Sarah Glaz and Mark Sanders
The poet, Sarah Glaz, resides in the US. She is Emeritus Professor of
Mathematics at the University of Connecticut specializing in the area
of commutative algebra. Her poetry is often inspired by mathematics
and its history. Mark Sanders, from Northamptonshire, UK, is a collage
and ceramic artist whose work engages with surrealism. His collage
construction is driven by research and combines materials already in
his stockpile with new components as required by the subject. This is
the second poem-collage pair on which Sarah Glaz and Mark Sanders
collaborated. This piece is part of their larger joint poem-collage
project involving the ancient history of mathematics.
In the 5th century BCE, the Pythagorean Hippasus of Metapontum
discovered the existence of irrational numbers. Particularly, he
had shown that square root of 2, which is the length of the
diagonal of a square with a unit side, is irrational. For his sin,
legend has it, he was thrown overboard during a sea voyage. The
poem plays with the imaginary possibility that his murder occurred
before he breached the Pythagorean code of secrecy and made his
discovery public; while the collage represents, as well as
extends, visually the poem’s content and imagery. Both poem and
collage incorporate the decimal expansion of square root of 2, and
other of its mathematical properties, in their structure. See the
link under the image for more information.