Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics Edited by Sarah Glaz and Joanne Growney WELLESLEY, MA: A. K. PETERS, 2008, US $39.00, 255 PP. ISBN 978-156881-341-7 REVIEWED BY SALLY I. LIPSEY

ll the poems in this unique anthology use mathematical allusions to express love. It is surprising to find that most of the poets represented here are not mathematicians, and, possibly more surprising, to see how many mathematicians (including the most famous) have written poetically about love. The source of the title, Strange Attractors, is a poem, Chaos Theory (p. 66), by an award-winning professor of English, Ronald Wallace. As we read this poem, we explore connections between seemingly random events in the universe and personal experiences (like love affairs). Wallace writes, ‘‘We are uniquely strange attractors, love’s/pendulum point or arc, time’s shape or fancy,/in a system with its own logic, be it/ the cool elegance of eternity, or/the subatomic matrix of creation and decay.’’ How does mathematics, famously cold and austere, and scary for so many, speak of love? How can it propose romance and describe sexual encounters? The writers are drawn to the sights, sounds and content of mathematical terms and symbols for the imagery and truths they wish to convey. The 150 poets represented in the anthology show us a variety of ways for mathematical imagery to portray love as well as tears, fascination and admiration. An example from early history: The Roman poet, Catullus (84–54 BC) wrote Let’s Live and Love: To Lesbia, asking her to ‘‘Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,/ another thousand, and another hundred,’’ (p. 12). In this century, Marion Cohen asks, ‘‘So how come there’s a discontinuity at the waistline?/How come, around there, Zeno whispers ‘halfway?’/How come that waistline is throbbing with infinity?/And my hand and heart throbbing/with zero?’’ (Scared and the Intermediate Value Theorem, p. 137). A high proportion of these poems use terminology common to everyday speech, requiring no special math education. Remember Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s answer to How Do I Love Thee? (p. 11): ‘‘Let me count the ways./I love thee to the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach, …’’ In Paradiso: Canto XXXIII, Dante Alighieri speaks of ‘‘… the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars’’ and describes himself to be ‘‘Like a geometer wholly dedicated/to squaring the circle, but who cannot find,/think as he may, the principle indicated—’’ (p. 76). In a poem of yearning, On Your Imminent Departure: Considering the Relative Importance of Various Motions, Pattiann Rogers (p. 53), asks, ‘‘Which is more important, the motion of the wind/ …/or your hand in motion across my back, …’’. Another

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example is Parabolic Ballad by Andrei Voznesensky (p. 63), a poetic vision in which ‘‘Art, love and history race along recklessly/Over a parabolic trajectory.’’ (Parabolic Ballad is translated from Russian by W. H. Auden, one of the many distinguished translators cited in the book.) Human beings have a natural affinity for numbers, especially for the small ones of early childhood and the very large ones that are fun to say. Poets, both mathematical and not, exhibit this affinity. Harry Matthews ends each line of his sestina, Safety in Numbers (p. 44), with a number from 1 to 7, using a different permutation for each stanza. John Donne has a variety of numbers in The Computation (p. 21), where ‘‘Tears drowned 100, and sighs blew out two,’’ as does Carl Sandburg in Number Man, a poem dedicated to ‘‘the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach’’ that gives human qualities to numbers (p. 185). The mysterious attributes of prime numbers, ‘‘the power, the peculiar glory …’’ are surveyed in Let Us Now Praise Prime Numbers (p. 190) by Helen Spalding. Beyond all numbers, infinity beckons: ‘‘Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore, /My love was infinite, if spring make it more.’’ (From Love’s Growth by John Donne, p. 20.) An intriguing poem, Yes, by David Brooks, (p. 10) refers indirectly to infinity by imagining ‘‘living this life/ over and over,’’ including ‘‘… that moment when our whole life/flashes before our eyes’’. Infinity was an important concept in the work of the distinguished mathematician Jakob Bernoulli (1654–1705), who shows his feelings about the idea in a poem inserted in his Treatise on Infinite Series: ‘‘What joy to discern the minute in infinity!/The vast to perceive in the small, what divinity!’’ (p. 130). Bernoulli is also one of many mathematicians who appear as references or characters in the poems. ‘‘Bernoulli would have been content to die,/Had he but known such a2cos 2U!’’ are the last two lines of the selection from Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad (p. 39). Here, Lem also refers in an amusing way to Riemann, Hilbert, Banach, Cauchy, Fourier and others. A reference to Archimedes and a famous quote (‘‘Give me a place to stand and I can move the world’’) is used by Jean deSponde in building a portrait of ‘‘the love I feel for you, my dear’’ (Sonnet of Love XIII, p. 17). Fibonacci inspires Kathryn DeZur who longs ‘‘for the fertility/ of Fibonacci’s numbers, that mystical statistical world/where one plus one equals three’’ (Fibonacci Numbers, p. 85), and Bill Parry writes of friendship, relating it to Alexander’s horned sphere in a poem of the same name (p. 178). Benoit Mandelbrot is a character in Mandelbrot Set, song lyrics by Jonathan Coulton (p. 141). (Both the horned sphere and the Mandelbrot set are among the illustrations accompanying some of the poems in the book.) Poets who write of love and math often write with humor also. C. K. Stead applies a Venn diagram technique (with circular illustrations) to a survey of 19 love affairs in which ‘‘17 were over/7 were forgotten/and 13 irrelevant/ but only 2 were all three’’ (from Walking Westward, p. 58); and Haipeng Guo considers the difficulty of a love affair (When a P-Man Loves an NP-Woman, p. 161).

