Personal Relativity

They tell me time seems

to speed up the older people get
because each day, month, or year
becomes a smaller and smaller
percentage of the overall total.
I hate math, so cold, so correct.

I recall school years
that dragged on for decades.
A magical summer or two
lasted a millennium. Then

the time wagon turned into
a bullet train and five years
became a minute. Whole years
vanished like peas down a sink.

Today a woman said to me,
"I'm 70 years old. What
happened?" I said, "Ask that
bastard, time. Happy birthday!"

A Number of Words

On the mulish bus
going to the conference,
a mathematics professor
said to a scholar of rhetoric,
"One day you'll
realize that everything
is about numbers."
The rhetorician replied,
"Thank you for telling
me that using words."


hans ostrom 2019

Wittgenstein's Progress

After trying to reduce
philosophy to mathematics,
Wittgenstein went on
to explore a forest
of rhetoric and psychology,
of banter and brain.


hans ostrom 2018

"The Pascaline"

Have you seen the Pascaline?
Nor have I. It must have been fine.
It was a calculator from
the 17th century, built
by the legendary Blaise Pascal,
who even with a friend (Fermat)
also certainly found a math
to figure the odds of a roll
of the die. Later,

he invented Pascal's Wager,
a thought-gamble in which
you must choose to bet (get
this) on whether God exists.
Is the smart money
on yea or nay?

Pascal's Pensées persist.

Black dots on white cubes
tumble in my untidy mind.
I really hate Las Vegas,
the true ghastly capital
of the USA, and I really
would like to say I've
seen a Pascaline. But I can't
say that I have.


hans ostrom 2015

What Exactly Do You Mean?

Divine algorithms
press against
brittle positivist
walls, disturbing
the binary peace.
God did well in math.



hans ostrom 2013

Regarding Math

*
*
*

Regarding Math

(problems, indeed)


Among his several problems with mathematical equations
was that he had no trouble letting x be x and y be y. He
silently advised them to remain letters. He did wish for them
that they didn't have exponents sitting on their shoulders
like unseemly growths. Also a problem is that he saw

both sides of an equation as art--assemblages of parentheses,
letters, numbers, and other symbols--and he didn't care
what they stood for.  They stood for the image they created.

Then there was the problem of his seeing--there, in the middle--
an equal-sign.  He thought, if each side is content to be equal
to the other, who am I to intrude on this amicable truce?
They were the same, apparently, so let them be. He didn't

care to know their secrets.  Forced to solve an equation,
he did so, but it never felt like success, and he never
recalls anyone explaining why equations had to be solved.

He does remember sitting next to pretty girls in math class
and smelling their hair and their thin sweaters, and looking
at their painted nails, and thinking, "Let these girls
stand for beauty. Yes, let's equate them with allure."

Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

More Poetic Math

Here's another poem on math, from a poet's perspective:

Doing Another Kind of Math

by Hans Ostrom

Bach over Blues
times Rock over
Mozart equals

music cubed.

Fox plus bear

divided by snow
equals dream.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom