The so-called divide between art and science really bugs me. Photograph: PA

"There are only two degrees, maths and physics. All the rest is fucking poetry."

This pithy insight came to me from a friend working in a big city bank. It is the obdurate opinion of one of his "quant" colleagues. A quant is a quantitative number-cruncher, someone who does the real business of science/economics, unlike the "quallys" or qualitative workers (the rest of us), who probably spend our days dusting flowers, writing poetry or similar. If you are thinking quant = Gordon Gekko of Wall Street fame, you are way off. Gordon Geeko is more like it. A typical quant holds a first-class maths degree from Oxford and gets into competitive spreadbetting, not to make money but to outwit the Cambridge physicist in the hedge fund team. The number of PhDs in the back rooms of the city would make any ivory tower proud.

Is the quant/qually divide the 21st century manifestation of the Two Cultures controversy? The Two Cultures humdinger kicked off properly in 1959 when scientist-cum-novelist CP Snow fingered literary intellectuals as "luddites", bunkered down in literary tradition, who couldn't tell their second law of thermodynamics from their third law of motion. For Snow, science was the future and literary types had to stop monopolising the moniker "intellectual" and get with the equations. FR Leavis, Cambridge don and literary critic, was having none of it. So vitriolic was his counter-attack on Snow that in a Time report he's called "the Himmler of Literature". Crikey! Could I look forward to the quants and quallys slugging it out in similar fashion at the Poet-in-the-City event on poetry and science at the Wellcome Trust's new galleries last week?

I can report that there was no blood on the carpet - partly because there was no diehard quant to rub the panel of poets up the wrong way, but mainly because of something pinpointed by the chair, Helena Kennedy, right at the start. That is, both poetry and science use "language to get to the essence of ideas". And that is what we got. Poetry of scientific precision building arguments that moved us beyond bare scientific facts, as science itself moves from demonstrable fact to argued-out theory.

This was an intellectual endeavour for head and heart. We had Maurice Riordan's On Not Experiencing the Ultraviolet Catastrophe, which turns Planck's constant h into a musing on "I love you - but why don't you love me?" We had Michael Symmons Roberts' homage to To His Mistress Going to Bed by John Donne (the most cited poet of the evening), where in the age of the genome the lover's body "is already mapped". When Symmons Roberts read out a patented gene sequence, the arguments and ideas that had gone before - both poetic and scientific - ensured that we were not reduced to the fact of our DNA.

The wonder of science and poetry is that they break through boundaries, both biological and intellectual. The Two Cultures controversy was not really a showdown between science and poetry: it was an argument about where we go next. CP Snow's real concern was not whether the topic of conversation at the Oxford high table was Thomas Kyd or nuclear fusion. It was about progress in the developing world, which he thought scientists would enable. For his contemporary Jacob Bronowski, however, what "quickened societies" was "the cast of mind which searches, which questions, which dissents... Each society has given it its own form: religious, literary, scientific."

It seems it's not the quant in his counting house nor the poet in his garret that makes or breaks the search for understanding. It is the public intellectual willing to contest and contend without bounds the common ideas that will shape our future.

So come on you quanty boys - I'll show you a sestet, if you show me your quadratics.