Why Math Matters to English Majors

For today's meeting of my English Senior Honors Thesis course, one of our assigned readings was by Ezra Pound, founder of a poetic school known as Imagism, and (in my opinion) a little crazy. T. S. Eliot famously dedicated The Waste Land to him and called him "the better craftsman" in the process, but my tastes have always leaned decidedly toward Eliot. However, this thesis course is really forcing me to think things through, and giving me a new appreciation for writers I might otherwise have dismissed, so I set out with at least some kind of willingness to give Pound a chance.

But that's not the point of this post. The point is that my professor -- affable, brilliant, possessing a PhD in English literature and a professorship at UC Berkeley -- wasn't initially able to decode one of Pound's arguments because he made it using a mathematical analogy.

Pound says:

…When one studies Euclid one finds that the relation of a²+b²=c² applies to the ratio between the squares on the two sides of a right-angled triangle and the square on the hypotenuse. One still writes it a²+b²=c², but one has begun to talk about form. Another property or quality of life has crept into one’s matter. Until then one had dealt only with number. But even this statement does not create form. The picture is given you in the proposition about the square on the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. Statements in plane or descriptive geometry are like talk about art. They are a criticism of the form. The form is not created by them.

We come to Descartestian or “analytical geometry.” Space is conceived as separated by two or by three axes (depending on whether one is treating form in one or more planes). One refers to these axes by a series of co-ordinates. Given the idiom, one is able actually to create.

Thus we learn that the equation (x-a)²+(y-b)²=r² governs the circle. It is the circle. It is not a particular circle, it is any circle and all circles. It is nothing that is not a circle. It is the circle free of space and time limits. It is the universal, existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time. Mathematics is dull ditchwater until one reaches analytics. But in analytics we come upon a new way of dealing with form. It is in this way that art handles life. The difference between art and analytical geometry is the difference of subject matter only. Art is more interesting in proportion as life and the human consciousness are more complex and more interesting than forms and numbers.

Now, when I was doing my reading, the last sentences of this quote thoroughly impressed me. Coming into this with no expectation of liking Pound, I actually found myself agreeing with his metaphor, and wishing I could talk it over with my old junior high math teacher!

But this section, which made the most sense to me, was the one that made the least sense to my professor, who claimed to have failed math the last time she took it. I and some other students in the class ended up explaining to her exactly how Pound's mathematical references supported his argument -- how "a²+b²=c²" describes a particular set of properties of a particular type of triangle, but "(x-a)²+(y-b)²=r²" actually defines the points on a coordinate plane that create the figure of a circle. If I were rewriting Pound, I might suggest that this is the difference between the terms "equation" (i.e. anything that has an equals sign in it, that expresses an equivalence) and "formula" (which I think of as a particularly significant equation, general enough to define or create the type it describes).

I felt a strange pride in the moment when my affable, brilliant English professor, after internalizing all the math, burst out with, "It's like a recipe for a circle! But the triangle one isn't a recipe! Oh, that's brilliant!"

I may have chosen to exist in a sphere upon which mathematics doesn't impinge very often, but that doesn't mean I'm mathematically illiterate. And it certainly doesn't mean that I think mathematics is inherently any more or less meaningful (or entertaining) than any other academic pursuits. I can be proud of the fact that I took two years of Calculus in high school, even if at the time I did it ostensibly because I wanted to avoid math in college, because the math that I've learned has genuinely changed the way I look at the world.

Sometimes, being at Berkeley and seeing the kinds of math that my friends are doing makes me feel like I'm never going to get past the tip of the iceberg as far as mathematics is concerned, and that therefore my math doesn't matter. Today helped me see otherwise. While I don't believe that I'll ever learn more math than I know now, and I certainly don't believe that my present math knowledge amounts to much, I do think there's something to be said for having taken the time to learn and internalize the math that I have encountered so far. Today, in what I am sure counts as an incredibly rare circumstance, it helped me understand a literary critic. Tomorrow it probably won't show up in any tangibly useful way -- but the more I learn, the more I come to believe in the importance of transgressing boundaries between subjects and disciplines in order to rejuvenate ideas, concepts, or formulations that seem to be growing stale. Today, math made English matter more than English could on its own, at least for me.

And so here I am doing the unthinkable and offering thanks to Ezra Pound, for answering the unspoken question of why I need math, and why it really was all worthwhile.