Well, with my most recent entry in “Write On,” I’ve talked about games and writing so far on this blog, but no math . . . and it says it right up there in the title! A real shame, if you ask me. To remedy that, here is a poem I’ve been working on based off the stuff we’ve been learning in my math class. There’s not gonna be too much more stuff about this anytime soon barring a major change in plans, since I’m focusing on “Write On,” but this should hold me over, at least. Without further ado . . .
Cantor’s Curse
1874 – Mathematics unwinds around Georg
Cantor’s finger, the endless
array of
infinite infinities,
some more infinite than others,
blur past his eye and make it bleed. Kronecker
despises him, says he espouses set of
lies, but Dedekind was kind –
Cantor’s proofs grow like vines
up and around axiomatic poles.
1884 – Cantor’s depression is documented for the first time,
when the luminescent
eye of God
peers at him from behind paper
and he stabs at it with his pencil – but what is God,
other than uncountable
infinity?
1878 – Cantor postulates the continuum hypothesis,
stating that there is no separate size of infinity between
the natural numbers and the real. But:
1940 – Godel proves you can’t disprove it
1963 – Cohen proves you can’t prove it
How cruel, that the definite sleekness of numbers
makes them so slippery, that even
mathematicians, the sentinels of certainty
must bow
before the altar
of ambiguity, like their physicist brothers before them,
all because God whispered to Cantor
the locations of the loose
threads by which to pull and
unravel the universe.
1877 – Cantor sees,
but does not believe.
They give him medals, degrees,
but he dies alone, tormented by the shrieking infinities
besides the broken body of geometry
this,
a man who sought to create
but destroyed,
who sought
while the bombshells bursting over Europe
tore apart the fabric of the physical world
the only infinite left
he could trust.
