Dev.SN

The Poetry of Code and the Code of Poetry

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:30AM   
from the H1-Beauty-of-Existance dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"New Scientist reviews Vikram Chandra's 'In Geek Sublime.'

From the article:

In 1975, Austrian-born physicist Fritjof Capra published an unlikely bestseller that explored the parallels between ideas in particle physics and Eastern mysticism. The Tao of Physics became a cult classic, selling over a million copies globally. Despite positive reviews, the book left many readers ultimately unsatisfied and unconvinced. In Geek Sublime, Vikram Chandra draws similar parallels between the process of writing computer code and some of the Indian philosophical systems that have profoundly influenced art, literature and poetry in the subcontinent, but which remain largely unknown in the West."

• Obligatory Cyberiad (Score: 1) by qwerty on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:02PM

  by qwerty (861) on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:02PM (#6840) Homepage

  From Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad":

  Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:

  "Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."

  "Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

  Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
    Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
    Their indices bedecked from one to n,
    Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

  Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
    And every vector dreams of matrices.
    Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
    It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

  In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
    Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
    Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
    We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

  I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
    Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
    And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
    And in our bound partition never part.

  For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
    Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
    Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
    Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

  Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
    Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
    A root or two, a torus and a node:
    The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

  Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
    The product of our scalars is defined!
    Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
    Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

  I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
    I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
    Bernoulli would have been content to die,
    Had he but known such a2 cos 2 phi