I recently wanted to use the title of the famous short story "Everything that Rises must Converge" in a poem of mine. However, the mathematician in me insisted on changing it to "Everything that Rises, if the rise is bounded, must Converge".
Are there other literary quotations that are false mathematically, and how can they be changed to make them true?
Note: Attempts to use "To be or not to be" will be dealt with most severely.
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A great example of this:
"Sir, in your otherwise beautiful poem (The Vision of Sin) there is a verse which reads 'Every moment dies a man, every moment one is born.' Obviously this cannot be true and I suggest that in the next edition you have it read 'Every moment dies a man, every moment one-and-one-sixteenth is born.' Even this value is slightly in error but should be sufficiently accurate for the purposes of poetry."
- Charles Babbage, in a letter to Lord Tennyson
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This one is rather famous:
1 Kings 7:23
Then he made the sea of cast metal. It was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference.
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As I noted some years ago, an example is the claim by Thomas Carlyle (1795$-$1881, in Sartor Resartus (c.1833)) that "It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe." In fact, this echo of John Donne's "if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less" [Meditation XVII, 1624] is not a fact of mathematics but an error in physics according to Newton's Laws (1687): the recoil must exactly cancel out the pebble as the "centre of gravity of the universe" continues on its unalterable course.
[Later] Proposed correction: "It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand moves the centre of gravity of the Earth."
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Would you count sayings as literary? If so, what about
Some would argue this was proven wrong in a way by Sputnik (or take any modern GEO satellite). A strict reading of your question would dismiss this as a physical constraint, not a false statement in a mathematical sense).
And then, the exponential function (among many others) may disagree.
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"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied; "and then the different branches of Arithmetic--Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.
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Perhaps my favorite is the example of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a trilogy of five books.
"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts." - Francis Bacon
This would be a very poor website were that to be true.
"There's no limit to how complicated things can get on account of one thing leading to another." - E. B. White
Okay maybe that one is correct.
Hosea 1:10
Both the children of Israel and the sand of the sea are, of course, finite sets. As a fine grain of sand has a mass of approximately $3.5 \times 10^{-10}$ kg according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28mass%29 , it only takes about 2.5 kg of sand grains to outnumber all the people currently alive on Earth. Even for coarse sand, a truckload should suffice.