Discreet Continuity

»A mathematician who is not also to some extent a poet will never be a perfect mathematician.« (Karl Weierstraß, mathematician)

Conversely, lyric poet Oswald Egger conducts basic research into the interaction between mathematics and poetry:

He grasps both as related manners of thinking, darts in his short articles »with cheerful seriousness« between children’s games (hopscotch, finger and hopping games etc.) and pattern formations in geometry and text.

The History of Ideas runs simultaneously by leaps and bounds (discretely) and simultaneously steadily, and this book enables readers to follow its course: from the magic horn of the folk song through to the inner metrics of topological spaces in Riemann’s geometry. Nor does Egger shy away from complex mathematical issues, rather he takes them on. In the tradition of Arno Schmidt’s Reciprocal Radiuses or Edgar Allen Poe’s Eureka he presents abstract connections graphically in articulate images and is entertaining to boot. In the process this lyric poet almost manages without formulas and – totally forgoes poems.

»I thought of the forest as an arrangement of dots in a grid. When were two dots, tree by tree, visible to each other in the grid, and when not?«