Wall Street will flutter and run.
   Do the math.