A Poem-Collage Project
Poem by Sarah Glaz  with Collage by Mark Sanders

The poem-collage pair appears in the JMM 2024 online art gallery: https://gallery.bridgesmathart.org/exhibitions/2024-joint-mathematics-meetings/sarah-glaz-mark-sanders
 

Sarah Glaz  University of Connecticut, Storrs,  Connecticut, USA    Website

Mark Sanders  Rushden, Northamptonshire,    UK  Website

History, Mathematics, Poem, Collage  
   

Thales (ca. 622 - 547 BCE) lived in the city of Miletus, a flourishing Greek colony in the province of Ionia (now Anatolia, Turkey). He is considered one of the "Seven Sages" of Greek antiquity, and the father of demonstrative mathematics.

 

Thales left no written works behind him.  Revered by his contemporaries and intellectual descendants, his life and work became the subject of numerous accounts, some of which contradict each other, and none of which is reliable with absolute certainty by contemporary standards. Nevertheless, they all credit Thales with being the first Greek philosopher to put science on a logical basis. This includes introducing deductive reasoning as an approach to mathematics: the why of a mathematical truth becoming as important as the how, which is the cornerstone of the discipline to these days. With this, Thales opened the door to inquiries into abstract mathematical ideas for their own sake, rather than only for practical purposes or religious practices as it had been the custom in other cultures before his times. 

 

Thales was born to a distinguished family in Miletus. In his youth, he was a successful merchant, traveling widely throughout the Mediterranean region and bringing home with him both goods and scientific knowledge. Stories about his merchant days show him as a shrewd businessman, but not a particularly kind person. The story recounted in the poem, is a fable written by Aesop (ca. 620 - 564 BCE) about one of Thales' mules. The mule, loaded with salt for trade, stumbled into a stream and discovered that rolling in water dissolved some of the salt lightening its burden. The mule repeated the trick on subsequent trips. To discourage this habit, Thales filled the mule's saddlebags with sponges instead of salt. The sad mule looks at us from the bottom right corner of the collage.

 

Historical sources describe Thales' mathematical accomplishments in the areas of geometry and astronomy, claiming that he brought home geometry from Egypt, and astronomy from Babylon. In the process, he discovered new propositions and supplemented existing knowledge with deeper understanding of underlying principles. He is credited with five propositions in geometry, most of which involve triangles. Stories abound about his use of these propositions to impress kings and kin alike with calculations of the height of pyramids and the distance of ships to shore.

 

One of Thales' accomplishments in astronomy is said to be the prediction of the solar eclipse of 585 BCE. This fact is reflected in the collage by the golden arc emerging from behind the Greek-motif bowl, top left. He is also said to have discovered the usefulness of the Ursa Minor constellation to sea navigation. The Little Bear is included in the top left corner of the collage. Among his other contributions, Thales is said to have observed and calculated the position of the Pleiades star cluster. The Pleiades, also known as The Seven Sisters, are shown in the center of the collage in their nymph form (a detail from the 1885 paining by the American symbolist painter, Elihu Vedder). 

 

Thales believed that water constitutes the principle of all things, and that the Earth was a flat disk which floated on an infinite sea. The image of the Earth's disk floating on the sea, appearing in the third stanza of the poem, is reflected in the collage by the waterlily pads on top of which The Seven Sisters gracefully dance. For more details see Mark's Dissecting Thales.

 

Not far from the coast of Miletus, lies the Greek island of Samos, where Pythagoras was born and spent his early years. Some sources claim that Thales was Pythagoras' teacher, recognizing the talents of his pupil and passing along his knowledge and approach to mathematics. 

Many thanks to Claudine Burns Smith  and to Robert Fathauer for help with formatting the poem-collage pair to the Joint Mathematical Meetings 2024 Art Exhibit specifications.