The Making of A Mystic Dream of 4

Abstract

A Mystic Dream of 4 is the title of my verse biography of the 19th century Irish mathematician, William Rowan Hamilton. This paper presents the thinking behind the making of the book, illustrated by a brief selection of the sonnets therein, hopefully finding some resonance with the themes of the Bridges Conference. William Rowan Hamilton (1805-65) is Ireland’s most celebrated mathematician; indeed, he is arguably the greatest mathematician of his time; in evidence of that, when the National Academy of Sciences elected its first foreign members in 1864, Hamilton’s name was top of the list! He had made significant contributions in a number of areas, many of which bore greater fruit in the following century (for example, ask any physical sciences graduate about the ‘H’ in the Schrödinger wave equation!). Equally significant, at least for our purposes here, he was also a poet! In this paper, I will discuss the making of a book: A title like A Mystic Dream of 4 [5] might suggest elements of spirituality, Freudian psychology and number theory; while all of these are present to some degree, it is in fact a verse-biography, as the subtitle reveals: A sonnet sequence based on the life of William Rowan Hamilton. But the first word of the title of this paper, ‘Making’, is no mere description of the business at hand, ‘to make’ deriving from ancient Greek as poiesis, the root of the word poetry. In the tradition of ‘bad poets borrow, good poets steal’, A Mystic Dream of 4 is lifted from one of Hamilton’s own poems, called The Tetractys [2]: