Let None But Geometers Enter Here

—On the entrance to Plato’s academy in Athens


When not in the midst of discovering anything,

this mathematician may humble himself

of a compass not pertinent to society.

And when he does have a cogency to a result discovered,

he may find himself, indeed,

important to society

for his own relation to mathematics,

and it seems he could make himself, by this rank,

relevant to the world.


Mathematicians are not,

generally,

people’s people.

Similarly, poets

are not, usually,

mathematicians’ mathematicians.