Classroom experiences inevitably generate humor and humorous poetry; teachers may find some perfect choices for a light moment in class. For instance, students will laugh appreciatively at Yehuda Amichai’s imaginative transformation of the problem ‘‘about a train that leaves from place A and another train/that leaves from place B. When will they meet?/…/None of the problems was about a man who leaves from place A/and a woman who leaves from place B. When will they meet,’’ (from Israeli Travel: Otherness Is All, Otherness Is Love, p. 5). Here is one originally written in the twelfth century for his daughter by Bhaskaracharya: ‘‘Whilst making love a necklace broke./A row of pearls mislaid./…/The young woman saved one third of them;/One tenth were caught by her lover./If six pearls remained upon the string/How many pearls were there altogether?’’ (from Lilavati, p. 131). For a little singing in the calculus classroom, try There’s a Delta for Every Epsilon, Tom Lehrer’s Lyrics for a Calypso Song (p. 167). The editors subdivided the anthology into three parts, namely: (1) ‘‘Romantic Love: from Heartaches to Celebrations’’ (pp. 3–71); (2) ‘‘Encircling Love: Of Family, Nature, Life and Spirit’’ (pp. 73–125); and (3) ‘‘Unbounded Love: For Mathematics and Mathematicians’’ (pp. 127– 198). Only in Part (3) do we find that the majority of poems are by mathematicians. I had fun doing my own special subsets also, classifying the poems according to varieties of love (sober, passionate, sexual, unrequited), varieties of math topics (from elementary school math to recent inventions), humor, history, use of symbols and diagrams, poetic structure based on math concepts (such as factorization or Fibonacci numbers), and quirkiness. One poem left me nonplussed—should I say it does not add up? It is a poem that actually sounds beautiful by

Becky Dennison Sakellariou called Math is Beautiful and So Are You (p. 54). It alternates between mathematical statements (in normal print) and personal statements (in italics), seemingly nonsequiturs, beginning with ‘‘If n is an even number/then I’ll kiss you goodnight right here,/but if the modulus k is the unique solution,/I’ll take you in my arms for the long night.’’ Perhaps what is required is a good imagination, a sense of humor and appreciation for music! Among the delights of this book, in addition to the poetry, are a substantive introduction, bibliographical resources, information about the poet-contributors, and about the mathematicians who are named in poems. From the introduction, I learned about Enheduanna, an ancient priestess who was responsible for mathematical survey calculations on the land and in the sky, and who also wrote poetry in the form of temple hymns. The introduction also gives information about other books that are likely to be of interest to readers of Strange Attractors. ‘‘Mathematical Poetry Resources for Further Exploration’’ extends the material given in the introduction. ‘‘Contributors’ Notes’’ and ‘‘About the Mathematicians Appearing in the Poems,’’ at the back of the book, provide details about the poets and the mathematicians, their degrees, careers, publications, and honors. Mathematicians and poetry lovers (with at least some feeling for math) will enjoy the many treasures in this anthology.

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2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, Volume 32, Number 1, 2010

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