Sharing a few words (found on X Twitter) from a FB post by poet Brian Bilston:
A reminder of upcoming student mathy writing-contest deadlines:
Create a video for a STEAM poem (A list of poems is provided.) -- deadline April 30, 2026, more info here.
A MoMath Contest with a variety of entry categories, including poems -- deadline, April 23, 2026.
Contests for which entry deadlines have passed -- but which will offer new entry opportunities in the future -- include the AWM Essay Contest and the American Mathematical Society Poetry Contest.
And, starting to count by twos, I find:
Writing
is a process
to discover new thoughts.
This morning as I was looking online for Valentine greetings to send to my grandchildren, I found this mathy poem:
In Rochallyi's article -- entitled "Vector Poetry" -- he shows us three different illustrations of poetry portrayed using vectors. He takes a phrase that he would like to communicate poetically and offers three examples of how it could be portrayed using vector poetry. The phrase is:
Growing up in western Pennsylvania -- on a farm close to Indiana, PA -- I was not far from the town of Punxsutawney and enjoyed celebration each year on February 2 of "Groundhog Day." On this day a legendary groundhog who has burrowed underground to spend the worst of winter -- near Punxsutawney, PA -- peeks out to test the weather. If he sees no shadow, spring is on the way BUT if he sees his shadow, he quicky scurries back to his underground refuge, this departure predicting six more weeks of winter. (Recent publicizing of this event has altered it -- now the groundhog does his shadow-seeing and prediction in front of a large audience. And it is televised!)
Today, in her weekly radio broadcast on wpsu, poet Marjorie Maddox offered the slightly mathy Groundhog Day poem "On Gobbler's Knob" by Pittsburgh poet Shirley Stevens (1940-2022). I offer it below (followed by a link to background information about the poem and the poet). Alas, today's groundhog has predicted six more winter weeks.
On Gobbler’s Knob by Shirley Stevens
We gather on the hill outside Punxsutawney
to draw tight circles against the dark.
Five thousand strong, we twist and shout
to circulate blood to our frozen toes,
A few days ago I found poetic words (offered below) by G. H. Hardy (1877-1947) posted on X by @TheMathFlow -- I enjoyed not only the poem but also an exploration of various MathFlow postings -- which offer lots of delightful bits of mathematics. (Visit @TheMathFlow and enjoy!)
When I come across a title that connects math and poetry, I become interested -- and want to read more. Google helped me discover here, in China Daily, an article featuring German professor Andrea Breard entitled "Reading numbers like poetry: A journey into ancient Chinese math." She goes on to tell about some algebraic methods that were written as poems -- the rhythm allowing easier and better memorization.
Andrea Breard is a German historian of mathematics, specializing in Chinese mathematics. Her remarks took me back to my childhood when we frequently repeated "counting rhymes" as we dressed or played or whatever. "One, Two, Buckle my shoe . . ." and "Hickory, Dickory, Dock . . . the mouse ran up the clock . . ." were frequent parts of my childhood chatter.
A Contest for High School Students -- Read on to learn more . . .
Students who are 15 to 18 years old (on September 1, 2025) are invited to apply for the 2026 Steven H. Strogatz Prize for Math Communication (sponsored by MoMath, the NY Museum of Mathematics) to share their love of math with the world!
On or before April 23, 2026 projects will be accepted in the following categories:
Art, Audio, Performance, Social media, Video, and Writing.
Examples include: podcasts, articles, school newspaper columns, art exhibits, videos, websites, Instagram accounts, songs, plays, and any other mode of public communication. Detailed information is available at this link.
Entry deadline is coming soon -- February 1, 2026.
Students are invited to interview a math-woman
and write about it --
and submit the essay to the Association for Women in Mathematics
by February 1, 2026.
Guidelines (middle-school, high school, college submissions) are here.
Previous winning essays are available here (follow the link and scroll down).
Recently I came across a math-poetry article here in a newsletter published by the University of Illinois, Springfield -- an article entitled "Navigating the Intersection of Math, Poetry, and AI: The Crossroads in Helena Soares’ Pursuit." The article shares poetry by Soares -- who is a student majoring in both mathematics and English -- and also includes a brief essay by her, entitled "A journey through math, AI, and poetry." Here is a poem by Soares from that article:
Recently Google led me to a recent and fascinating article about Jordanian poet Dr. Zaina Al-Qasem, a Jordanian scholar, who combines data science with creativity and is also a published poet. For her, mathematics and poetry share thought patterns — both driven by interpretation, structure, and the search for meaning, but through different lenses.
