I'm quite fond of maths (drop the 's' if you're American - yes, you can do it) but I've forgotten a good deal of it since my school years. I did delve into some more interesting bits in my early twenties (thanks to Martin Gardner et al.). Topics such as edge-of-chaos fractals, Conway's 'Game of Life' and the Santa Fe Institute's exploration of artificial life and complexity theory. But I really should have been examining bodies instead, both living and dead.
Nevertheless, I do drag memory remnants into my writing now and again, sometimes on a poetic theme. Here are two examples which might get your cogs whirring, the second one likely resonating more with those of a geometrical bent.
I'm eager to know if you think my simplistic attempts are adequate to the demands of accuracy or expectation placed upon them – or not! Let me know by leaving a comment below.
My first example of a maths-oriented poem is the short ditty I tweeted a reply to in response to a prompt from, aptly enough, WritingPrompt.com. If you are after a quick warm-up exercise to start your writing day (no matter if that's the morning, afternoon or evening) then it might be worth trawling their Twitter stream or web site for several thousand(!) other prompts.
It's lonely being single,
yet two can be a crowd.
He's straight, she's curvy.
Neither loud nor proud.
Not ready for a threesome,
even if binary is allowed.
Division a constant danger,
integral fear of fractions.
So best stay on our continuum
despite neighbourly distractions.
This second example just mushroomed into my mind whilst I was writing the beginning of a scene for my novel (there's a character who wakes up by kind of booting up, their visual recognition being more than the sum of purely algorithmic parts.
A singular dimension, matter unknown.
So points becomes lines
as another is grown.
Extend two to three,
cubes from squares and
spheres from circles now sewn.
Slice and dice these
across their dimensions
for ellipses, prisms and rectangles.
Cones and cylinders
a simple digression from
Euclid’s pyramids and triangles.
Entertain them all with a Möbius strip.
Tessellating tesseracts and twisted doughnuts
through topology rip.
Julia sets the pace, meandering
through the Mandelbrots, exploring
imaginatively numbered places.
Whilst time plays a lonely fourth,
stretching all of their dances
across a multitude of spaces.
