Great Circles: The Transits of Mathematics and Poetry

Description

This volume explores the interaction of poetry and mathematics by looking at analogies that link them. The form that distinguishes poetry from prose has mathematical structure (lifting language above the flow of time), as do the thoughtful ways in which poets bring the infinite into relation with the finite. The history of mathematics exhibits a dramatic narrative inspired by a kind of troping, as metaphor opens, metonymy and synecdoche elaborate, and irony closes off or shifts the growth of mathematical knowledge. The first part of the book is autobiographical, following the author through her discovery of these analogies, revealed by music, architecture, science fiction, philosophy, and the study of mathematics and poetry. The second part focuses on geometry, the circle and square, launching us from Shakespeare to Housman, from Euclid to Leibniz. The third part explores the study of dynamics, inertial motion and transcendental functions, from Descartes to Newton, and in 20th c. poetry. The final part contemplates infinity, as it emerges in modern set theory and topology, and in contemporary poems, including narrative poems about modern cosmology. Front Matter ....Pages i-xii Front Matter ....Pages 1-1 The House of Childhood (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 3-18 Music and Hyperspace (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 19-36 Great Books (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 37-59 Home, Cambridge, Paris: A Family (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 61-82 Front Matter ....Pages 83-83 What’s in a Circle? Spinoza, Leibniz, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Keats (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 85-96 Four Master Tropes, from Euclid to Leibniz, with Burke (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 97-111 Periodicity as Symmetry in Time: Housman (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 113-125 Front Matter ....Pages 127-127 Troping in Italian Gardens: Descartes, Wallis, La Hire, Gassendi (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 129-140 Flow, Rest, Inertial Motion: Wilner, Di Piero, Bonnefoy (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 141-162 Troping Towards the Transcendental: Napier, Newton, Leibniz (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 163-177 Front Matter ....Pages 179-179 Compactification: Randall, Fainlight, Sedakova (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 181-204 Beyond Deduction: From Descartes to Gödel (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 205-230 Literary Cosmology: Plato, Tobin, Major, Turner (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 231-253 Coda (Emily Rolfe Grosholz)....Pages 255-260 Back Matter ....Pages 261-274