03/07/2024

In Folha, Viana deconstructs the antithesis between humanities and sciences.

Lewis Carroll, matemático e autor de “Alice no País das Maravilhas”

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S. Paulo.

I spent the weekend at the São Paulo Book Fair for the launch of my book "Histórias da Matemática" (Stories of Mathematics) , an anthology of columns I've been writing for this newspaper since 2017. It was an opportunity to reflect once again on the intimate relationship between literature and mathematics and the supposed antithesis between "humanities" and "exact sciences."

A well-known journalist was surprised by the "pleasant to read" book written by a mathematician. "I thought that those of us in the humanities knew how to write, and that people in the exact sciences did calculations," he explained to me. As for me, I like to provoke my colleagues with the emphatic statement that mathematics is the most human of the sciences, without ceasing to be the most exact.

The concept of antithesis is a recent invention. Following Plato , medieval education divided the body of knowledge into seven arts, organized into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy), all indispensable for a complete education. And the boundary between mathematics and literature was blurred.

The Persian Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), to whom the collection of poems "Rubaiyat" is attributed, was a mathematician: he worked on solving cubic equations and also deepened the discussion of Euclid's parallel postulate. The "father of English literature," Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), author of "The Canterbury Tales," also wrote a "Treatise on the Astrolabe." And Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), author of "Alice in Wonderland," was a mathematician by profession and a fiction writer as a hobby.

Several authors have used mathematical rules to shape literary narrative, reinforcing the themes of the text. For example, in "Life: A User's Manual" by the Frenchman Georges Perec (1936-1982), the action moves between the rooms of a Parisian property according to the movement of the knight on a chessboard. But the mutual influence can also go in the opposite direction: in the classical Indian tradition, it was common to formulate mathematical facts in the form of poems to facilitate their communication.

The English mathematician G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) understood what unites mathematics with the arts: "Like the painter or the poet, the mathematician is a pattern maker. If his patterns are more permanent, it is because they are made of ideas. These patterns, like those of the painter or the poet, must be beautiful: the ideas, like colors or words, must relate harmoniously."

Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891), the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics, went even further. "It is impossible to be a mathematician without having the soul of a poet… the poet needs to look deeper, to see what others do not see… and the mathematician needs to do the same."

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