Entry 366 — An Extra Value of Long Division Poem
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I just realized something I should have realized long ago but didn’t: a huge virtue of the long division poem is that one can use it to indicate the value of its images to each other. In a long division poem I was working on last night, I suddenly saw how important the size of the remainder was. I’ve done other long division poems in which in which I consciously exploited the remainder’s small size, and I’ve often worried that my dividend might be smaller than my divisor or sub-dividend product or quotient, or even remainder. But I’ve never thought of the abstract aesthetic value of the characteristic. It’s something no other poem than a math poem can have, and that few math poems can have as clearly as a long division poem. So: hurray for me.
That’s all for today. I had hoped to post a new mathemaku, the one I sketched last night, and was very proud of. But a day of tennis then a long dental procedure–a tooth implant–did me in, and I started the day sluggish. And no longer think much of the poem.