Here are a few reflective lines of Zaina Al-Qasem's verse -- found in the article linked-to above -- lines that capture both introspection and intent.
Choosing a shape for a poem leads to restrictions on the numbers and lengths of words -- and sometimes this generously promotes creativity. Moving through the chilly winter season, I have discovered this poem -- "The Six-Cornered Snowflake" in POETRY (December, 1989) by poet and editor John Frederick Nims (1913-99). ENJOY!
When you have time, a fascinating website to visit and browse is OEDILF -- The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form.
Here is a sample:
cuproid by Recumbentman (Limerick #89414)
Tetrahedrons are bounded by four
Triangular faces, no more.
If on each one of those
A pyramid rose,
A cuproid would then take the floor.
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is again sponsoring a Math-Poetry Contest for students -- inviting submission of poems up to 20 lines in length in three admission categories:
Middle School High School College
Information about how to submit entries -- along with wonderful results from past contests -- is available at this link.
The following poem (which is found online here -- along with other winners) by Nora McKinstry (Edmonds Heights K-12 S) was the Middle School winner in 2025.
A recent visit to the Poetry Foundation website brought me to poems by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) -- and I counted sadly as I read his poem, "We Are Seven." I offer its opening stanzas below (and the complete poem -- 17 stanzas -- is available here.)
We Are Seven by William Wordsworth
For some students, math is fun BUT . . . if we don't understand something that can keep it from being fun. For those who DO NOT FIND MATH FUN, it is important for the rest of us to try to change that attitude. One useful viewpoint is that math need not be treated as an isolated subject . . . it is connected to our lives in VERY MANY ways. And sometimes, as this blog's postings illustrate, poetry offers non-threatening ways of making connections.
One of my recent discoveries is the website We Are Teachers where I found a collection of 38 mathy poems -- a dozen for elementary school students and the rest for middle and high students. Here is a sample from the elementary school group.
Fourteen years ago, back in October of 2011, I posted a poem of mine entitled, "Like Poetry, Mathematics is Beautiful" (at this link). Written more than thirty years ago, this continues to be one of my favorites of my mathy poems. I offer a portion of it below.
Like Poetry, Mathematics is Beautiful by JoAnne Growney
Timidly I ask
each one I meet if they
find mathematics beautiful
or useful, and each one dares to say,
"Useful, of course. I use it every day."
And if I seem to want a proof,
they all go on to tell
that daily they subtract and add
to keep a checkbook; sometimes also
they multiply to find how many squares
they need to tile the kitchen floor.
Born in New York City (1950) and of Asian heritage, poet Arthur Sze is the 25th US Poet Laureate (named on September 15, 2025) and the first Asian American to hold that position. In the October 20, 2025 issue of The New Yorker, we find Sze's poem, "Library of Congress," which opens with these somewhat mathy lines:
You peer down a lit corridor
on the fifth tier of stacks
where a million books breathe
on shelves, here's a book
on neutrinos, captured in Antarctica,
here's another on solar flares.
A curator displays a book
in Vai script and points to a triangle
with two dots, you wonder . . .
Mathematics organizes libraries!
More poetry from Sze can be found here;
scroll down below the bio to find titles and links.
Poetry-comic-artist Grant Snider posts wonderfully illustrated and entertaining verses online -- on X (Twitter) @grantdraws -- and sometimes his postings are mathy. Here is a link to an interview with Snider. Snider has indicated in his postings that our current month of October is Poetry Comics Month, Here is a link to one of his past poetry-comics-month postings -- and below I offer one of his illustrated mathy haiku.
On X I learned that this week -- November 10-14, 2025 -- is World Nursery Rhyme Week, and I searched and found this website that offers information about the week and these "5 official rhymes for 2025":
Monday, 10th -- Sing a Song of Sixpence
Tuesday, 11th -- Humpty Dumpty
Wednesday, 12th -- When I Was One (I played the drum)
Thursday, 13th -- I Hear Thunder
Friday, 14th -- Two Little Dickie Birds
Here at this website are all of the above except "Two Little Dickie Birds" -- which I offer a version of below. (Here in Wikipedia is more about that rhyme.)
