Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino has been blogging about mathematics and poetry at his Eratio blog. When he told me about it on the phone yesterday, I said I’d check it out, which I’ve now done. I left my first comment on it. Fortunately, for once I cut what I said before hitting the button telling his blog to accept it, for my post got rejected. I’ll try in a little while to post it again. Meanwhile I want to post it here, to make sure it’s somewhere, and because maybe one of my two regular visitors doesn’t also read Gregory, or misses posts to it because it’s irregular, which is my excuse.
Hi, Gregory. I’ve decided to tear into your commentary on mathematics and poetry Very Slowly, one idea at a time, to facilitate coherence.
I’ll begin with your statement that “Already (‘mathematical sentence’) (you’re) thinking analogically.”
This is where you and I first disagree, for (as revealed in our long & interesting phone conversation of yesterday) I believe numerals and mathematical symbols are part of our verbal language, just as, in my opinion, typographical symbols for punctuation or to abbreviate are. The mathematical symbol, “+,” for instance, is just a different way of writing, “plus,” or “&.” It therefore follows that for me, a mathematical equation is a literal sentence differing from unmathematical sentences only in the words in it. “a – b = c,” for instance, is a very simple sentence and not significantly different from, “Mary cried when she lost her lamb.”
Obviously, it’s just a case of your opinion versus mine, but I think acceptance of my opinion makes more sense, because it keeps thing more simple than your does. I would say that what most people mean by “words” are “general words,” while words like “sineA” or “=” are “specialized words” or mathematical words–like punctuation marks.
I think in my linguistics, these “words” are all called “textemes,” But it’s been a while since I read Grumman on the matter, so I’m not sure.
Hey, I found a glossary in which I define many terms like “texteme.” It’s not a word but a typographical symbol: “any textual symbol, or unified combination of textual symbols–letters, punctuation marks, spaces, etc.–that is smaller than a syllable of two or more letters: e.g., ‘g,’ ‘&h(7:kk,’ ‘GH,’ ‘jd.’” I coined the term for discussion of various odd kinds of symbols and symbol-combinations like some of those among my examples that not infrequently occur in visual or infraverbal poems.
So, I don’t have a special term for word, as I define it. Yet.
To continue my argument in favor of my take on mathematical expression as an extension of verbal expression, not something different in kind, I would saimply ask what is special about mathematical symbols that should require us to think of them as elements of a special kind of expression? They do nothing that ordinary verbalization can’t do, although they do it more clearly, compactly and elegantly.
Graphs would be mathematical expression–a form of visio-conceptual expression, as is written music. Chemical diagrams but not chemical notation. . . .
I don’t see that there’s any difference between the syntax of mathematical expression (other than graphs and probably other similar things I’m not into Math enough to think of right now) and normal verbal expression. There’s no inflection, I don’t think, in mathematical expression. Which is a triviality.
Conclusion: we need a carefully formed taxonomy of human modes of expression.