How do you say it in mathematics?

How do you say ‘I miss you’?

How do you say what you cannot, dare not?
Is smuggling numbers into a poem a solution?
Do you hope the numbers will speak clearly of what is still hidden from you?

And so the last part of my seven-part poem reads:

“The azaan woke me at 6:00.
The thunder at 4:00.
The nightmare at 2:48.
From 2:48 to 5:21
I sat and read a Hundred Scottish Love Poems.
You are forty-two
and have three children
from two different women.
My favourite song is on Track 9.
I play it again and again,
keeping demons and darkness at bay.”

How do you say what came before?

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Arianna Borrelli: Apples

“As has already been suggested , the fundamental idea of atoms could be expected to arise in all civilisations indepently, since everywhere men were engaged in cutting up lengths of wood, and the question would inevitably arise as to what would happen if successive cuttings were to go on until the uncuttable was reached” (Joseph Needham)*

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Botschaften aus dem Gehäus

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One apple and one apple makes two apples.
One apple and a half eaten one make 1.5 apples.
With only the help of a point (or a comma), mathematics has been able to accommodate half eaten apples and, after all, 1.5 is just as good a number as 1 or 2, is it not?

Mathematics at times feels like the world beyond a conjurer’s hat, from which the right abstraction will always pop up to match any problem we meet in reality.
So, for any occurrence we might face, we feel like asking: how do you say it in mathematics?
The conjurer will tell us, and everything will become clearer.

The man with the top hat may look mysterious, and look down to us as though he knew great secrets, but we know that he is only a conjurer, and not a real magician.
He is not making up the world behind the top hat: anyone with enough patience and skill could always understand how to reach into it. But why bother?

Still: what if there were no top hat and no conjurer, but only apples and people eating them?
Looking again at that 1.5, is it really as good a number as 1 or 2?
What if that point (or comma) were not the visible side of an abstraction, but just
some dirty trace left on mathematics by someone eating apples?

Indeed, what if the whole of mathematics were nothing but a heap of… well, maybe not just apple cores, but of very different traces left by people drawing, building and making business,
as well by flying arrows, light, electric currents or heat an cold?
Then, perhaps, the image of mathematics would not be a conjurer, but Dürer’s ‘Melancholia’

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