At this link, I found the following math-poetry information:
JOHANNESBURG - Some good news for struggling mathematics students:
Award-winning author Botshelo Mthomboti has a solution for you. In her book, Poetic Atmosphere of Mathematics, Mthomboti simplifies the subject through poetry. The 22-year-old Financial Management graduate has also penned two other books, A Black Child Transformed by Accounting, and The Poetic Atmosphere of Income Tax.
Here is a link to a YouTube video of a news story -- entitled "Poetic Solutions to Complex Problems" -- that tells of Mthomboti and shares her poem entitled "Multiplication and Division of Variables." And here is more about Mthomboti.
THANK YOU, Botshelo Mthomboti, for the enthusiastic energy you give to mathematics.
Stephanie Strickland is a poet whom I know and much admire -- and her work contains a rich variety of math-poetry creations; her poems have been featured in several posts in this blog (Here's a link to those postings.) Today I had the good fortune to refind another of her poems -- not yet posted herein -- and I offer it below.
Who Counts, Counts by Stephanie Strickland
Baby and you
--and me,
we will make three,
but baby-and-me
are different; we're two-
who-are-one.
Posted on X by talented and prolific STEAM blogger, Heidi Bee Roemer (@poetweet4), this Halloween poem relates to the geometry of a carved pumpkin face -- with mathematical shapes.
I recently learned of a book by creative writer Kellie Krumrie entitled Math Class (Calamari Press, 2022) -- a book of essays that feature teen-age girls. Exploring further I found poetry by Krumrie in La Vague -- an online feminist journal that has ceased publication BUT retains online records of previously published work.
Here is one of Krumrie's poems which I am enjoying puzzling over!
c e m e n t / e m m y n o e t h e r by Kellie Krumrie
‘She had the faculty of visualizing remote, very complex connections without resorting to concrete examples.’
Recently I discovered the website teacher planet and found there a variety of math-related resources including humorous versions of definitions of math terms.
Using a poetry-stanza format, I have included several of these "poetic" definitions below:
Math is like love;
a simple idea,
but it can get complicated.
Mathematician Lauren K. Williams (PhD ’05 MIT, currently Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University) has won a 2025 MacArthur Fellowship, a prestigious honor often called the “genius grant.” The award is presented annually by the MacArthur Foundation to “talented individuals in a variety of fields who have shown exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits.” The MacArthur Foundation praised Williams for “uncovering transformative connections between algebraic combinatorics and problems in other areas of math and physics.”
A varied and energetic and very valuable voice for the importance of connections between mathematics and poetry is STEAM-Poetry advocate Heidi Bee Roemer. Here is a link to her focus on mathy poems. (STEAM is a popular abbreviation for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics.)
Recently Romer has opened registration for a STEAM Poetry Video Contest. Between now and April 30, 2026, students can choose a STEAM-themed poem (from a selection of 40 poems), create short videos for their younger peers, and enter them in the contest. Contest details are here.
And here is a sample poem by Roemer -- a mathy poem written for elementary-school students.
Here in the US, we have a new poet laureate (announced by the Library of Congress on September 15, 2025) -- and this selected poet Arthur Sze sees poetry as a unifying agent -- "verse can bring us together".
Sze is a poet whose work I value reading -- but its links to mathematics are gentle and scattered. Here is a sample -- the closing lines from Sze's poem "Sight Lines". (The complete poem is available here at poets.org.)
A recent discovery that I have found fascinating is a reversible poem -- a poem with word/line choices that read the same from the last to the first as from the first to the last. Author Marilyn Singer offers the following sample on her website from her collection Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse Poems – illustrated by Josee Masse; Dutton/Penguin, 2010.
In this unique collection of reversible verse, classic fairy tales are turned on their heads. Literally. Read these clever poems from top to bottom. Then reverse the lines and read from bottom to top to give these well-loved stories a delicious new spin. Word patterns remain the same -- with changes only in punctuation and capitalization.
IN REVERSE by Marilyn Singer
Recently I found this online article in the Bangi News:
Why poetry has lost its lustre in the modern world
It offers the following forlorn math-and-poetry view:
Today, with schools pushing
math and science over the arts,
poetry feels like an old, boring puzzle.
