A chance encounter

     I invite you to celebrate the coming of the new year 2013 with a poem I like a lot.
     Alberta poet Alice Major produces poems that feel good in the mouth when you read them aloud.   As in "Locate the site," offered below.   From the repeated t's in her title and the c's in her epigraph to her closing lines with "accept / the guidance of whatever calculating god / has taken you in care," I hugely enjoy the vocal experience of reading Major's words; and that pleasure enhances their meaning.  That her terms often are mathy adds still more enjoyment.

Locate the site     by Alice Major

      To find a city, make a chance encounter

The plane sails in above the setter-coloured fields
swathed in concentric lines of harvest,
circle on square.  I find myself returning
to this place that wasn't home.

Explorers

Those who know mathematics but do not immerse in it daily often use its terms in contexts that surprise and delight.  I smiled with appreciation when I found, in Issue 25 (December 2011-2012) of 6x6, "The Life of Explorers" by Fani Papageorgiou ;  Ugly Duckling Presse has given me permission to include parts II, IV, and VI (of eleven parts) here.

from    The Life of Explorers     by Fani Papageorgiou

     II.     On the Method of Trial and Error

If a dog with a long stick in its jaws wants to get through a door,
he will twist and turn his head until he achieves his goal.

Support STREET SENSE

Street Sense is "The DC Metro Area Street Newspaper" and it is available from vendors in the Washington, DC area -- vendors who are struggling not to be homeless, vendors who are earning 50 cents for each $1 copy that they sell, vendors who are writing POETRY.

In the September 26 - October 10, 2012 issue of Street Sense, I found this mathy poem by Street Sense vendor Veda Simpson, "Think You Know Everything?"  Please ENJOY the poem and, if you are able, support this worthy publication.

Think You Know Everything       by Veda Simpson, Street Sense Vendor  

Star, shine bright!

*
on
top
give
light
freely
forever
abundant
brilliant
everywhere

Be our

light!

For more visual poetry of Christmas, enjoy a visit to Bob Grumman's Guest Blog posting for Scientific American.  Thanks, Bob, and Happy Holiday wishes to all.

Skating (with math) on Christmas

     Found at poets.org, a lovely poem of ice skating and mathematics and Christmas by Cynthia Zarin; the title is "Skating in Harlem, Christmas Day."   Perhaps some day I will have completed all the paper work and the waiting required by Knopf and Random House to gain permission to offer herein Zarin's poem (from The Watercourse (2002) ) -- but, for now, please enjoy it by following the link I have given above.

The magic of "i"

 An exciting math event occurred last week -- the opening of MoMath, 

a Manhattan museum that makes math fun.

 

Still thinking about complex and imaginary numbers (see Sue VanHattum's poem in the December 16 posting), I want to offer a couple of stanzas by Paul Hartal -- selected from "Voyage around the Square Root of Minus 1"  -- stanzas that are part of a lengthy consideration of connections between the arts and the sciences.  I do not always agree with Hartal's viewpoints -- but they are interesting to consider.

from  Voyage around the Square Root of Minus One     by Paul Hartal 

. . .  Mathematical equations are embedded
       with mysterious forces
       and their uncanny power transcends
       the cognitive faculties of the human mind.

Imagine new numbers

     As a child I wrote poems but abandoned the craft until many years later when I was a math professor; at that later time some of my poems related to ideas pertinent to my classroom.  For Number Theory classes "A Mathematician's Nightmare" gave a story to the unsolved Collatz conjecture; in Abstract Algebra "My Dance Is Mathematics" gave the mathematical history a human component.  
     My editor-colleague (Strange Attractors), Sarah Glaz, also has used poems for teaching --  for example, "The enigmatic number e."  And Marion Cohen brings many poems of her own and others into her college seminar course, "Truth & Beauty: Mathematics in Literature."  Add a west-coaster to these east-coast poet-teachers -- this time a California-based contributor: teacher, poet, and blogger (Math Mama Writes) Sue VanHattum.  VanHattum (or "Math Mama") is a community college math teacher interested in all levels of math learning.  Some of her own poems and selections from other mathy poets are available at the Wikispace, MathPoetry, that she started and maintains. Here is the poet's recent revision of a poem from that site, a poem about the invention (or discovery?) of imaginary numbers.

Imaginary Numbers Do the Trick      by Sue VanHattum    

The important 1 (multiplicative identity)

On this day 12/12/12, I have heard much media discussion concerning coincidences of number.  My own thoughts continue to examine the multiple meanings of "identity."  Here is a lovely tanka by Izumi Shikibu (b 976?) that focuses on the importance of one:

       This heart,
       longing for you,
       breaks
       to a thousand pieces--
       I wouldn't lose one.

