Helen of Troy, and the birth of Fuzzy Logic

TL;DR

This paper explores the poetic origins of fuzzy logic, tracing its conceptual roots to ancient Greek tragedy and modern poetry, highlighting the interplay between poetic expression and mathematical logic development.

Contribution

It presents a novel perspective on fuzzy logic's foundations by linking it to poetic and philosophical questions from classical and modern poetry.

Findings

Fuzzy logic has conceptual roots in ancient Greek tragedy and poetry.

Poetry and mathematical logic have historically influenced each other.

The article illustrates this connection through analysis of two poems.

Abstract

The poem Helen of the Nobel laureate George Seferis was inspired by the anti war play Helen of Euripides. In his poem, Seferis empathizes with the hero of the tragedy, Teucer, who opposed the involvement of The Gods in the lives of the humans, posing unanswered and contradictory questions. With the verse What is god; What is not a god; what is there in between them, the ancient poet Euripides sets foundations to the kind of logic that one can consider as a predecessor of Fuzzy Logic. It is worth noting that when Seferis received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1963, he stated: Right now I feel I am a contradiction myself, a sentence charged with the new language of mathematical logic of the 20th century. Interplaying with the famous words of Karl Weierstrass It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician in this article we discuss, through two poems, of how poetry and mathematical logic might have influenced each other.