Why spend time decoding a poem
when you can watch a 15-second reel
that makes you laugh?
Is this view useful? Explore more in the Bangi News here.
Recently I learned via a post on X -Twitter by Anthony Bonato (@Anthony_Bonato) that the new Roman Catholic Pope Leo was, in college, a math major. (For Wikipedia's info on Pope Leo, follow this link.) I celebrate this with one of my favorite poetic forms, a syllable-count triangle.
Math
is a
discipline
that can prepare
for leadership and
holiness -- Pope Leo!
Today I have been thinking about election results and the role that non-voters have in deciding elections and I have shaped my words into the following syllable-count triangle:
Count
the votes.
Elections
are decided
by we who vote -- and
also by those who don't!
This is a quick and brief post BUT its shortness may give you some time to explore these richly populated links:
Math Songs for Kids -- on YouTube.
Each year the Association for Women in Mathematics holds an essay contest -- inviting middle school and high school and college students each to interview a math woman and to write about it. The names of 2025 contest winners -- and links to their essays -- are available here at this link.
One of my delights as I browsed through the contest results was to find male as well as female essay winners. Here is a link to "Bridging Worlds through Mathematics" -- an essay by Alan Zhang of Francis Richmond Middle School, telling of an interview with Alena Erchenko (Dartmouth College), that won first place in the Grades 6-8 contest group. And this link leads to "Where Dreams Can Take You" -- an essay by Peter Holman of Frances C, Richmond Middle School telling of an interview with Kim Luke (Simbex).
What is Micro Poetry?
Micropoetry (a term sometimes offered as two terms) is an ultra-short form of poetry, typically under 25 words or 140 characters, blending creative brevity with precise language characterized by sharp imagery and emotional depth while allowing diverse interpretations. (Definition found at this website.)
Both mathematics and poetry are condensed languages, endeavoring to say much in a few words or symbols and so, when I recently came across the term "Micropoetry' -- aka micro-poetry or micropoetry -- I became curious (and I thought of Haiku) and I decided to to explore.
Poetic constraints such as syllable-counts and rhymes may seem at first glance to pose difficulties in constructing a poem BUT those of us who have explored using constraints very often find that meeting the imposed constraints guides us to new and creative thinking. At the July, 2025 Bridges Conference, Sarah Glaz and Lisa Lajeunesse offered a workshop that explored writing strategies derived from this ratio. (Here is a link to the abstract for the workshop -- and at that link you also can download a pdf of the complete paper.) Below I offer a couple of samples of their "golden ratio" poems.
Journaling Prompt 20: Math Poetry: The Square
Last week I mentioned the current (July, 2025) issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics and today I want to again call attention to the array of poetry that is in this issue; here is a ink to the Table of Contents and the photo below offers a list of poetry titles and authors. (Visit the JHM website; explore and enjoy; several delightful stanzas from Vijay Fafat and Cristian Ramirez Rodriguez were offered in this previous blog post.)
In a 2023 issue, in the JHM Section entitled The World of Mathematics, two of the eight articles involve poetry -- the 2nd and third articles named below; to get to the Table of Contents and access to the articles, follow this link.
A lavish and wonderful celebration of connections between mathematics and the arts is the annual international BRIDGES, Mathematics and the Arts Conference. This year's conference took place last month (July, 2025 in Eindhoven, Netherlands) and one of its special events was a poetry reading.
Information about the poets and sample poems are available here at the website of Sarah Glaz (mathematician-poet and coordinator of the BRIDGES readings). Below I have included one of these very special poems:
View no Fiery Night by Marian Christie
No
one
went to
the tower
to vie with the foe.
Fretting, worn, we rove in night fog ––
the ring, the theft, the vow forgotten. Hovering high
over the town, the frightening wyvern, whirr of her winging interwoven with fire.
Twice a year a new issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics is published online; here is a link to the Table of Contests for the July, 2025 issue which I have recently enjoyed browsing. This issue contains a plentiful variety of poems and articles related to poetry. The term "Linear Poem" was a concept new to me -- found here in the article, "Introducing the Linear Poem" by Cristian Ramirez Rodriguez -- and I offer it below:
Linear Poems
Are poems where each line
increases or deceases by the same number of
words every single line, this number is the slope, m, and
the words in title are b (intercept); Here m is 3, b is 2.
