Here is a list of 17 quotes from historical figures. In each, the key word (some variation of math/poetry or mathematician/poet) has been left out. Can you guess which art form is being described in each case?
Answers & Authors Below: (M = Math-related, P = Poetry-related)
1. ___P___ is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. Samuel Johnson
2. To think the thinkable – that is the ___M___’s aim. Cassius J. Keyser
3. All ___P___ [is] putting the infinite within the finite. Robert Browning
4. The moving power of __M____ invention is not reasoning but imagination. A. DeMorgan
5. When you read and understand ___P___, comprehending its reach and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little. Stephen Spender
6. ___M___ practice absolute freedom. Henry Adams
7. I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any ___P____. Randall Jarrell
8. Do not imagine that ___M___ is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense. Lord Kelvin
9. The merit of __P___, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth; truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations , which serve as conductors. T.B. Macaulay
10. It is a safe rule to apply that, when a ___M___ or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense. A. N. Whitehead
11. __P____ is a habit. C. Day-Lewis
12. . . . in ___M___ you don’t understand things, you just get used to them. John von Neumann
13. __P____ are all who love – who feel great truths. P. J. Bailey
14. The __M____ is perfect only in so far as he is a perfect being, in so far as he perceives the beauty of truth; only then will his work be thorough, transparent, comprehensive, pure, clear, attractive, and even elegant. Goethe
15. . . . [In these days] the function of ___P___ as a game . . . [looms] larger than its function as a search for truth. C. Day-Lewis
16. A thorough advocate in a just cause, a penetrating __M____ facing the starry heavens, both alike bear the semblance of divinity. Goethe
17. __P___ is getting something right in language. Howard Nemerov
Source: The American Mathematical Monthly, Feb 1992, in turn taken from an article by Professor JoAnne Growney entitled “Mathematics and Poetry: Isolated or Integrated?” which appeared in the Humanistic Mathematics Network Newsletter #6 (May 1991), 60 – 69.
