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 fourth poem-collage pair on which Sarah Glaz and Mark Sanders
collaborated. The piece is part of their larger joint poem-collage
project involving the ancient history of mathematics.
Euclid (323–285 BCE) lived in Alexandria, a Greek city situated in
Egypt at the mouth of the Nile. He founded a school of mathematics
at Alexandria’s famous center of learning, the Museum. Very little
is known about his life beyond the monumental achievement of
writing “The Elements,” a book that had profound impact on Western
thought, and set the foundation for mathematical standards of
reasoning for all times. The poem was inspired by the magnitude of
Euclid’s impact on future mathematics; while the collage
represents and extends visually the poem’s content. The collage’s
centerpiece is a map of Alexandria cut into the outline of the
diagram used by Euclid to prove Pythagoras Theorem. See the link
under the image for more information.