Many people think of the arts, such as writing and painting, and the sciences, which include mathematics and physics, as completely removed from each other. People who have these skills are termed “left brained” or “right brained,” with no inbetweens, no quintessential “Renaissance man” category.

Katherine Coles wants to change that.

Coles, who is the poet laureate of Utah and a creative writing professor at the University of Utah, is the founder of the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature.

“It was kind of my brainchild, just something that I wanted to do,” she said.

The theme of this year’s symposium is “Mathematics, Language and Imaginations.” It is a three-day event that includes three keynote speakers.

“There is always a poet or novelist, a scientist – this year it’s the mathematician Barry Mazur – and some other appropriate person that arises out of the topic,” Coles said. “The third person is the wild card, who sort of brings it all together.”

The speakers are Alice Fulton, a poet and professor of English at Cornell University; Mazur, an MIT and Princeton graduate and author of the 2003 book “Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen)”; and award-winning contemporary classical composer Fred Lerdahl – the “wild card.”

It can be difficult to see what these people might have in common, let alone what they can contribute to one another’s work. The answer to this is found in the theme.

“Math is a language,” said Fred Adler, the symposium’s co-director. “All of our thinking is done in some language or other, whether that’s math, the ordinary language of English or music.”

The official Web site of the event, www.scienceandliterature.org, concurs with Adler’s statement, putting it in more poetic terms: “Words. Images. Notes … numbers and equations. All of these are forms of language, vehicles for human thinking, expression and communication; all of them take on the shapes of our minds and shape our minds in turn.”

Still, the question remains, Why bring all of these people together for a single conference? Adler gave an example of how the conference can make people see a side of life they’ve never experienced before.

“It can get people who don’t do math to appreciate what mathematicians do through a more familiar angle – poetry,” Adler said. “Math is very much an art form.”

By comparing these separate topics to each other, the symposium helps individuals understand and learn about new things.

The purpose of this, Coles said, is to get people back to embracing all kinds of different topics, to have a well-rounded education.

“The divisions between (the disciplines), like they are today, are not natural ones,” Coles said. “It’s really only in the last century that we’ve seen the kind of specialization we have now. The experts in different fields should be talking to each other all the time.”

She referenced the aforementioned Renaissance period as an example of what a good education should consist of.

“In those days, an educated person was educated in a number of different areas,” she said. “The bodies of knowledge have gotten to be so vast that it’s really impossible to understand physics, writing, painting fully, which I think is really unfortunate. I think it can close down creativity rather than opening it up.”

In the past, the symposium has been a success, with tickets selling out quickly.

“People are curious. They want to get a sense of what’s going on,” Adler said. “At this event, people who are specialists talk to you as an equal. I remain convinced that people want to learn – that’s why I’m a professor. I think that people appreciate seeing an actual person there.”

Coles added, “I think that people are hungry for these conversations. It can be very mind-expanding.”

Coles said many undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Utah volunteer their time to help with the organization of the symposium, and though she and Adler do not actively recruit from other campuses, anyone who would like to volunteer would be welcome.

The symposium will be from Nov. 5-7 at the University of Utah. Those interested can register by visiting the Web site, and tickets are free of charge.

– kuniko.poole@aggiemail.usu.edu