Page 178 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

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developing the mind’s eye through

equation poems

Learn to Write an Equation Poem—Unfolding Lines That

Provide a Sense of What Lies Beneath a Standard Equation

Poet Sylvia Plath once wrote: “The day I went into physics class it was death.” 1
She continued:

A short dark man with a high, lisping voice, named Mr. Manzi, stood in front of the class in a tight
blue suit holding a little wooden ball. He put the ball on a steep grooved slide and let it run down
to the bottom. Then he started talking about let a equal acceleration and let t equal time and
suddenly he was scribbling letters and numbers and equals signs all over the blackboard and my
mind went dead.

Mr. Manzi had, at least in this semiautobiographical retelling of Plath’s life,
written a four-hundred-page book with no drawings or photographs, only
diagrams and formulas. An equivalent would be trying to appreciate Plath’s

poetry by being told about it, rather than being able to read it for yourself. Plath
was, in her version of the story, the only student to get an A, but she was left
with a dread for physics.

“What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the
mathematics of the heart?”
—David Eugene Smith, American mathematician and educator