Why Writers Should Learn Math

[Prashant Kumar]

Don't think this should be in the imperative; nonetheless interesting take
probably. Important distinction to be made between what is recognisably
"mathematics" to most, and the process and business of mathematical
insight, intuition and discovery.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/writers-should-learn-math.html

In 1998, the New York *Times* wrote about a performance by the Fort Worth
Ballet, singling out a male dancer for “his surprisingly fluid strength”
while lamenting his lack of “soaring leaps” and “lively pirouettes” in a
challenging routine that included Balanchine’s “Firebird.” If that seems
like tepid praise, consider that the dancer was Herschel Walker, then a
running back for the Dallas Cowboys. Walker had studied ballet at the
University of Georgia, and while what he learned in the dance studio cannot
alone account for his eight thousand two hundred and twenty-five career
rushing yards, it surely fooled a linebacker or two. Nor is Walker the only
football player to have seriously studied ballet: the Hall of Famer Lynn
Swann is the subject of an NFL Films featurette titled “Baryshnikov in
Cleats.”


What ballet is to football players, mathematics is to writers, a discipline
so beguiling and foreign, so close to a taboo, that it actually attracts a
few intrepid souls by virtue of its impregnability. The few writers who
have ventured headlong into high-level mathematics—Lewis Carroll, Thomas
Pynchon, David Foster Wallace—have been among our most inventive in both
the sentences they construct and the stories they create.
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