From The Ink Dark Moon:  Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (Vintage Books, 1990), translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani. 

Loss of Identity

     Some of the richness of a poem comes from the multiple meanings available for the poet's words.  We read "line" and think of the geometric straight thing and of the type of work a person does and of a particular list of products and  . . .   .    For mathematicians, a given term may have a precise mathematical specification that trumps all the others.  (See, for example, the discussion of "random" in the 5 December 2012 posting.)
     A math term that especially interests me poetically is "identity."  One has a unique "identity" and experiences "identity theft" or an "identity crisis"  --  each time I hear the word my cross-referencing brain links to the mathematical notion of identity.  In the integers, the element zero, 0, is an identity for addition since 0 added to any integer produces no change.  Likewise, 1 is an identity for multiplication since 1 multiplied by any integer produces no change.

That's so random! (NPR, OEDILF, etc.)

     One of the challenges I face in friendly conversations is not to overreact to a "misuse" of the word random.  When I hear someone use that word to describe events that are peculiar or haphazard my heart-rate rises in protest.  It is as if I am in math class where every term has one, quantifiable definition -- my use of random describes a situation when a variety of things may happen and all of them are equally likely.  Like when a fair coin is tossed, or a die.  Or when a lottery ticket is selected.
     Recently my attitude was aired nationally. Sort of.  On Friday, November 30, NPR's Evening Edition featured a discussion of random.  Written by commentator Neda Ulaby, "That's So Random:  The Evolution of an Odd Word" mentions the 1995 film "Clueless," a comedian (Spencer Thompson), the Hacker's Dictionary  -- and also includes comments from the Oxford English Dictionary's editor, Jesse Sheidlower. I am rethinking my stubborn position.

Rearranging words

After posting, on November 15, three stanzas by Darby Larson -- three of the more than six quadrillion stanzas that result from arrangements (permutations) of eighteen selected words --  I decided to try my own arranging.  Here are two results.

       noise is angry morning                          Arrangement 1
       surely hung suppose beads
       in windy eyes there's your what
       wake-up and the sway    

Bold women count

Last evening at a poetry reading at Kensington Row Bookshop, I read my poem about Sophia Kovalevsky (posted on June 24); hearing it out loud before an attentive audience helped me to sense a couple of edits I need to make.  Conversations after the reading drew my focus once again to bold women.  Mathematics has some of these women --  and wants more.  Here, in a poem with some numbers, Margaret Atwood celebrates a woman who is not only bold but who burns.  Many of Atwood's words apply to difficulties (including being misunderstood by men) faced by women in mathematics  -- women who have "talent / to peddle a thing so nebulous / and without material form." 

     Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing        by Margaret Atwood   

     The world is full of women
     who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
     if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
     Get some self-respect
     and a day job.

Lincoln and Euclid -- common notions

     This afternoon I enjoyed the recently-released film, Lincoln -- appreciating Sally Fields as Mary Todd, Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens and (especially) Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln. An absorbing drama -- inspiring and also informative.  With a slight mention of mathematics:  in a film conversation with two-young telegraph operators, Lincoln reflected on his study of Euclid and shared with the young men the first of Euclid's common notions:

     Things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. 

Women Scientists in America

That

one,

Mary

Gray,  is bold,

mathematical,

and female.  One of the founders

(one-nine-seven-one) of the Association for

Women in Mathematics and an attorney, a leader of our struggle to get

well-meaning men to confront the attitudes they inherited, to change -- so that "think

mathematically" does not mean the same as "think

like a man."  Mathematics has

myriad voices.

Awaken!

Hear all

of
us.                                   a Fibonacci poem by JoAnne Growney      

Thank you, Mary Gray

For today, Thanksgiving, I have wanted to prepare a special poetic tribute and thank-you to mathematician Mary Gray.  I have had yet not found time for complete preparation of that celebration.  But here are the opening words:  THANK YOU -- to a founder of  AWM (Association for Women in Mathematics) and a woman who has done much, much, much to further the opportunities and recognition for women in mathematics --  to Mary Gray.

A permutation puzzle -- the sestina

In a sestina, line-ending words are repeated in six six-line stanzas in a designated permutation of the words; the thirty-nine-line poem ends with a three-line “envoi” that includes all six of the line-ending words.  (After the first, a stanza's end-words take those of the preceding stanza and use them in this order:  the 6th, then the 1st, then the 5th, 2nd, 4th and, finally, the 3rd. In the envoi, two of the six words are used in each line.)  Here is a sestina by Lloyd Schwartz that uses only six words -- but its punctuation and italics cleverly shape variations of meaning. 

Rearranging words . . .

