Monday, June 20, 2022

Mathy Poems on YouTube

      In a recent posting -- 6/08/2022 -- I tell of mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz and link to her website that has a collection of links to works by various mathy poets that have participated in BRIDGES math-arts conferences.  Glaz not only offers connections to poet-information, she also offers links to YouTube recordings of poems -- and recently, to supply her with that, I worked with my granddaughter, Serena Growney, who has just finished her freshman year at high school and knows a lot more about using YouTube than I do.  Here's a link to our Growney-Growney YouTube collaboration(I had intended for Serena to focus on the book cover and not to catch my elbow, etc, in the background -- but perhaps all of that makes it more interesting.)  For viewers who like to see the text of a poem as well as to hear it, here is a link to a blog posting of "Things to Count On" -- and below I offer the text of the poem (a very new one), "A Tragic Mathematical Romance."

A Tragic Mathematical Romance        by JoAnne Growney

     Abscissa, my darling, what is the
     basis for your discontent?  When I
     calculate the
     distance between us, I
     even have trouble seeing it as
     finite – its growth has a steep
     graph, climbing out of my
     hemisphere with an almost
     infinite slope,
     jumping with impossibility like the
     Koenigsburg Bridge problem,
     multiplying my sadness until I am
     negative – no
     odd or even integer is the
     perfect number to describe my
     quantity of distress – I
     rotate and reflect,
     substitute and subtract, try to find a
     theorem that will remove my
     uncertainty.  I follow the
     vector directing my heart
     toward the origin, where the
     x-axis and the
     y-axis and the
     z-axis meet.     Abscissa, please come back and greet me at zero.

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