Do math and literature have anything in common?
Micah Mattix
No two fields seem to have less in common than mathematics and literature. The former, in Aristotle’s view, is the foundation of all the sciences and nothing if not useful. Poetry, on the other hand, “makes nothing happen,” as W. H. Auden put it famously.
Yet references to math abound in modern literature. Herman Melville, for example, was positively obsessed with mathematics. In Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab compares his cabin boy to a circle — “True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its center” — and Ishmael praises the “mathematical symmetry” of the sperm whale’s head. In another scene, Ishmael describes the mathematical properties of the cycloid, a curve that is made by tracing a point on a circle, in which “all bodies … will descend from any point in precisely the same time.” And in Mardi, the character Babbalanja remarks that man is “harder to solve, than the Integral Calculus — yet plain as a primer.”
IT’S EMBARRASSING YOU NEED A BOOK TO TELL YOU IT’S OK TO LIKE GOOD ART BY BAD PEOPLE
Differentials make an appearance in Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Vasily Grossman’s 1959 novel Life and Fate. George Eliot uses geometrical metaphors in Middlemarch and Adam Bede. She writes, for example, that “Mr. Casson’s person … appeared to consist principally of two spheres, bearing the same relation to each other as the earth and the moon: that is to say, the lower sphere might be said, at a rough guess, to be thirteen times larger than the upper.” Euclid gets a mention in the first paragraph of James Joyce’s Dubliners.
In Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections between Mathematics and Literature, Sarah Hart, a professor of math at the University of London, argues that literature is indebted to math for more than just metaphors. The two “are inextricably … linked”: “The universe is full of underlying structure, pattern, and regularity, and mathematics is the best tool we have for understanding it.”
Hart doesn’t quite prove this, unfortunately, but she does provide some interesting connections between mathematics and literature nonetheless. Take prime numbers, for example. The number of syllables per line in a haiku (three, five, and seven) are all prime. The most common meter in English is the iambic pentameter — that is, a line containing five stresses — and is also prime. Dante used three-line stanzas with an interconnected rhyme scheme (terza rima) in his three-volume Divine Comedy. The use of prime numbers to establish a line of poetry, Hart writes, “perhaps helps to categorize the lines as separate indivisible entities, whereas 4, 6, and 8 all have ‘fault lines’ that would arguably weaken the structure.”
She is right to use “perhaps” because one thinks immediately of the Alexandrine as a counterexample. It is the most common line in French poetry and is composed of 12 syllables, the most divisible number under 20. The sonnet contains 14 lines and, in its earliest form, is divided into two stanzas, one of eight lines (an octave) and one of six (a sestet). If the iambic pentameter is the most popular meter in English, the iambic tetrameter, a line of four stresses, is probably a close second.
Hart’s point, of course, is that all literature has a structure and that math can help us identify that structure. But she has surprisingly little to say about this other than a few tentative remarks about prime numbers and the use of geometric progression by some novelists.
Perhaps I was expecting too much, but I was disappointed with her discussion of fractals. A fractal is a shape that is created by reproducing the pattern of the whole. Parallel structure and self-similarity are everywhere present in literature and share some similarities with fractal geometry, as the late poet and critic Paul Lake has observed. Hart, however, mostly focuses on how Michael Crichton uses the fractal in Jurassic Park as a symbol for how change happens.
Still, lots of other observations make this book a fun ride. The best part, in my view, is her section on giants and Lilliputians, where she calculates the plausibility of some of literature’s more fantastic characters. Jonathan Swift’s Brobdingnagians, for example, would not be able to stand if they existed. They are 12 times bigger than Gulliver but “bone can take only ten times normal pressure before breaking: the Brobdingnagians’ bones would break as soon as they tried to move.”
Voltaire’s giant Micromégas, who is 24,000 times larger than humans, wouldn’t be able to move on Earth either, but would he be able to move on another planet? Nope: “To get the same pressure on his bones as we experience on our Earth, his planet, if it’s like ours in everything but size, would have to be not 24,000 times the size, but 1/24,000th the size. … He is 120,000 feet tall, and the circumference of such a planet would be only 5,478 feet. It would be like a human trying to live on the surface of a grape.”
The Lilliputians, on the other hand, would have no problem moving around and could actually fall from any height without injury since their terminal velocity would only be 4.2 meters per second, far less than the highest survivable rate of 12 meters per second. Hart writes that because the amount of energy that muscles produce is “roughly proportional to their mass,” the height that “a scaled-down human can jump to is more or less the same as the height a usual human can manage, around a meter.” The same would be true for a giant flea. No matter how big it was, it could jump about as high as a normal flea: seven inches.
Sadly, if the Lilliputians were real, they would likely starve to death because of Kleiber’s law, which states that an animal that is twice the mass of another will not require twice the number of calories but two to the power of 3/4th’s the number of calories. If an animal requires 100 calories a day to survive, one that is twice the size will require only 168. This means, however, that the smaller the animal is, the more calories it needs proportional to its mass. Hart calculates that the Lilliputians would need to eat 161 Lilliputian-sized apples per day to survive.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Once Upon a Prime is not a systematic exploration of the connections between mathematical and linguistic structures, but it is a fun spin on the Ferris wheel, with lots of interesting observations and calculations.
Math and literature do share a great deal in common, and her book shows, as she writes, that understanding some of these connections can enhance our “enjoyment of both.”
Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.