Monday, January 14, 2019

Poems that Celebrate Mathematicians

     Recently I received from John Golden (blogger at mathhombre.blogspot.com and math professor at Michigan's Grand Valley State Universitythis link to a collection of poems developed by students Ellen Audia and Connor Dudas as their senior project for degrees in Mathematics from Grand Valley State University.   On page 6, we have their poem about Archimedes:

Archimedes

Everyone knows
The great Archimedes
One of the leading scientists
Of the classical antiquity

The area of a circle
Equals pi r squared
Archimedes also discovered
The volume of a sphere  

He approximated pi
Better than anyone had
And exponentiated numbers
So you didn’t have to add

His ideas were useful
They weren’t just theories
Explaining the lever
And compound pulleys

He used a method
Now called exhaustion
That gave him area
And gave us integration 

Give him a place to stand 
He’ll invent anything
He’ll move the earth 
Create simple machines

The screw, the pulley 
The catapult and heat ray
Archimedes did it
And nothing got in his way

The students' Introduction includes an enthusiastic THANK-YOU to John Golden. AND, thank you -- Ellen and Connor -- for celebrating mathematics and its people and its applications with poetry!

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