Sunday, July 1, 2007

A poem on Mathematics : By Tagore

Mathematics ....
The enchantment of rhythm is obviously felt in music, the rhythm which is inherent in the notes and their groupings. It is the magic of mathematics, this rhythm which is in the heart of all creation, which moves in the atom and in its different measures fashions gold and lead, the rose and the thorn, the sun and the planets, the variety and vicissitudes of man's history. These are the dance steps of numbers in the arena of time and space, which weave the maya of appearance, the incessant flow of changes that ever is and is not. What we know as intellectual truth, is that also not a perfect rhythm of the relationship of facts that produce a sense of convincingness to a person who somehow feels that he knows the truth? We believe any fact to be true because of a harmony, a rhythm in reason, the process of which analysable by the logic of mathematics.

- Rabindranath Tagore

(Tagore's Introduction for Saankhya - The Journal of ISI-Kolkata)

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