           by Robin Chapman and Julien Clinton Sprott               !!""     The goal of both mathematician and poet is to seek clarity and beauty of expression about the world around us through elegant use of their respective languages. While nature is a common source of inspiration for both mathematician and poet, the poet examines the human response to nature while the mathematician explores the logical order of nature. Despite these similarities, creative use of both mathematics and poetry together are uncommon. Several mathematicians have written poetry – J. J. Sylvester and James Clerk Maxwell sometimes incorporated poems into their papers, although these are now forgotten (perhaps with good reason) while their mathematics continues to inform new research. Many of us have enjoyed the light verse of Ralph Boas, Jr. [1] and poetry has often graced the pages of The Mathematical Intelligencer. But few poets have dared to incorporate mathematical themes in their exploration of the human condition, although Anne Michaels has captured Kepler’s life and thought superbly in her long first-person poem, A Lesson from the Earth [2], which begins “I begged scraps from the Rudolphine Table – the rinds of orbits, stars scattering like pips spat from Tycho’s chewing mouth…” and continues with “…We must learn this lesson from the earth, that the greater must make room for the small, just as the earth attracts the smallest stone…” and “…I used to think that we escape time by disappearing into beauty. Now I see the opposite. Beauty reveals time.” In Images of a Complex World, a poet and research psychologist (Chapman) and a physicist and dynamicist (Sprott), both at the University of Wisconsin, collaborate on exploring the beautiful world of dynamical systems and nature through poems, illustrations, and thumbnail essays. Although billed as an addition to your coffee table, this book really belongs in your classroom instead. By adding depth and dimension to many dynamical ideas and concepts, Chapman’s poems enrich our and our students’ understanding of them. Here is her poem, Fixed Point, from a set of poems entitled Stillness: The Fixed Point The dot: how it stops everything. Finishes the thought. Ends the sentence. Where everything vanishes in the end. Period. But it is not the all of it, though all come to it.