The Toolbox

Mathematical Modeling

The Taj Mahal is a work of art and a work of mathematics.

Photo by Arpit Jawa

Counting what counts

For our chapter on mathematics, let’s begin with a poem.

Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink on ordinary paper; they weren’t given food, they all died of hunger. All. How many?

It’s a large meadow. How much grass per head? Write down: I don’t know.

History rounds off skeletons to zero.

A thousand and one is still only a thousand.

That one seems never to have existed

Wisława Szymborska

For years this poem has echoed in my soul. History rounds off skeletons to zero. Tens of thousands of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Roma, and Russians died at the Szebnie camp east of Jasło, Poland between 1941 and 1944. Szymborska’s poem is a call for dignity for those lives amidst the unimaginable. When we ask historians, “How many people died in Nazi death camps?” the answer rounds off skeletons to six zeros: 11,000,000. We can see the shape of the horror that happened, but the vastness of the tragedy blurs the details of the truth. Human stories can get lost in zeroes.

Does that mean we give up on numbers? No. This poem reminds us why: there is a profound difference between “a thousand and one” and “a thousand.” That difference: “one.” What was their name, that ...