Flower Arrangement

I kept smiling throughout this story, which weaves in mathematics without really speaking about it overtly, and at the same time, capturing sardonic commentary about treatment of women in a male-centric world. So Mrs Warner - Sally Jo Warner - who is not really very good at making flower arrangements, takes it upon herself one day to make a great “Arrangement” on behalf of her Ladies Club so that it can win a prize at the “Federated Gardens Show”. Usually, it is Mrs. Barbara who is the resident expert making award-winning flower-settings and Sally is determined to put on a good show.

She wants to select a good baseline, a backbone for the arrangement. She considers a “Hogarth Curve”, an S-shaped look to flowers which appear pleasant but wishes something more exotic. And her thought goes:

“But the Hogarth Curve isn’t the only line in the world. Lines reminded me of math, and math reminded me of that Mathematics for Morons book Ronald brought home in one of his numerous un successful attempts to improve my thinking ability. There was something in that book wanted to remember. Some really interesting line. I grabbed the book and started down the index. B. Was sure it began with a B. No. Moebius Strip. That was it”

In the end, she does make the flower arrangement but it does not look quite like a Mobius strip, till her six-year old genius son, Tommy, creates “the roundest balloon ever” and sticks it between the arrangement. After that, the flower arrangement takes on a funny look, as if it is leaking in another dimension. The balloon is coated on the inside with a magnetic paint, a concoction made by Tommy himself. This paint somehow ends up creating a fifth force, turning the entire flower arrangement into a trans-dimensional object. And after that… well, the story goes through some funny moments, the balloon is burst and appears turned inside out without having suffered a break (implying a flip through a higher dimension). Scientists try to understand the phenomenon as it dissipates and Tommy turns his attention to “making the squarest thing in the whole world”… I could not but wonder if the author was making a reference to the Kaluza-Klein model in which a higher-dimensional version of General Relativity spits out Maxwell’s Equations, which, of course, govern the behavior of magnets…

The story has many subtle references to women being put down in ordinary course of life. At one point, as she is making the Mobius arrangement, Jo asks herself: “Why is my subconscious like a Moebius Strip? The best answer I could come up with was that it’s because it has a half twist in it.”

A very humorously written story.

A further note: The referenced “Hogarth Curve”, also known as “The Line of Beauty”, describes an S-shaped, serpentine line. It appeared in the theory of aesthetics put forth by an English artist, William Hogarth, in his book, “The Analysis of Beauty”, in 1753. One imagines the mathematical sign for integration as a Hogarth Curve…