Westminster and its Abbey

The City of Westminster contains within it many of the sights which draw millions of visitors each year to London. Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, the West End, Covent Garden, Piccadilly, Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey all lie within the bounds of Westminster. It is the cultural and entertainment centre of London.

Just to the west of the Houses of Parliament (and its famous clock tower) lies the ‘foremost national shrine’ of Great Britain, namely, the Collegiate Church of St Peter, better known as Westminster Abbey. Dating from the 10th century, the Abbey was largely built in the 13th century in the Gothic style. While the exterior is relatively undecorated, the interior is magnificent, particularly the Henry VII Chapel, which is a stunning example of the Late Perpendicular or Tudor style of church architecture.  

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Poets’ corner

The Abbey is famous as the site of the coronation of almost every English monarch since William the Conqueror. It houses tombs and monuments to many of England’s early rulers and many of Britain’s greatest people, including Sir Isaac Newton, England’s greatest mathematical and scientific genius.

In particular, within the South Transept, in what is known as Poet’s Corner, are gathered together the bodies or memorials of Britain’s greatest poets. Beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer in 1400, poets whose tributes were erected here include Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, Burns, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Eliot, Thomas and Auden.

Poets to be sure, but there is also a mathematical connection.  

   































Chaucer and the astrolabe (I)

Geoffrey Chaucer (c1340 – 1400) was England’s major medieval poet and, as one of the most illustrious figures in English literature, well deserves his prior place in Poet’s Corner. Best known for his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer also wrote the scientific text Treatise on the Astrolabe, and (possibly) a book of astronomical tables, Equatorie of the Planetis. The Treatise, though partly translated from an earlier Latin version of an Arabic text, is a model of clarity. It is easily understood even today, despite a few factual errors of detail.

The astrolabe was the most important scientific instrument for astronomers, astrologers and surveyors until the late 17th century. It was probably developed in ancient Alexandria by the astronomer Hipparchus around 150 B.C., and is a very versatile device. It can be used to find stellar and solar time, times of sunrise and sunset, the positions of the sun, moon, stars and planets, and the heights of objects. Chaucer’s Treatise on the astrolabe became a standard source for astronomers and surveyors in the English speaking world. Thus Chaucer made a small but significant contribution to the world of mathematics.

Project  Find out how to construct and use an astrolabe. See, e.g., ‘The Astrolabe’, by J.D. North in Scientific American, Jan. 1974, 96 – 106.





















Chaucer and mathematics

Chaucer refers to mathematics in his poetry. In the Franklin’s Tale (one of the Canterbury Tales), he tells of a master of the astrolabe who




‘ ... knew the moon in all her operations
And all the relevant arithmetic
For his illusion, for the wretched trick
He meant to play, as in those heathen days
People would do.’

If you read the Franklin’s Tale, you might be able to find out what the ‘trick’ was, and how the astrolabe figured in it.

 The Summoner’s Tale describes a mathematician ‘as wise as Euclid or as Ptolemy’, who solved a difficult problem:

‘In all arithmetic you couldn’t find
Until today so tricky an equation.’
Investigate  Who were Ptolemy and Euclid?  What were their contributions to mathematics?  Why would Chaucer have been so familiar with them?   






















The Poets’ salute to Newton and other mathematicians

One of Chaucer’s near neighbours in Westminster Abbey, Sir Isaac Newton, was celebrated by poets as much as by his fellow scientists and mathematicians. His epitaph, by Alexander Pope, reads

‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said: “Let Newton be” and all was light’.

Robert Southey described him in the following terms:

‘There Priest of Nature! dost thou shine,
Newton! A King among the Kings Divine,’
Newton

while William Wordsworth referred to

‘Where the statue stood
Of Newton, with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind forever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.’

Other mathematicians are also featured in the works of various poets.   



























Wordsworth and the world of geometry (I)

The great Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850), is honoured in Poet’s Corner, although his remains reside in his beloved Lake District. Wordsworth’s classical grammar school education gave him a strong background in mathematics, including the study of Euclid. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that he includes reference to geometrical aspects in his early poetry, though sometimes not very successfully:

‘Not five yards from the mountain path,
This Thorn you on your left espy;
And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond,
Though but of compass small, and bare
To thirsty suns and parching air.
I’ve measured it from side to side;
‘Tis three feet long, and two feet wide . . .’
               The Thorn (original version)

Investigate  Wordsworth was one of many poets who referred to geometrical ideas in their poetry. Others are the ‘metaphysical’ poets Andrew Marvell and John Donne; in particular, Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, Marvell’s Definition of Love and Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-Barrow make creative use of geometrical imagery. Can you find other examples in the world of poetry?   

















Wordsworth and the world of geometry (II)

Wordsworth could and did wax eloquently about geometry, as may be judged from these excerpts from The Prelude, Book 6 :

‘More frequently from the same source [geometric science] I drew
A pleasure quiet and profound, a sense
Of permanent and universal sway,
And paramount belief; there, recognized
A type, for finite natures, of the one
Supreme existence, the surpassing life
Which to the boundaries of space and time,
Of melancholy space and doleful time,
 Superior and incapable of change,
Nor touched by wetterings of passion – is,
And hath the name of God.’

‘Mighty is the charm
Of those abstractions to a mind beset
With images and haunted by himself,
And specially delightful unto me
Was that clear synthesis built up aloft
So gracefully; even then when it appeared
Not more than a mere plaything, or a toy
To sense embodied: not the thing it is
In verity, an independent world,
Created out of pure intelligence.’

Further reading ...

 Buchanan, S. (1962), Poetry and mathematics, Lippincott.
Midonick, H. (1965), The treasury of mathematics, Penguin.   
http://www.westminster-abbey.org/