The author goes on to tell how he has used this form with math students -- and he offers additional examples.
In a few days I will be going on a vacation with family -- enjoying time with my children and grandchildren. As I think back to past times together, I remember querying my grandkids about their math interests and suggesting the invention of a mathy rhyme. I find rhyming statements easier to remember than non-rhyming ones -- and my grandchildren enjoyed discovering and inventing and repeating rhymes -- sometimes brilliant and sometimes silly.
One of my longest-known and all-time favorite mathy rhymes is this one that tells the days of the month; below is a version of this memory-aid, found online here at Math is Fun.
Poet and science-writer Sam Illingworth has been noted in earlier posts in this blog -- here's a link -- and I enjoy online-searching for his work again and again to find still more. Illingworth's blog, The Poetry of Science, is a wonderful site to visit and revisit, to read and explore.
Recently I discovered the following Illingworth poem (posted at The Poetry of Science on June 19, 2025) -- a poem with a bit of math AND inspired by recent research findings that living near a golf course increases the risk of Parkinson's disease (possibly due to exposure to pesticides used on the course).
Overspill by Sam Illingworth
They do not play,
but live beside
the tailored grass.
One of the mathematicians that I celebrate for her achievements is Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1832). Despite her short life (with death due to uterine cancer) Lovelace did important work on the development of computers (in her time called analytical engines).
Here is a link to a fascinating documentary, "Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing -- 2015," about the life of Ada. Thinking about Ada and exploring mathy poems led me to the collection Against Infinity (on my bookshelf) and to the following poem:
Zero by Harriet Zinnes (1919-2019)
On X (Twitter) today I found the following quote posted by poet Ilya Kaminsky -- quoting recently deceased poet Fanny Howe (1940-2025). Howe's poetic statement, quoted below, is one that applies (for me, at least) to both poetry and mathematics:
One way to understand your own condition is to write something and spend a long time revising it.
In revising you teach yourself. You find your own information buried in your body. It is still alive until you are not.
Here, at PoetryFoundation.com, are more than twenty of Howe's poems; I offer one of these below:
I was captivated by the title -- "He's Not a Poet, But He Plays One" -- of a poem (found here) by Donald Illich -- and it led me to want to explore this poet's writing. Sometimes he uses mathematics -- not in major thematic ways but in very interesting ways. Below I offer a poem that illustrates my view.
Water Mathematics by Donald Illich
calculated the river and the stream,
modeled the pond under dangerous
situations. Water was really math,
The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM) offers delightful and broad-ranging connections between mathematics and the arts. An article that I discovered recently considers ways to use poetry in mathematics classes. Found in the July 2023 issue, "Teaching Mathematics with Poetry: Some Activities," by Alexis E. Langellier (an adjunct professor of Computer Science at Moraine Valley Community College and a graduate teaching assistant at graduate student in Mathematical Sciences at Northern Illinois University). Working toward a degree in Computer Science, Langellier has this intent: My goal is to get more women in STEM.
Musing this morning, this blogger found these words:
My
hands
hold a pen
and my fingers
translate thoughts into
words on paper. Sometimes
I meet someone who
thinks with fingers
like I do.
THANK YOU, Greg Coxson,
for frequent sharing of MATHY POEMS with me!
Gregory Coxson, professor and researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the US Naval Academy, is a supporter of integration of the arts with the sciences and enjoys writing poems. (Here is a link to his previous appearances in this blog -- including a couple of poems that he created.)
Greg has sent me some sample poems from the Summer, 2025 issue of Up.St.ART, a magazine that focuses on and celebrates the arts in the Annapolis, MD region. The issue that Coxson alerted me to has a special collection of Harvested Words -- poems built by selecting phrases from another publication. From this collection I share a poem, shown below, that is built from phrases selected from the book Probable Impossibilities by Alan Lightman; the selector is poet Natalie Canavor of Annapolis, MD, and she has given me permission to include her poem here:
Glimmerings by Natalie Canavor
THANK YOU, Peter Cameron,
for your generous sharing of mathematical ideas and their links!
Happening soon -- the Conference on Theoretical and Computational Algebra -- scheduled to take place in Evora, Portugal, June 29 - July 3, 2025. (Conference information is available at this link.) A special feature of this conference will be the honoring of mathematician Peter Cameron. As mathematicians and poetry-lovers and bloggers, Peter and I discovered each other online. This link leads to Cameron's first "Mathematics and poetry" blog posting (on April 6, 2010) and in Cameron's posting on July 14, 2010 (entitled "Mathematics and Poetry, 2") he links to my blog (first posting March 23, 2010) with this statement:
JoAnne Growney has posted on her blog a poem structured using prime factorisations: I think it is a lovely poem, and urge you to take a look.
This link leads to a summary-description of Cameron's blog and this link goes to his first "Mathematics and poetry" posting. AND, here is a link to the search-results for the term "poetry" in his blog.
I would like to celebrate Peter Cameron by sharing the opening stanzas of his ten-stanza mathy poem, "Millennium":
Recently I found (on X @letsplaymath) this thoughtful and poetic musing by Denise Gaskins :
Mathematical beauty
is when our mind's eye is opened
to see something new -- or
to see something old in a new light.
A good friend who is a strong and active supporter of math-poetry links is Annapolis Naval Academy Professor Greg Coxson -- and, in a recent article (in this newsletter from a subgroup of the Mathematical Association of America -- MAA) entitled "Meet Me on the Bridge Between Mathematics and Poetry," Coxson offers several poems. One of these is "The Art of Numbers" by Scotland mathematician-poet Eveline Pye -- and she has given me permission to offer it in my blog:
The Art of Numbers by Eveline Pye
We talk of beautiful words, art, buildings
when they're not part of the natural world.
An x in Algebra is no more abstract than
an idea in philosophy, just more useful.
Split This Rock is an activist poetry organization that calls poets to a greater role in public life and reaches out to a network of socially engaged poets; the organization is centered in Washington, DC but reaches all over the world . . . One of their ongoing activities is the selection of a Poem of the Week -- and one of their recent choices was a challenging and fascinating poem that included frequent uses of mathematical notation to express its ideas.
Submission Deadline -- September 24, 2025
Space Byi *2025 is an experimental digital art platform dedicated to exploring the intersection of mathematics, geometry, and artistic expression. As an official pavilion of The Wrong Biennale, they provide "a space for artists, mathematicians, and creative thinkers to engage in boundary-pushing visual and conceptual explorations."
In particular, this site extends a call for mathematical poetry -- information at this link -- to be submitted via email on or before September 24, 2025 -- to Radoslav Rochallyi at info@rochallyi.com.
One of the strong and consistent promoters of connections between mathematics and the arts is Sarah Hart and she recently gave the 2025 Einstein Public Lecture at Clemson University (sponsored by AMS, the American Mathematical Society) entitled "A Mathematical Journey Through Literature."
Hart is the author of Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature (Flatiron Books, 2023) -- NYTimes review here; purchase info here. Her presentation, summarized here in an AMS article entitled "The Axiom of a Sonnet," explored ways that the guidelines for a sonnet -- or other poetic structure -- are similar to the guidelines for a mathematical structure such as a group or a ring. A thought-provoking quote from her presentation:
Several weeks ago I was surprised and delighted to receive an email from Lillian Liu, a high school student in Westchester, New York and also is a mentee of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) -- with mentor Dr. Annalisa Crannell, emerita professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania and someone I have been privileged to know.
High school junior Lillian Liu has recently founded The Hyperbolic Review -- her response to noticing that "mathematical poetry isn’t as widely discussed or recognized as it should be. It seemed that many people weren’t even aware of its existence." Because this blog shows my connection with mathy poetry, Liu reached out to me, via email, and sent me this link to Issue 1 of The Hyperbolic Review: https://www.thehyperbolicreview.com/issue-1.
Below I offer the opening stanzas of "Asymptotes" by Devanshee Soni; following this sample will be a link to The Hyperbolic Review -- containing the complete poem and lots of others.
Once again, my mathematician-poet-friend Sarah Glaz has carefully organized a math-poetry reading -- this one to be held at the upcoming Bridges Math-Arts Conference, July 14-18, 2025 in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Details concerning the exact time and location for the reading, scheduled for Thursday, July 17, will be announced here at this link.
Below I offer a sampling from the poets who will be reading at Eindhoven -- a CENTO that I have built by inclusion of a phrase from a poem by each of the poets registered for participation in Bridges 2025. (Information about the poets is found here at this website maintained by Sarah Glaz.)
