James Joseph Sylvester: Mathematitian and "poet".
There is a rather interesting transcribed speech here which discusses the poetical efforts of J. J. Sylvester, who was the first Jew to hold a professorship at Oxford. In particular, as mentioned by Bell, he wrote a poem called, "To a missing member of a family of terms in an algebraical formula" which starts as such:Lone and discarded one! divorced by fate, From thy wished-for fellows--whither art flown? Where lingerest thou in thy bereaved estate, Like some lost star or buried meteor stone?So yeah, his math was better than his poetry.

What I'm Reading: Men of Mathematics
Men of Mathematics by Eric Temple Bell is a collection of personal and professional biographies of thirty great mathematicians. The first three are from ancient Greece: Zeno, Eudoxus, and Archimedes. The others are from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, from Descartes to Cantor.It was written in 1937, which shows. Not just when the author refers to Bertrand Russell in the present tense, but also, for example, when he mentions in the introduction that certain "writers and artists (some from Hollywood)" have been interested in "how many of the great mathematicians have been perverts." ("None.")The great thing about this book is the richness of detai