Mathematics and poetry: How wide the gap? (Q909649)

The author is mathematician, he wrote a calculus textbook for liberal arts students. He emphasizes on the similarities as well as on the differences between mathematics and poetry in underlining his statements by quoting examples frequently taken out of history. According to Bochner, at 400 B.C. it was possible to use the words poetry and mathematics to refer to the same things. To find an access to mathematics as well as to poetry you need an apprenticeship. Language plays a very important role. Sometimes it is possible to encounter the same pleasure inside a poem as in regarding a mathematical theorem. There is also an aesthetic pleasure in both, they are giving form to abstraction like artifacts, they don't belong to distinct cultures. But there also exists a necessary gap. Poetry is linked with the ear, mathematics with the eye. There is also a legal distinction between the poetical truth and the mathematical truth. Mathematics is only reviewed by mathematicians, poems are reviewed by society. The article ends with the following statement due to Weierstrass: ``No mathematician can be a complete mathematician unless he is also something of a poet''.