You have no idea how much poetry there is
in the calculation of a table of logarithms!
— Jane Muir, Of Men and Numbers
Don’t ask me to describe the color blue,
or to portray the flavor of a pear;
to explicate the texture of the air,
or draw a contour map of Xanadu.
I’d rather write that one plus one is two;
the universe is none of my affair.
An abstract God is (n)either here (n)or there;
and as for love, it can be false or true.
In cold and calculating, clear, exact
equations, you approach infinity,
while I am left to reason with my heart.
And yet in symbols signifying fact
we share a common tongue of symmetry,
the pure delineations of our art.