Hyperdimensional Poetry

My attribution to the Library of Ialexandria for providing the links to the site.

James Clerk Maxwell, in honor of another great mathematician of his time, wrote, in a poem loaded with references to Hyperdimensional Physics and beyond:

“Oh WRETCHED race of men, to space confined!
What honour can ye pay to him, whose mind
To that which lies beyond hath penetrated?
The symbols he hath formed shall sound his praise,
And lead him on through unimagined ways
To conquests new, in worlds not yet created.


First, ye Determinants! In ordered row
And massive column ranged, before him go,
To form a phalanx for his safe protection.
Ye powers of the nth roots of - 1!
Around his head in ceaseless cycles run,
As unembodied spirits of direction.


And you, ye undevelopable scrolls!
Above the host wave your emblazoned rolls,
Ruled for the record of his bright inventions.
Ye cubic surfaces! By threes and nines
Draw round his camp your seven-and-twenty lines-
The seal of Solomon in three dimensions.


March on, symbolic host! With step sublime,
Up to the flaming bounds of Space and Time!
There pause, until by Dickenson depicted,
In two dimensions, we the form may trace
Of him whose soul, too large for vulgar space,
In n dimensions flourished unrestricted.”

-- James Clerk Maxwell To the Committee of the Cayley Portrait Fund -- 1887

Note that the “seven-and-twenty lines”, is a reference to one of his scientific mentors, Arthur Cayley’s hyperdimensional geometry (the “27 lines on the general cubic surface” problem). This is nothing less than the geometrical and mathematical underpinnings of the infamous “circumscribed tetrahedral latitude” of 19.5 degrees, the hyperdimensional quaternion geometry whose physical effects have been rediscovered all across the solar system and beyond!

The 27 shows up in my poetry quite often. See for yourself at the home of the Brigid Muse.