Abstract / Synopsis
What do Shakespearean words, doughnuts, cups of tea, and horses in the sky all have in common with a famous theorem? To discover the answer, we take you on a journey in a strange, enchanted land: the land where mathematics meets poetry. Here we explore how a fundamental literary trope, metaphor, and a fundamental result in topology, Brouver's Fixed Point Theorem, touch and illuminate one another. Delving into the symmetry of this transdisciplinary embrace, we find that it reveals, not only the beauty of poetry and mathematics, but that of life itself: the beauty hidden in ordinary things like a doughnut, a cup of tea, horse-shaped clouds on a winter day or the poetically radiant simplicity of a theorem that casts a new light on it all.
DOI
10.5642/jhummath.GLGE1548
Recommended Citation
Sanziana Caraman & Lorelei Caraman, "White Horses in the Sky: or The Magical Place Where Topology Meets Poetry," Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 15 Issue 1 (January 2025), pages 277-296. DOI: 10.5642/jhummath.GLGE1548. Available at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol15/iss1/16