ARTICLES: Mathematics and What It Means to Be Human ENGLISH + MATH

[Ryan Goble]

The Chronicle of Higher Education is running an interesting series of blogs titled - 'Mathematics and What It Means to Be Human' in three parts. Part 1 and Part 2 have been published. This is a great example of the possibilities of connecting disciplines - specifically English and Math. The story behind the articles:

In May 2009, Michele Osherow, an English professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and dramaturg at the Folger Theatre, in Washington, invited her colleague Manil Suri, a mathematician at the university, to act as mathematics consultant for the Folger's production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. The play explores the relationship between past and present through the characters' intellectual pursuits, poetic and mathematical. That led to a series of "show and tell" sessions explaining the mathematics behind the play to both cast members and audiences. In the fall of 2011, the two professors decided to take their collaboration to the classroom and jointly teach a freshman seminar, "Mathematics and What It Means to be Human." Here is the first of a three-part series on how the experiment played out.

Sample from Part 1:

Manil Suri: The pre-theater talks I gave at the Folger really fired me up. Few intoxicants are as dangerous to a mathematician as an audience of laypeople willingly listening to a math lecture. So when Michele tantalized me with a whole semester's worth of such highs with a class full of enthusiastic (OK, at least captive) students, the endorphin factory in my brain went into high alert.

I could be Johnny Appleseed, strewing impressionable young minds with the seeds of logic and algebra; or Florence Nightingale, bringing mathematical succor to these poor, deprived humanities rookies. This was a chance to engineer a grand meeting of diverse disciplines and worldviews—to create, in one corner of the university, our very own Arcadia.

My chairman was less enchanted by those lofty aspirations. In fact, he seemed downright distracted by the mundane matter of course release. "Who will cover the extra cost over what they're offering?" he asked. I'll skip the next part—squeezing out money, like squeezing out sausage, is best left off-screen. Suffice to say, we managed to get the go-ahead.

Full blog: http://chronicle.com/article/MathematicsWhat-It-Means/134850/

Sample from Part 2:

Michele Osherow: While Manil astounded the students with mathematical impossibilities—the trisection of an angle assignment, Zeno's paradox—I focused on the possibilities that characterized the study of literature. Shakespeare's King Lear made it easy to note the range of readings inspired by a single work. But not every text we gave to the students was as richly complex as Lear.

In fact, convoluted might better describe the poetry we introduced next in the classroom from a collection called the Oulipo Compendium. Oulipo poetry emerged in 1960 when Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais gathered a group of writers and mathematicians in France to create literature guided by strict (very strict) and often bizarre constraints. For example, the S+7 (or N+7) constraint requires that every noun in a text be replaced with the seventh noun appearing after it in a dictionary. (You can find more information about Oulipo poetry here.)

I had never heard the word Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature) and was surprised when Manil handed me the anthology during our course planning. He qualified the suggestion by saying he had "no idea if it was any good." But I was intrigued: Literature produced through a series of strict constraints was an interesting fusion of our two fields. I wasn't sure, though, if the art was to be found in the language or in the template. I worried that to some students it wouldn't matter.

Read Part 2 at: http://chronicle.com/article/MathematicsWhat-It-Means/135114/?cid=j...