Is It True That Heinrich Von Kleist was a lousy mathematician? If Paul de Man were right, the answer to this question would be: Yes, he was.

In his influential essay “Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist” de Man writes:

The footnote to this passage is even more explicitly critical: “Kleist’s mathematical references are not always correct and he makes mistakes unworthy of a gymnasium student.” On the positive side, I should note that de Man deserves credit for at least raising the question of mathematics in Kleist’s text “Über das Marionettentheater,” a topic that many other authors simply choose to ignore. But instead of trying to answer the question by studying either the sources to which Kleist refers repeatedly or the history of mathematics from a modern point of view, de Man opts for a cheap solution. What he says about Kleist’s mathematics only serves him as a springboard for the literary scholar’s favorite leap from axioms and precise definitions to the tricks of free association. The tool that does the trick in this case, as in many others, is an etymology that, without being incorrect, is nonetheless “somewhat dubious.” It is true that the two components of the neologism “logarithm” can mean “word” and “number.” But there is no doubt that John Napier, who coined the term in first half of the seventeenth century, understood the word λόγος according to the definition that had been current since the Middle Ages, namely in the sense of “ratio.” Thus Kleist is perfectly right and a better mathematician than de Man when he writes about the puppeteer: