Wednesday, November 11, 2009

James Joseph Sylvester: Mathematitian and "poet".

There is a rather interesting transcribed speech here which discusses the poetical efforts of J. J. Sylvester, who was the first Jew to hold a professorship at Oxford. In particular, as mentioned by Bell, he wrote a poem called, "To a missing member of a family of terms in an algebraical formula" which starts as such:
Lone and discarded one! divorced by fate,
From thy wished-for fellows--whither art flown?
Where lingerest thou in thy bereaved estate,
Like some lost star or buried meteor stone?
So yeah, his math was better than his poetry.

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