garnets and pie
Happy almost-equinox!
My poem “Persephone takes up the garnets” will be in The Deadlands later this year–I just signed the contract yesterday. The poem is equal parts intense mythical allusions and a hidden riff on the video game Hades. There are worse things to do than play a game about running through the underworld over and over as winter turns into spring.
On a different front entirely, I was the mathematician source for a Pi Day article in Wired about the movie Pi. We had a long email conversation that was highly condensed for publication–but you can see my influence in parts of the discussion that don’t quote me, if you know what to look for. Here’s an excerpt from the longer interview:
Would you prefer that the movie tackled some of its mathematical concepts in a more rigorous way? Or are you just happy to see math in TV and movies, in whatever way?
Yes and no. I do love it when movies sneak in a glimpse of greater mathematical complexity. For example, the cartoon Flatland: The Movie sneaks some beautiful images of rotating hypercubes in around its story of a little hexagon with a bow in her hair. But I’m willing to suspend disbelief about technical details when watching a movie in a way that wouldn’t be appropriate when attending a seminar! (If you’re curious about the kinds of math details that Pi gets right and wrong, the book Math Goes to the Movies has a nice analysis. Of course, some pieces are pure fiction! One plot-irrelevant surprise is that the numbers in the title credits do not actually match the beginning of the decimal expansion of pi.)
I would like to see TV and movies go beyond the myth of the lonely genius more often. Mathematicians debate and collaborate constantly. We use Erdős numbers to measure our publication connections, the way actors count degrees of Kevin Bacon; we travel all over the world to write on each other’s chalkboards; we invent new words to convey the nuances of our ideas. One of my favorite parts of Pi is actually that it shows us an enduring relationship between the protagonist and his onetime PhD advisor. I’d love to see movies take a broader view of the strengths and failures of mathematical community.
Meanwhile, Gennoveus’s stance on movies and video games is that it’s good to have humans sharing the couch.
Yours,
Ursula.