Scott Buchanan - Poetry and mathematics (1929)

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The triangle is an obsession to geometers and the rest of the world may be grateful to the geometer for cultivating such a neurosis.

Scott Buchanan
Watch the engineer and you will learn many things, but do not ask him about mathematics, unless you want to see quite another thing, how technology and folk-lore get invented and broadcast.

Scott Buchanan
The best proofs in mathematics are short and crisp like epigrams, and the longest have swings and rhythms that are like music.

Scott Buchanan
The prestige of the engineer is another accretion to the tradition of mathematics. This more than any other one thing accounts for our present mathematical complex. The engineer is fast taking the position of authority, superseding the priest, the scholar, and the statesman in our organized thought and action.

Scott Buchanan
Mathematics then becomes the ladder by which we all may climb into the heaven of perfect insight and eternal satisfaction, and the solution of arithmetic and algebraic problems is connected with the salvation of our souls.

Scott Buchanan
Numbers are not just counters; they are elements in a system.

Scott Buchanan
Symbols, formulae and proofs have another hypnotic effect. Because they are not immediately understood, they, like certain jokes, are suspected of holding in some sort of magic embrace the secret of the universe, or at least some of its more hidden parts.

Scott Buchanan
In general the teacher of mathematics has been the high priest of an occult ritual, the keeper in many senses of an esoteric doctrine which only his superiors or predecessors have understood.

Scott Buchanan
Mathematics is not a compendium or memorizable formula and magically manipulated figures.

Scott Buchanan
The mathematician has again been lured to an adventure with a symbolic hobbyhorse and has discovered new routes to the absolute or infinite.

Scott Buchanan
Science is an allegory that asserts that the relations between the parts of reality are similar to the relations between terms of discourse.

Scott Buchanan
The clarification of any idea, however simple or complex it may be, begins with its location on that translucent phosphorescent surface of man's thought that Plato called opinion or belief.

Scott Buchanan
Mathematics suffers much, but most of all from its teachers.

Scott Buchanan
Each symbol used in mathematics, whether it be a diagram, a numeral, a letter, a sign, or a conventional hieroglyph, may be understood as a vehicle which someone has used on a journey of discovery.

Scott Buchanan
The theory of number is the epipoem of mathematics.

Scott Buchanan
The scientist is the contemporary monk copyist, writing over old literature on the palimpsest of experience, triumphantly announcing his faithfulness and accuracy in transferring the copy.

Scott Buchanan
Anything worth discovering in mathematics does not need proof; it needs only to be seen or understood.

Scott Buchanan
The structure of mathematics and their propositions about them are ways for the imagination to travel and the wings, or legs, or vehicles to take you where you want to go.

Scott Buchanan
The engineer sings as he works — often he only whistles — and in that singing there is the magic of poetry. The engineer's science, like the sailor's chanty, is good literature.

Scott Buchanan
Mathematics and poetry move together between two extremes of mysticism, the mysticism of the commonplace where ideas illuminate and create facts, and the mysticism of the extraordinary where God, the Infinite, the Real, poses the riddles of desire and disappointment, sin and salvation, effort and failure, question and paradoxical answer.

Scott Buchanan