Log24

“Words that tear and strange rhymes”

"In his youth, Paul Simon thought of himself as a poet . . . .

And surprisingly often he describes problems with the process:

And the song I was writing is left undone
I don’t know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can’t believe
With words that tear and strange rhymes

For me, things were somewhat similar. Like many people, I wrote poetry in my youth. Julian Jaynes says something like 'Poems are rafts grasped at by men drowning in inadequate minds', but I think I knew from early on that one of the main reasons was to practise my writing, so that when I had something to say I could say it clearly. When Bob Dylan renounced the over-elaborate imagery of Blonde on Blonde  for the clean simplicity of John Wesley Harding, I took that as a role model.

Could Simon’s experience happen in mathematics? It is possible to imagine that an important mathematical truth is expressed in 'words that tear and strange rhymes'. More worryingly, an argument written in the most elegant style could be wrong, and we may be less likely to see the mistake because the writing is so good."