Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 231, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 September 1910 — POETRY IN BILLS [ARTICLE]

POETRY IN BILLS

University of Chicago Teacher Makes Unique Statement _ Professor Wllczynskl Announce* Advance of Rhythmical Revolution In “Poetry and Mathematics." Chicago.—Poetry Is booming. The grocer's bill may now be called a lyric, the butcher's communication an elegy, and the housewife who checks the charges a literary artist of the subtlest mold. Professor Ernest J. Wilczynski of the University of Chicago mathematics department says so. Profesor Wllczynskl, who teaches integral calculus, projective differential geometry and other advanced subjects at the university, announced the advance of the rhythmical revolution In a lecture on “Poetry and Mathematics” the other day at Ryerson Physical Laboratory. Poets and mathematicians, he declared, are expert in each other’s arts, and by no means so different as uninformed persons may imagine. The university authority defined the world as one huge mathematical problem, and his remarks were full of comfort for those who may have felt a lack of the poetical faculty. Bookkeepers as well as tradesmen and kindergarten pupils may squeeze themselves Into the poet’s hall of fame by a liberal Interpretation of the new theory. "The poetic and mathematical aspects of the human mind have much more in common than is usually realized," said Professor Wllczynskl. “There Is no such thing as one faculty of the mind that Is without contact with other faculties, and It Is true tn the case of the mathematics and poetry, of course. “A poem and a mathematical composition are both the expressions of ideas. Goethe said that he disliked mathematicians because they always translated everything into their own language. But he would not have objected had he known that their language was the most beautiful, perfect and adequate of all. A "Each art has a peculiar language, and Its conventional symbols. Beethoven nnd Wagner, spent many years distributing small black dots over five parallel lines, but the dots were only the symbols, not the music. In the same way the mathematical equation Is only the symbol, but the form Is the Important thing. This Is true of both poetry and mathematics. “Like poetry mathematics may express Its thought tn different ways and mav be of beauty because of Its formal element The peculiar element of poetry may be said to be rhythm and that of mathematics to be rotation. Aristotle called attention to the necessity for unity of action in the drama, and the same necessity holds for r.ijkthematlc*’. . -Aristotle's famous saying that the probable-impossible Is preferable to the improbable-possible, Is true in

mathematics also. We Insist upon casuallty in mathematics as we do in poetry. “The minds of poets and mathematicians work in the same way, both possess Imagination, both hold’ the idea important and insist that the essential Ideas must be true. The perfect mathematician, then, may be regarded as the perfect poet, and the arts are very similar,"