WE CELEBRATE MATHEMATICS
The power of a theorem lies
with a diagram of clockwise arrows
hovering high over the town,
while infinite time is waiting
and triple sixes strive
in-between our beginnings and ends.
One of my very-special math-poetry connections -- and a frequent sharer of new poems with me -- is Gregory Coxson, Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Recently he sent me the poem "Math Class" by Poet Mary Crow -- a poem that deals with the role of women in math. I offer its opening lines below, followed by a link to the complete poem. (A good poem to stimulate class discussion of the currently-growing status of women in math.)
Math Class by Mary Crow
Somehow that shriveled arm
seemed the perfect arm
for tracing the odd shapes of geometry
in white on our black chalkboard
showing us a woman could do
this unwomanly thing
and sometimes a girl would let out a giggle
almost like a pig squeak
and our teacher would stop, chalk
in her lifted hand
and her back would stiffen
as she turned and glared at us
then returned
to tracing out her mysteries
we girls thought
meant math is for old maids . . .
Crow's complete poem is available online here at poets.org.
A worthy organization in Washington, DC in which to get involved is FREE MINDS BOOK CLUB (https://freemindsbookclub.org/about-us/) -- an organization that collects books and provides reading opportunities for incarcerated individuals AND ALSO offers online presentations of poems (https://freemindsbookclub.org/poems/) for volunteers to read and offer comments. I encourage you to participate -- participants need not be poets, simply interested readers!
Here are the opening lines of one of the poems I found at the Free Minds website; please visit the site to sign in and read more:
Here at the website We Are Teachers I found a delightful collection of 38 Math Poems for Students in All Grade Levels. Although I liked the offering there of "Eighteen Flavors" by Shel Silverstein I found the sample there to be incomplete (only ten flavors) and I searched further to find Silverstein's complete poem (found here) and, ice-cream lover that I am, I offer it below:
A Pennsylvania poet whose work I enjoyed and learned from has recently passed away -- Harry Humes, who taught literature and film at Kutztown (PA) University and produced and edited (until his retirement in 1999) a bi-annual poetry journal, Yarrow.
Humes' poetry was not mathy but I connected with it deeply because we had Pennsylvania in common, Back in 2010, in the early days of this blog, I posted Humes' poem "The Butterfly Effect" at this link. Here is a screenshot of the poem's opening lines:
Recent Presidential misstatements and distortions of American politics and policies are disturbing -- and I have pulled from my shelf a literary anthology This Is What America Looks Like. published in 2021 by the Washington Writers Publishing House and containing fiction and poetry from writers in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. (Purchase is available at amazon.com.) In this collection I found, in the poem "D.C." by Donald Illich, the phrase "here, where presidents lied" -- and since the poem contains a couple of quantitative words, I offer it below:
D.C. by Donald Illich
I'd never seen rats
crawl down city streets
until I came here,
where presidents lied,
Today I look back to this "Fib" posted last year and to other previous Earth Day postings. -- as I HOPE that we can learn to save our planet!
A brief reminder that the STEAM POWERED POETRY VIDEO CONTEST -- announced in this this posting from last November -- has its entry deadline approaching very soon -- on Wednesday, April 30. And here is a direct link to contest information.
Write a poem . . .Create a video of you reading it . . . SUBMIT!
It delights me that the American Mathematical society links math and poetry by sponsoring a student poetry contest each year. AMS recently announced this year's winners (along with videos of the winning poems) -- and I offer samples of the winning poems (from college, high school, and middle school students) below:
from "Proof" by Emilynne Newsom, Harvey Mudd College
There's a practice you will see in math.
It is a way of showing what is true.
In steady step-by-step it lays a path
from what you know to what you seek to prove. (Find the rest here.)
from "Homeric Simile ... " by Samanyu Ganesh, The Westminster Schools
Just as the sea otters grasp each others' paws
whilst sleeping, latently
basking in the stillness of their moonlit sanctuary, drifting
assuredly . . . (Find the rest of this poem here.)
from "forever" by Nora McKinstry, Edmond Heights, K-12
a mobius strip is a never ending loop a
forever-going cycle of one small strip
but still it goes on and on
impossible to stop but easily created . . . (Find the rest here.)
