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Nyxie
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I read E.T. Bell's 'Men of Mathematics' and found it interesting that one mathematician therein was a big poetry buff. I looked up his poetry but only found two poems online at all! - 'Kepler's Apostrophe,' and 'Remonstrance.' http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/403.html
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From [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joseph_Sylvester ]:
James Joseph Sylvester (September 3, 1814 London – March 15, 1897 Oxford) was an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory and combinatorics. He played a leadership role in American mathematics in the later half of the 19th century as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and as founder of the American Journal of Mathematics.[...]
One of Sylvester's lifelong passions was for poetry; he read and translated works from the original French, German, Italian, Latin and Greek, and many of his mathematical papers contain illustrative quotes from classical poetry. In 1870, following his early retirement, Sylvester published a book entitled The Laws of Verse in which he attempted to codify a set of laws for prosody in poetry.
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If you read about him he was apparently a very emotional and "out-there" kind of guy; he'd sometimes forget theorems he himself discovered and would "unexpectedly burst into orations or recite poetry, often his own" (http://www.robertnowlan.com/pdfs/Sylvester,%20James%20Joseph.pdf).
More on his life: http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/sylv/sylvchap.pdf
Mathematicians have the most interesting biographies of all, somehow.
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From [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joseph_Sylvester ]:
James Joseph Sylvester (September 3, 1814 London – March 15, 1897 Oxford) was an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory and combinatorics. He played a leadership role in American mathematics in the later half of the 19th century as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and as founder of the American Journal of Mathematics.[...]
One of Sylvester's lifelong passions was for poetry; he read and translated works from the original French, German, Italian, Latin and Greek, and many of his mathematical papers contain illustrative quotes from classical poetry. In 1870, following his early retirement, Sylvester published a book entitled The Laws of Verse in which he attempted to codify a set of laws for prosody in poetry.
~~~~~~~~
If you read about him he was apparently a very emotional and "out-there" kind of guy; he'd sometimes forget theorems he himself discovered and would "unexpectedly burst into orations or recite poetry, often his own" (http://www.robertnowlan.com/pdfs/Sylvester,%20James%20Joseph.pdf).
More on his life: http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/sylv/sylvchap.pdf
Mathematicians have the most interesting biographies of all, somehow.
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