Shakespeare and the Number 14, or Why Poetry and Mathematics Belong Together
by Maria PopovaA short lesson in cultural cross-pollination.
We’ve already seen how Shakespeare changed everything and how Fibonacci, “the man of numbers,” changed the world. But in this short video, Professor Roger Bowley uses Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter and penchant for the number 14 to show that the bard was quite the man of numbers himself, revealing a relationship between poetry and mathematics much more tightly knit than the standard cultural compartmentalization would have you believe.
Poetry is an extreme form of wordplay, in which numbers dictate form and structure to give more beauty to it.
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