By day, Laurie Kirby is a professor of mathematics at Baruch College in New York City. By night, though, thanks to some mysterious detour on the royal road to geometry, he performs his poetry and music under the nom de perf of T. G. Vanini. But the arts of Euclid and the arts of Yeats are all of a piece to Kirby, who says he's been feeling "more and more" the unity between his disciplines.

    "I've never been satisfied with rational explanations of the connection between math and poetry," says the violinist, whose band, the Princes of Serendip -- featur[es] Don Yacullo on keyboard and Julie Parisi on frame drum and ethereal vocals . . . The work he's doing now, he adds, is "not an explanation, but maybe an embodiment" of that connection.