Oulipo: Applying Mathematical Constraints to Literature and the Arts in a Mathematics for the Liberal Arts Classroom

Abstract

Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle, or Workshop on potential literature), an over 50-year old movement that began in France, seeks to apply mathematical constraints to literature and the arts. In this article, I will give a brief survey of this movement and how I have built a learning module based on it for my mathematics for the liberal arts course. I will provide descriptions of student-created, mathematically constrained poetry, music compositions, and videos. These projects allow my students to apply mathematics (for example, modular arithmetic, combinatorics, and graph theory) to their interests in literature and the arts.

Keywords:

• Oulipo
• mathematics for liberal arts

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank Patrick Bahls, who inspired me to use Oulipo in my MLA classroom.

Notes

¹ An English translation of the poem, in itself quite a feat of creativity, can be found in [10]. An online, interactive version of the poem in French, English, and Swedish can be found at http://x42.com/active/queneau.html.

² Remarkably, Gilbert Adair’s translation of the novel into English, A void, also leaves out the letter “e.” Christian Bok’s 2001 novel, Eunoia, is an example of a univocalic lipogram: each chapter uses only one vowel. Mark Dunn’s 2001 novel, Ella minnow pea, gets progressively more restrictive: it tells a tale of a fictional island off the coast of South Carolina that begins to outlaw letters one by one [3, 4].

³ For more on the history of the Knight’s Tour problem and orthogonal Latin squares, see [11].

⁴ This module lasts about 5 weeks including a week of presentations.

⁵ Because the students perform a lot of background work during the proposal process, they are able to make good use of the 2-week creation period. I do not feel they are rushed during this phase of the module.

⁶ The criteria “Presenter as a good audience member” and “In-class presentation delivery” counts for one-third of the project grade; the remaining criteria count for two-thirds of the project grade. This project counts for 10% of the students’ final grades. Although I did not explicitly include the mathematical depth in the rubric, this category can be easily added.

⁷ A full description of the constraint can be found in [7, pp. 202–203]. An online n + 7 “Machine” can be found at http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sloan Evans Despeaux

Sloan Evans Despeaux is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. She has been teaching MLA courses (and loving it) since 2002 and has benefitted greatly in that endeavor from her fellowship in Project NExT. Her research interests include the history of mathematics (specifically the mathematics, mathematicians, and scientific journals in 19th-century Britain). She organizes the biennial conference, SMURCHOM (Smoky Mountain Undergraduate Research Conference on the History of Mathematics), and she has recently published papers in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London and Annals of Science.