In Defense of Mathematics

On 2018090920180909 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original PoemsLeave a comment

There is no hatred more condoned
Than that of mathematics.
You will find little argument:
Amid all our dramatics

Of love to hate, of death to life,
Brand new to most archaic —
There is still a consensus on
(At least) the algebraic.

And that’s its general uselessness.
I hear this all too often;
That math is never used at all,
And well into one’s coffin

One’s yet to find a use for it.
And so, amid back slapping,
I hear poor math get buried to
The sound of general clapping.

But if one went back to my chair
It would be soon discovered
That mathematics is my job,
My desk with it is covered

It turns out much of life itself
Is math – that subject tortuous –
In spite of great consensus that
It is just way to arduous

I’d have no great solution if
I was in charge of school:
For many would still hate it,
And think those like me a fool

For my appreciation of
Its beautiful mosaic:
That seems to others pointless squiggles,
Strange and formulaic —

So most will never see a thing
In math there to admire:
And those that can, already do —
I’m preaching to
The choir

Conceptual Monologue

On 2018040820180408 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original PoemsLeave a comment

We search to find concepts
To explain things,
Then confuse the concept
With the thing,
Forgetting that concepts are just
Explanatory devices.

For instance,
There is no such thing
As what “all women think”,
Or “how all men act”
In a given situation.

Concepts, even scientific models,
Make things simpler than
They really are;
Substituting Athenian elegance
For the statistical uncertainties
Of real life.

Even the mathematics of uncertainty
Has been invaded by the
Proselytizers of certainty;
Saying, “If you have enough of this,
And enough of that,
And enough of the other thing,
You have certainty.”

Only,
We never have enough
Of this, that, or the other thing.
No matter,
We go on to make
Confident predictions,
Dressing up our medicine-man show
In the trappings of mathematics,
In much the same way
Of other con-men through the ages.

Concepts *are* things,
But they are neither identical to nor greater than
The things they purport to explain.

We seem to be psychologically conditioned
For the use of heuristics;
“Rules-of-thumb” that only need to be true
Most days to be useful.
Things like:
“If it rains on weekends after the equinox,
It will rain on weekends up until the solstice.”

If it then rains 9 of 13 weekends,
We feel justified in saying what we said:
Even if the results are no different
Than what might be generated by
An entirely random process.

Why do two people’s bodies,
Subject to similar lifestyles and stresses,
Break down at different speeds?
We look for general answers
Where only specific answers will do.

Because we think
Once we “know” a thing,
We can control it.
And the hard work of understanding
Things, places, and people,
In all their individual complexity,
Is one we often eschew for
The quick route of simplicities.

But it is only in
Individuality that anything
Of importance exists:
When you are talking about
Your children, you call them
By name.
You don’t just classify them as
“Kids”, “Millennials”, or “Gen-C”,
They are who they are,
As people.

There is no empathy in concepts,
Only dismissive generality,
And the idea that others (not us)
Obey scientific laws.

Triangles

On 2017032220170319 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems1 Comment

When one angle is right, you can’t go wrong.
Pythagorean theorem all the way:
Summed squares of short sides are the square of long,
You should be fluent in this, night and day.

But do not mix up summed squares with square roots,
For then you err as movie Scarecrow does:
Isosceles instead of right, to boot,
Or maybe math is diff’rent there, in Oz.

Lopsided triangles are too obtuse,
More compact ones an acute pain can cause:
The rules are tight, so don’t play fast and loose,
Euclidian’s not space, but still has laws.

And when, at last, geometry you see,
Your mind gets wrecked by trigonometry.