How Does Poetry Capture the Essence of Mathematics and Physics?

[MathJakob]

If you could describe mathematics / physics in one sentence that covers Archemedes through to Einstein, what would you say?

Your answer can be mathematical or even just a single equation.

The as a separate question: If you could bring back 1 mathematician / physicist from history, who would you pick and why?

 

[WannabeNewton]

Roses are math, violets are math, I like math, math.

 

[MathJakob]

Roses are math, violets are math, I like math, math.

That is shocking lol

 

[micromass]

Take this integral upon the function!
And, in parting fractions now,
Thus much let me know--
I am not wrong, who deem
That my calculations have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a derivative, or in a form,
In a group, or in the empty set,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we prove or conjecture
Is but math within math.

I stand amid the Banach space
Of a tormented topology,
And I hold within my pen
invertibles of the function right--
How few! yet how they are dense
Throughout my space to the open subspace,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter measure?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless manifold?
Is all that we prove or conjecture
But math within math?

 

[dipole]

I always loved the way Sagan phrased it (or one of his writers... who knows?)

"We are a way for the cosmos to know its self."

 

[MathJakob]

Take this integral upon the function!
And, in parting fractions now,
Thus much let me know--
I am not wrong, who deem
That my calculations have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a derivative, or in a form,
In a group, or in the empty set,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we prove or conjecture
Is but math within math.

I stand amid the Banach space
Of a tormented topology,
And I hold within my pen
invertibles of the function right--
How few! yet how they are dense
Throughout my space to the open subspace,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter measure?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless manifold?
Is all that we prove or conjecture
But math within math?

Awesome!

 

[jackmell]

If you could describe mathematics / physics in one sentence that covers Archemedes through to Einstein, what would you say?

Mathematics, physics too for that matter, is cut from the same cloth that gives it form: Nature.

 

[Mandelbroth]

The sentence that first comes to mind: "Construct something new, and then generalize everything repeatedly."

I love how none of these actually mention any numbers.

I'd bring back Gauss. Definitely Gauss.

Take this integral upon the function!
And, in parting fractions now,
Thus much let me know--
I am not wrong, who deem
That my calculations have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a derivative, or in a form,
In a group, or in the empty set,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we prove or conjecture
Is but math within math.

I stand amid the Banach space
Of a tormented topology,
And I hold within my pen
invertibles of the function right--
How few! yet how they are dense
Throughout my space to the open subspace,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter measure?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless manifold?
Is all that we prove or conjecture
But math within math?

Wow. I believe there's now a footnote in Oxford's Dictionary under the definition for the word "multifaceted" that reads "cf. micromass." I'm impressed.

 

[Ben Niehoff]

"Love and Tensor Algebra", from Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

 

[Pythagorean]

not self consistent
but it appears to be so
often do I weep

 

[MathJakob]

Although my knowledge of math and physics is limited. If I had to describe mathematics in a single sentence or equation I'd have to say that the most elegant equation that I've come across has to be $e^{i\pi}+1=0$

Then in second place comes $2{\left( {\frac{E}{c}} \right)^2} + {(mc)^2} + {(mx)^2} - 2\frac{{mxE}}{c} - 2mE \le 0$

 

[WannabeNewton]

I got another one:

Circles n' stuff.
Math.

 

[256bits]

Even the numbers have conflicts - seven ate nine.

 

[reenmachine]

Idiots on their path
Will feel the wrath of math
Rectangles , triangles
Four and three angles
One guy named Gauss
Did math in his house
One guy named Archimedes
Made other minds look like comedies
When women look at math guys
They find them charming like black skies
They would kill to get a date
With one of these adorable guys who can calculate

said my piece