One of my recent delights was to be contacted by mathematician Lakshmi Chandrasekaran, a mathematician that is one of the team at Her Maths Story -- a website (found at https://hermathsstory.eu/ ) that publicizes and celebrates the stories of female mathematicians. A bit of background about the website is shown in the screen-shot below:
Exploring the internet, looking for mathy poems, I came across the website Poemverse -- and I entered the search term math and was led to an exciting list of possibilities -- and plentiful outcomes also occurred when I searched using other mathy terms -- algebra, geometry, etc... I also found a collection of "Poetry for the Math Haters" -- at this link. Below I offer two verses found there -- alas, without information about the contributing poets.
Finding Humor in Math Hating
Mathematical Mischief by Jessica Rose
Oh, math, your tricks and riddles,
Leave my brain tangled and in a fiddle,
But in this battle of numbers and wit,
I'll find humor, and never submit.
Mathematical Laughter by David Scott
Math, my eternal nemesis, it seems,
Yet I'll laugh at your complex schemes,
For in this world of calculations and strife,
A little humor is the elixir of life.
AND, here is a link to some YouTube math songs!
In the United States, April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month. Visits to the links in the preceding sentence will offer lots of information about these monthly celebrations (as will exploring this blog). AND, below I offer a poetic celebration of mathematics.
American poet Harry Mathews (1950-2017) was a member of OULIPO and divided his time between New York and Paris; much of his work moved outside the restrictions of traditional poetic forms.
Here are the opening lines of his poem, "Safety in Numbers":
from Safety in Numbers by Harry Mathews
The enthusiasm with which I repeatedly declare you my one
And only confirms the fact that we are indeed two,
Not one; nor can anything we do ever let us feel three
(And this is no lisp-like alteration: it's four
That's a crowd, not a trinity), and our five
Fingers and toes multiplied leave us at six-
As time passes I find -- to my delight -- more and more mathy poems available via internet. Recently I was alerted to a fascinating poem appearing recently in The Mathematical Intelligencer (Vol 47, p. 39, 2025).-- "I am the Zero" by Md Sadikur Rahman. Here is one of its stanzas (and the complete poem is available at this link):
from I Am the Zero by Md Sadikur Rahman
I am the mirror in the middle of the number line,
Where numbers see their reflections with the proper sign.
Add me to a number, and there is no change.
But multiply by me, I kill that one, leafing nothing in exchange.
Dividing by me? That's a troublesome thing,
Even the brightest minds must pause and think.
Here are several powerful lines from Lutken's poem "Emmy Noether and the Conservation of Hope":
. . . . Her awe of abstract algebra endured.
Against winds feeling hatred,
purge of Jews from academics.
she wrote, thought, taught from home.
Flames reaching the streets
forced a journey of tears,
exile to America/
She searched the heart of mathematics
and physics from wherever.
Lutken's complete poem is available at this link; for and previous postings in this blog of work by E. R. (Emily) Lutken, follow this link. A varied collection of postings featuring Emmy Noether may be found at this link.
AND, to further celebrate women in math and poetry, explore the labels in the right-hand column of this blog AND use the SEARCH box.
Celebrating WORLD POETRY DAY -- with a memory!
As a child I became acquainted with poetry -- poetry that I came to love -- through a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), an undated edition by Avenel Books that was on our farmhouse bookshelf when I was growing up.
Block City by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
What are you able to build with your blocks?
Castles and palaces, temples and docks.
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,
But I can be happy and building at home.
Non-poets often wonder about the use of patterns in poems -- does following a set of constraints help of hinder the process? For me, often -- though not always -- constraints push me to discovery. Below I offer a triangular poem by Washington, DC poet E. Laura Golberg which I re-found recently in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM); Golberg's poem remembers the costs of war.
Pension Building, Washington, DC by E. Laura Golberg
A
dis-
play
of the
normal
curve can
be found in
old buildings
where feet have
rubbed away the
middle of stair steps.
Here, wounded Union
veterans pulling one foot
over the new marble, wore
off atoms. Men with crutches
placed them firmly at an angle.
Their boots scuffed the stairs.
Those who had been refused
pensions descended, while
dragging feet. Today, the
building, with its pillars
and open space is used
as a museum. Balls
may be held here;
hems of formal
gowns weep
down the
stairs.
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