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Thursday, November 11, 2010

Poetry in mathematics.

While I was looking for 'poetry in mathematics', all I could find was this article in the Journal of on-line Mathematics and its Applications (volume 6 October 2006) by JoAnne Growney called Mathematics in Poetry.


As I find it hard enough to describe what I mean by Poetry in mathematics, in my native language Dutch, I won't even give it a try in English. But I would like to show this snippet of math as an example of what I consider deeply poetic. Although the context is math, to me this is poetry, period.

\[\begin{aligned}
1^2 &= 1^3\\
(1+2)^2&=1^3+2^3\\
(1+2+3)^2&=1^3+2^3+3^3\\
(1+2+3+4)^2&=1^3+2^3+3^3+4^3\\
(1+2+3+4+5)^2&=1^3+2^3+3^3+4^3+5^3\\
(1+2+3+4+5+6)^2&=1^3+2^3+3^3+4^3+5^3+6^3\\
\cdots &= \cdots
\end{aligned} \]

$(1,9,36,100,225,441,\cdots)$.

2 comments:

  1. Nilo--
    You might be interested in http://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com.
    JoAnne

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  2. JoAnne,
    How could you guess? ;-)
    Thanks for the URL.
    nilo
    ( I'll post it on Facebook and on the bookmarks page here too,k as I am sure more people will be interested. )

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