Paolo Nespoli reads Emily Dickinson

#1695

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself–
Finite Infinity.

We want a theory

We want a theory. An uncommon want
When every year and month sends forth a new one
Till after cloying the gazettes with cant
The age discovers it is not the true one.

Hannes Alfven from On the Origin of the Solar System

The day of mathematical poetry

posted by @ulaulaman about #mathematics #poetry #BridgesConference

Bridges: Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science (discovered via Mr Honner) is an annual conference where mathematicians, scientists and artists explore the mathematical connections between these subjects. In particular today is the poetry day, and I decide to publish an interesting scientific poetry, that was submitted and published on Nature!
Frederick Soddy, who winned the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921, composed The Kiss Precise, in which he rediscovered the Descartes' Circle Theorem

originally proved by Rene Descartes, which involves the radii of four mutually tangent circles

He wrote his result in verses:

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.
To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.
If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.
Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the center.
Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There's now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend's a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.^{(1, 2)}

The most interesting thing is the generalization of the result, that was submitted also⁽⁷⁾ in poem by Thorold Gosset:

And let us not confine our cares
To simple circles, planes and spheres,
But rise to hyper flats and bends
Where kissing multiple appears,
In n-ic space the kissing pairs
Are hyperspheres, and Truth declares,
As n + 2 such osculate
Each with an n + 1 fold mate
The square of the sum of all the bends
Is n times the sum of their squares.^{(3, 4)}

It's interesting to observe that Soddy's poetry is the oldest poem submitted to a scientific journal, being older than The Detection of Shocked Co/ Emission from G333.6-0.2 by J. W. V. Storey, published in 1984 on the Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia and discovered by Maria Popova.

There are the rushing waves

via @amedeo_balbi

A scientific poetry by Richard Feynman from The value of science (pdf):

There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison.
Ages on ages before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.
Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.
Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.
Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe.

(via Amedeo Balbi)