O my brother Chalkies, some of us don't do the numbers, and
some of us do ...
Any of you fellows have sons or daughters who've just headed to
college? My girlfriend's daughter just transferred from Colby
to Emory. She's signed up for Math 107, Introduction to Probability
and Statistics. I keep asking her mom about the syllabus and looking
up the professor on the internet, and the text. I was worried
at first because the book was by Freund, but then saw that it
was in its 8th edition, and there were no calculus prerequisites.
Stats for Poets, no doubt ... and yet ... some poets make do make
great statisticians. And vice versa.
Thomas Pynchon. English majors in 1973 read Gravity's Rainbow
as if it were sacred text. His character, Roger Mexico, plotting
the WW II V2 hits on London and conjuring their Poisson frequencies...
"I was a math major when I first read it," a colleague
said to me last week as we discussed a recently published appreciation
of the book. " I switched to English." She laughed.
"Funny ... I switched from English to math," I laughed back.
They really are the same, math and poetry: language, essentially.
Your wife's-birthday-as-trifecta may be pure statistical
elegance, and your carefully-simulated-three-tuple pure trochaic
meter. In the end, they are the same ticket.
S. t.
