The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “mathematics poetry”

The Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music
The Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music

“There are few pleasures in art greater than the secure sense that one can recognize beauty when one comes upon it… Recognizing the beautiful in an abstract art like music partakes somewhat of a minor miracle.”

read article

How Pythagoras and Sappho Radicalized Music and Revolutionized the World
How Pythagoras and Sappho Radicalized Music and Revolutionized the World

The story of the invention of the love song, the world’s first algorithm, and the mathematics of transcendence.

read article

Favorite Books of 2020
Favorite Books of 2020

Audre Lorde, Keith Haring, Bruce Lee, chance, love, black holes, constraint as a catalyst of creativity, and a whisper of Whitman.

read article

Astronomy, Race, and the Unwitnessed Radiance Inside History’s Blind Spots
Astronomy, Race, and the Unwitnessed Radiance Inside History’s Blind Spots

A poetic instrument for observing and redrawing the spectrum of privilege and possibility.

read article

Life, Death, Chance, and Freeman Dyson
Life, Death, Chance, and Freeman Dyson

“These matters are in the hands of a blind fate whose decrees it is perhaps well that we cannot foresee.”

read article

Matter, Music, and the Mind
Matter, Music, and the Mind

“Sound is sea: pattern lapping pattern… Matter delights in music, and became Bach.”

read article

One Art: The Decades-Old Classic That Remains the Ultimate Consolation for Loss
One Art: The Decades-Old Classic That Remains the Ultimate Consolation for Loss

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

read article

How the World Holds Together: Patti Smith Reads Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Premonition of Particle Physics
How the World Holds Together: Patti Smith Reads Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Premonition of Particle Physics

A rhapsody of wonder between the scale of atoms and the scale of minds.

read article

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Walt Whitman’s Stunning Serenade to Our Interlaced Lives Across Space and Time
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Walt Whitman’s Stunning Serenade to Our Interlaced Lives Across Space and Time

“It avails not, time nor place… What is it then between us?… It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, the dark threw its patches down upon me also.”

read article

How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe
How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe

How many revolutions does the cog of culture make before a new truth about reality catches into gear?

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)