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8 December 2005: A few days ago, I got a post from someone calling herself Scarlett. She asked about Kaz Maslanka's mathematical poetry, which she said she had trouble understanding. I'm not sure which of his works she was referring to--probably not the two on display below (with the texts of the second enlarged below the poem they are from).
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The first of these should be easy to understand for anyone who has had high school algebra. It is an equation showing that a man's intelligence quotient (which represents his intelligence in this poem although not in my philosophy) is reduced by the amount of alcohol he's consumed times the sexual attractiveness of any woman near him). The poems in the denominator make a poem of what would otherwise be a mathematical prose statement.
The second poem, in the words of its creator, "uses the physics equation for power but in place of the variables Maslanka inserts metaphors to create a symbiosis of mathematical poetry and visual poetry." On the surface, this, too, is "just" the result of a substitution of images verbally expressed for mathemaitcal terms. It's more interesting, though. Take, for instance, whate Maslanka does the delta t twice shown. The delta indicates an infinitesimal quantity of ti, or time, so he give's it a value I take to be the split second one recognizes he's made a profound solution to some problem, out of "temporal neutrality." To be frank, I'm not sure why he seems to provides a range of values for his delta time, but my calculus (and deltas are among the paraphernalia of claculus) is creaky. Anyway, the piece's poetically-expressed images make it a mathematical poem, and its infusion into an arresting illumage makes it what Kaz calls "polyaesthetic."
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