The Avrin Proposition

The Avrin Proposition
Please familiarize yourself with the similar triangles poems to help with the following.

The physicist William Avrin has restructured the similar triangles poem to form a new proposition to ponder. He uses a edited example of the similar triangles poem titled “The Lottery” that was posted Friday March 9, 2007 (below)



From the poem above to the examples below.

Here we have the "The Avrin Proposition" shown in the simile version



Here we have the "The Avrin Proposition" shown in the metaphor version



The idea of us solving the question, whether the statements equal 1 or any number for that matter, would require some rigorous control of the contexts in question and furthermore, they (the contexts) would need to be limited greatly to have any meaningful value. I personally am not that interested in finding the perfect number that is entirely too scientific for me. However, I wish to say that I believe mathematical poetry is more about the ‘aesthetic feeling’ of the mathematical relationships within the equation as opposed to the quest to solve it for hard numbers. However there is a very interesting twist to this idea of number in mathematical poetry.

Here in the Avrin proposition we are bouncing our understanding of the words and our feeling of the relationships against the resulting number and thus forming a comparison for metaphoric conflation. In another words the source domain of the metaphor is the statements “playing the lottery” divided by “ogling pornography” as well the statements “financial fantasy” divided by “sexual fantasy” and our target domain is the number “1”. Here we have a very good example of an aesthetic feeling involved in metaphor that conflates from number and words.

Thank you Bill Avrin for pointing this out!

Similar Triangles Poems

Similar Triangles Poems / Proportional Poems

I would like to map out the structure and show examples of what I call "Similar Triangles Poems"or "Proportional Poems". Let me use the example of Similar Triangles to help visualize the proportional relationship in this mathematical structure.

Let us first look at two similar triangles with sides labeled ‘a’ ‘b’ ‘c’ and the second with sides labeled ‘d’ ‘e’ and ‘f’ Notice the laws of geometry state that a/b is equal to d/e as shown below. I am going to call this latter equation "The Similar Triangles Relationship".

Also let us note that we can solve for any or all of the variables. This will give us four synonymous variations of the similar triangles relationship in terms of one variable – examples shown in the next slide:

Now let us look at the logical structure of the following comparison: Apples are to apple butter as peanuts are to peanut butter. Furthermore, let us also look at how we can map the latter statement into the similar triangles relationship.
The following slide shows us a good example of how metaphor can be applied to the relationship of similar triangles.

Now let us substitute the terms of our logical comparison into the all of the similar variations to create four similar triangles poems.

We now have four poems that are logically equivalent but syntactically different. Each poem says the same thing only with a different flavor much like playing a piece of music in four different keys.

The pedagogical example above uses rather mundane subject matter. To see more poetic examples, please click on the lablel for "Similar Triangles Poems" (below)

From Ethnic To Creedal

This poem is in the form of a similar triangles poem.

Extremism

Here is a similar triangle poem concerned with extremism.

The Lotto

Here is a similar triangle poem concerned with playing the lottery.