The Generosity of Numbers: Why I love and hate math

When I was a kid, I loved words--give me metaphors and similes, give me alliteration, give me the "snap, crackle, pop" of onomatopoeia! Math was...well, not the same. Once I got into Algebra and all the surprises that followed it (Algebra II, Trig/Analyt), I could no longer count on my magnificent brain to figure out the answer with any degree of reliable accuracy.  Sometimes the right answer felt like winning the lottery--and by that I mean, rare and random and disconnected to any pattern I could figure out.


I appreciated the beauty of math, how it had hidden rules and patterns and how it solved so many of the world's problems..."If a train leaves Chicago at 12:45 and another train leaves South Bend at 2:17, and then if there's a cow on the tracks..." I did not understand math, totally, but I respected it. I stared wide-eyed at it, like a Neanderthal's first encounter with fire. It gave off lovely sparks, but had a heat and power that I knew were beyond my grasp. Math was to be approached with caution once we had variables and equations and parabolas and hyperbolas. Math was to be approached with something akin to awe, barefoot and kneeling before a burning bush full of mystery and beauty and sometimes, as my GPA swiftly showed me, full of pain.

I love this poem by Mary Cornish about the generosity of numbers. I dedicate it to my favorite high school teacher, who taught, of all things, mathematics. John B. Walters, III, this one is for you.

Numbers
by Mary Cornish

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.

There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.