X Takes Y for Z: Mathematics, Literature & Play
Time and place:
12:30 PM on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008; NAC 4113
Description:
Speaker: Philip Ording (Medgar Evers College, CUNY)
In 1960 the chemical engineer and mathematician François Le Lionnais (1901-1984) and the author Raymond Queneau (1903- 1976) founded a collaborative group to explore the potential of mathematical structures for generating and understanding literary texts. The group, based in France, came to be known as OuLiPo, which is short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature).
Queneau, an amateur mathematician himself, wrote what is considered the first Oulipian text, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), 1961. It consists of ten sonnets, fourteen verses each, composed in such a way that the reader may choose to replace each verse as she wishes by another chosen from any of the other nine corresponding to it. This talk will present the combinatorics at work in a variety of OuLiPo writing strategies or constraints as they call them. In addition, we will consider the potential in these playful writing strategies for generating and understanding mathematics itself.
Philip Ording is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. His research interests are in geometric topology and mathematics in the arts.
