Mathematics and poetry are more connected than most of us realize. A July 3, 2025 article by Ev Crunden for the University of Pennsylvania’s Omnia magazine (a shorter version dated August 19, 2025 can found here) describes the intersection between mathematics, poetry, and ancient India,
Add zero and one to get one, one and one to get two, one and two to get three, two and three to get five. Most of us know this—that each successive number is the sum of the two numbers that came before it—as the Fibonacci sequence, named after a 12th-century Italian mathematician. But as early as 200 BCE, an Indian poet and mathematician named Acharya Pingala used that sequential concept to analyze poetry, and 7th-century scholar Virahanka later described it in more detail.
In fact, the use of math on the Indian subcontinent stretches back more than 3,000 years, and curiosity about this ancient and understudied history is at the center of Priya Nambrath’s research. As a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies, Nambrath is studying the applied practice of mathematics during medieval and premodern times in what is now Kerala, a state in southwestern India.
It’s “a deeply grounded and long-lasting mathematical tradition,” she says, one in which people drew on local religious and metaphysical themes, as well as the rhythm and structure of Sanskrit poetry. In the process, they uncovered many ideas and approaches long before Europeans did—discoveries that go largely underrecognized: “For the most part,” Nambrath says, “even students in India are not taught this aspect of cultural and intellectual history.”
Initially, Nambrath planned to dig into the topic independently. Ultimately, however, she realized she needed more academic support, “not just in the methodologies of Indian mathematics, but also in the literary and social histories of the region,” she says. …
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“This research involved a lot of time spent in several different archives and dealing with different categories of archival material,” she explains. From December 2023 to September 2024, Nambrath visited manuscript libraries in India, where she identified a few mathematical texts that had not been previously studied or translated. Those texts provided insights into “a medieval system of pedagogy,” Nambrath says, one that incorporated local approaches to mathematics.
She also found that European colonial scholars struggled to completely understand Indian math. One stumbling block, she observed, was cultural prejudice and a sense of mathematical superiority. But Nambrath surmises they may also have been flummoxed by how different it was from anything they’d encountered, something she ran into herself. “My STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] background had encouraged me to think of mathematics as a kind of universal language, not susceptible to cultural and historical nuance like art, music, and literature,” she says. “But what I was seeing in Indian mathematical texts convinced me otherwise.”
Besides the close links with poetry, mathematical progress was sometimes driven by the precise requirements of ritual practice, and advancements in astronomy were often motivated by the needs of astrology. These efforts resulted in unique modes of mathematical expression, according to Nambrath.
One example is the kuṭṭākāra method, which Nambrath says translates to “the pulverizer,” or the idea of reducing or grinding something down. The method is actually an algorithm that helps to solve what we now call linear Diophantine equations. Those take the form ax + by = c, with x and y representing unknown quantities, and the other letters representing known quantities. Through the kuṭṭākāra method, coefficients in this type of equation are broken up into smaller numbers to make it easier to find a solution.
The kuṭṭākāra method has some similarities with modern computational algorithms, but it first appeared in a 5th-century text, the Āryabhaṭīyam, with many other Indian mathematicians building on it over the years. The text is a treatise written in Sanskrit verses, using what Nambrath describes as an obscure system of word-numerals—that is, consonants representing digits, vowels denoting place value.
“We think of sciences and the humanities as embodying some kind of essential disciplinary binary,” she says. “But here I was, encountering mathematical ideas and techniques encased in metrically precise and linguistically lush poetry.”
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Nambrath, who is aiming to graduate next year, is now deep into writing her dissertation, along with developing a module for the Penn Museum that links artifacts in their Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek galleries with the mathematics practiced by those cultures. Museum visitors should be able to see the result this fall [2025].
And though that activity is a side project, Nambrath says it’s bringing her research full circle. “It gives me a much more holistic view of how humans across time and geography have wrestled with mathematical problems,” she says. “These approaches can be unique, but they are always logical, and it is fascinating to see how grounded they are in culture and custom.”
