Not Just the Pretty Stuff: Mathematical Poetry and the Politics of Mathematics

What is mathematical poetry? I cannot extract a clear definition from Gizem Karaali’s paper. At most, one might infer that it is a poetic practice engaging cognition, consciousness, and creativity. Yet the author also suggests that these capacities define the human species. This raises an interesting question: why should an argument even be required for “a more humanistic understanding of mathematics”? What other understanding might one hope for?

Mathematics is a creative human activity. Again, what else could it be?

Even if one were to hold that mathematics ultimately derives from Platonic forms, from formal symbolic systems, or from computational processes, such positions concern the ontology of mathematics, what mathematics is. They do not eliminate the fact that mathematics is practiced by humans as a social activity. Proofs are written, arguments are debated, conjectures are proposed and refined, and standards of elegance or rigour are negotiated within communities of mathematicians.

Humanistic approaches to mathematics, as presented by Karaali, operate at only one of several levels of interest. They are not concerned with ontology but with epistemology and practice: how mathematics is known, communicated, taught, experienced, and lived. From this perspective, mathematics is unavoidably embedded in human culture, language, institutions, and forms of collaboration and domination. The great Emmy Noether, for instance, was forced to teach under David Hilbert’s name and initially received no salary. This speaks to the all-too-human fact that women were officially excluded from teaching in Germany at the time.

In that light, perhaps mathematical poetry does not need a strict definition to be meaningful. Its significance may lie precisely in revealing that mathematics participates in the same cognitive, aesthetic, and creative processes that animate other human forms of expression. Poetry becomes one medium through which the experience of doing mathematics can be articulated, shared, and reflected upon.

However, the author would do well to account for the fact that human processes are not limited to beauty. Human creativity has also produced works that are rhetorically powerful and aesthetically admired by some while advancing deeply racist visions of the world. Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden, for instance, remains a striking example: formally memorable, historically influential, and deeply entangled with the ideology of an empire that did not value all human life. The existence of such works reminds us that poetry is a human practice shaped by severe limitations. One might ask whether mathematics, too, can be similarly parochial.

The same social forces that organize other forms of cultural production also shape mathematics: hierarchy, competition, the commerce of credit, colonial histories, racism, sexism, and other structures of exclusion that influence who participates, whose work is recognized, and whose contributions are forgotten.

The question, then, is not whether mathematics is human, but how its humanity becomes visible. Put this way, mathematical poetry need not be limited to celebrating elegance or beauty. We should also seek to illuminate the ambitions, tensions, exclusions, and structures of power that shape mathematical life. In other words, it need not be only about the pretty stuff.

There is one more point. At the time Karaali wrote this paper, one might forgive the author for not considering machines. Today, however, it is a live question whether artificial intelligence does mathematics, and it is a credible position to say that it does. AI certainly writes poems; here is one: 

 PROMPT: Write an 8 line poem inspired by the number e. 

Endless growth in quiet disguise,

a curve that lifts yet never flies.

Born from change that feeds on change,

a constant calm in motion strange.

In compound whispers time reveals

a rhythm every market feels.

From limit’s breath the value came—

2.718… and still the same.

Maybe this zombie can do math as convincingly. The challenge going forward is not to defend the humanity of mathematics as a fragile possession, but to understand how that humanity, with all its virtues and flaws, becomes visible in a world where both people and machines participate in its making.

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Karaali, G. (2014). Can zombies write mathematical poetry? Mathematical poetry as a model for humanistic mathematics. Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, 8(1–2), 38–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513472.2014.926685