     If we count all possible arrangements of 18 words, the total number of these is 18! (18-factorial) and equal to 6,402,373,705,728,000 -- a collection of word-permutations that would be a burden, rather than a joy, to contemplate.  (This previous posting offers some small lists of permutations for review.)
     Poet Darby Larson boldly experiments in his verse and in a 2009 posting (found months ago at  darbylarson.blogspot.com but no longer there) I found these three stanzas -- three of the more-than-six-quadrillion possible arrangements of a particular list of eighteen words.  

Finding fault with a sphere . . .

     On November 9 I had the pleasure (hosted by Irina Mitrea and Maria Lorenz) of talking ("Thirteen Ways that Math and Poetry Connect") with the Math Club at Temple University and, on November 5, I visited Marion Cohen's "Mathematics in Literature" class at Arcadia University.  THANKS for these good times.

          This
          Fib
          poem
          says THANK-YOU
          to all those students
          from Arcadia and Temple 
          who participated in "math-poetry" with me --
          who held forth with sonnets, pantoums,
          squares, snowballs, and Fibs --
          poetry
          that rests
          on
          math.

      My Temple host, Irina Mitrea, and I share something else besides being women who love mathematics -- the Romanian poet, Nichita Stanescu (1933-83), is a favorite for both of us.  My October 23 posting ("On the Life of Ptolemy") offered one of Sean Cotter's recently published translations of poems by Stanescu and below I include more Stanescu-via-Cotter -- namely, two of the ten sections of "An Argument with Euclid."  These stanzas illustrate Stanescu at his best -- irreverently using mathematical terminology and expressing articulate anger at seen and unseen powers of oppression.

Symmetry in poetry

In Euclidean Geometry, objects retain their size and shape during rigid motions (also called symmetries); one of these is translation -- movement of an object from one place to another along a straight line path.  Here are a few lines by Alberta poet Alice Major that explore the paths of rhyme as a sound moves to and fro within a poem :

     Rhyme's tiles slide
               from line
     to line, a not-so-rigid motion --
     a knitted, shifting symmetry
               that matches 'tree' 

Word Play -- "Of Time and the Line"

Charles Bernstein, poet and teacher,  experiments with poetry  and prefers "opaque" and "impermeable" writing -- to awaken readers "from the hypnosis of absorption."  In the poem below he does, as mathematicians also do, multiplies ideas by playing with them -- here using "line."

     Of Time and the Line     by Charles Bernstein

     George Burns likes to insist that he always
     takes the straight lines; the cigar in his mouth
     is a way of leaving space between the
     lines for a laugh.  He weaves lines together
     by means of a picaresque narrative;

Storm Sandy -- and climate change

     That
     storm
     Sandy
     has caused more
     people to believe
     climate change is real and awful
     than the piles of statistics amassed by scientists --
     bad to worse since 1950  --
     ice caps melting, drought,
     sea levels
     rising.
     Oh,
     My!

This poem of mine, with its syllables counted by successive Fibonacci numbers, is a slight revision of one posted on 31 August 2012.  That earlier posting also links to climate change data and to other  FIBS.

Greatest common factor

Sometimes a mathematical phrase offers a splendid concentration of meaning in an otherwise non-mathematical poem.  This is the case in the poem below by Taylor Mali, teacher and slam poet. 

Undivided Attention     by Taylor Mali

A grand piano wrapped in quilted pads by movers,
tied up with canvas straps—like classical music’s
birthday gift to the criminally insane—
is gently nudged without its legs
out an eighth‐floor window on 62nd street. 

Geometry of Trees

     Donna Masini, one of my poetry teachers at Hunter College, offered this rule of thumb for use of a particular word in a poem:  the word should serve the poem in (at least) two ways -- in meaning and sound, or sound and motion, or motion and image, or  . ..  .
     Richard Wilbur (1921 - ) is a former US Poet Laureate (1987-88), a prolific translator, and one of my favorite poets -- and perhaps this is because he seems to maximize his word-choices with multiple uses.  When I read Wilbur, I see and hear and feel -- and, after multiple readings, these sensory impressions coalesce into understanding.  Here is one of his sonnets, a poem of the geometry of absence:

"On the Life of Ptolemy"

Poetry at its best uses words in new ways.  Mathematics sometimes does that also.  But for a poet to use mathematical terms in new ways can be risky.  Nichita Stanescu (Romania, 1933 - 1983) was a poet unafraid to take that risk.  Here is Sean Cotter's translation of Stanescu's "On the Life of Ptolemy" from the new and fine Stanescu collection, Wheel with a Single Spoke.

     On the Life of Ptolemy     by Nichita Stanescu

     Ptolemy believed in the straight line,
     It exists.
     Count its points and, if you can,
     tell me the number.