I found more about mathematics and poetry in an April 12, 2023 post (it’s an excerpt from Sarah Hart’s 2023 book, “Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature”) published on the Literary Hub
The connections between mathematics and poetry are profound. But they begin with something very simple: the reassuring rhythm of counting. The pattern of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 appeals to young children as much as the rhymes we sing with them (“Once I caught a fish alive”). When we move on from nursery rhymes, we satisfy our yearning for structure in the rhyme schemes and meter of more sophisticated forms of poetry, from the rhythmic pulse of iambic pentameter to the complex structure of poetic forms like the sestina and the villanelle. The mathematics behind these and other forms of poetic constraint is deep and fascinating. I’ll share it with you in this chapter.
Much more sophisticated mathematical problems have been expressed in verse, though. As I mentioned in the introduction, it was the standard format for mathematics in the Sanskrit tradition. The twelfth-century Indian mathematician and poet Bhaskara wrote all his mathematical works in verse. Here is one of the poems in a book he dedicated to his daughter Lilavati:
Out of a swarm of bees, one fifth part settled on a blossom of
Kadamba,
and one third on a flower of Silindhri;
three times the difference of those numbers flew to the bloom
of a Kutaja.
One bee, which remained, hovered and flew about in the air,
allured at the same moment by the pleasing fragrance of
jasmine and pandanus.
Tell me, charming woman, the number of bees.What a lovely way to write about algebra!
We don’t tend to write our mathematics in verse nowadays, more’s the pity, but the aesthetic link with poetry remains: the goal of both is beauty, a beauty that makes a virtue of economy of expression. Poets and mathematicians alike have praised each other’s specialisms. “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare,” wrote the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in a 1922 sonnet paying homage to Euclid’s geometry.
For the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, both mathematics and poetry can “lift the mind above the dull stir of Earth.” Einstein is reported to have said that mathematics is the poetry of logical thought. A mathematical proof, for example, if it’s any good, has a lot in common with a poem. In both cases, each word matters, there are no superfluous words, and the goal is to express an entire idea in a self-contained, usually fairly short, and fairly structured way.
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The resonances between poetry and mathematics were expressed well by the American poet Ezra Pound in The Spirit of Romance (1910): “Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres and the like, but equations for the human emotions.” Pound made another analogy between mathematics and poetry—the way that both can be open to many layers of interpretation. I would say that mathematicians have a very similar understanding of what makes the greatest mathematics: concepts that hold within them many possible interpretations—structures that can be found in different settings and so have a universality to them.
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Sarah Hart
Sarah Hart is a respected pure mathematician and a gifted expositor of mathematics. When promoted to full Professor of Mathematics at Birkbeck College (University of London) in 2013, she became the youngest STEM professor at Birkbeck and its first ever woman Mathematics Professor and one of only five women Mathematics Professors under the age of 40 in the United Kingdom. Educated at Oxford and Manchester, Dr. Hart currently holds the Gresham Professorship of Geometry, the oldest mathematics chair in the UK. The chair stretches back in an unbroken lineage to 1597. Dr. Hart is the 33rd Gresham Professor of Geometry, and the first woman ever to hold the position.
A classic story and mathematics
Years ago I was surprised to find out that “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll held a lot of mathematical concepts. You can find more about those concepts in a December 16, 2009 article by Melanie Bayley for New Scientist, Note: A link has been removed,
What would Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess’s baby or the Mad Hatter’s tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a boat trip near Oxford, though, and you’ll find that these famous characters and scenes are missing from the text.
As I embarked on my DPhil investigating Victorian literature, I wanted to know what inspired these later additions. The critical literature focused mainly on Freudian interpretations of the book as a wild descent into the dark world of the subconscious. There was no detailed analysis of the added scenes, but from the mass of literary papers, one stood out: in 1984 Helena Pycior of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had linked the trial of the Knave of Hearts with a Victorian book on algebra. Given the author’s day job, it was somewhat surprising to find few other reviews of his work from a mathematical perspective. Carroll was a pseudonym: his real name was Charles Dodgson, and he was a mathematician at Christ Church College, Oxford.
The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the missing scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.
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One last thing, there’s more poetry/math at JoAnne Growney’s Intersections — Poetry with Mathematics blog.
Enjoy!
