Exploring Math-Attitudes with Verse

     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 April, Celebrate BOTH Mathematics and Poetry

           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-

Zero -- Celebrate this Powerful Tool

       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.

     Rahman's complete poem is available at this link.

Women's History Month -- Celebrate MATH-WOMEN

      A book that I return to again and again for mathy poems is Manifold:  Poetry of Mathematics by E. R. Lutken (Taos Press, 2021).  Lutken therein celebrates a mathematician that I greatly admire, Amalie Emmy Noether (1882-1935).  

     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.

A Child's Garden of Verses -- Geometry of a City

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.   

A Triangular Poem

     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.

Golberg's mathy poems  "Menger Sponge"  and "Heuristic or Stochastic?" also are available online (also published by JHM).

Celebrate PI AND Remember its digits

     Friday, March 14 (3.14) will be π-day -- and I look back and remember how one of my high school math teachers challenged me and my classmates to come to class prepared to recite as many digits of π as we could remember,  I was not a particularly good memorizer and was delighted  to learn that the lengths of the words in this sentence:

How I wish I could calculate pi !

are the first seven digits of pi . . . . and the lengths of the words in the following rhyme give the first thirteen digits:

                      See, I have a rhyme assisting
                      my feeble brain,
                      its tasks sometime resisting.

More here (in a blog posting from way back in 2010)

AND

This link leads to a webpage offering a million digits of π.

Poetry Moment with a Bit of Math

       Recently on the weekly program Poetry Moment on WPSU -- a radio station in Central Pennsylvania -- poet Marjorie Maddox featured work by another Pennsylvania poet and Emeritus Professor at Penn State University, Emily Grosholz.

     Grosholz' featured poem, "Holding Patterns," is a villanelle:  Here are its opening lines:

          We can’t remember half of what we know.
          They hug each other and then turn away.
          One thinks in silence, never let me go.

          The sky above the airport glints with snow
          That melts beneath the laws it must obey.
          We can’t remember half of what we know.

Geometry of Kindness . . . Power of a Circle

      Found on Facebook recently -- this snapshot of my syllable-count triangle from an earlier blog posting  . . . I like the way that choosing words that conform to a pattern stimulates my thoughts.

From a blog posting back in 2018

Black History Month Celebrates Math Women

     Black mathematicians and female mathematicians often have not been given the credit they deserve -- and I have been delighted to find this website that features eleven famous African-American mathematicians --  six of which are women.   This website celebrates: 

2.) Fern Hunt (1948-   )     Fern Hunt is best known for her work in applied mathematics and mathematical biology. Throughout her great career, she has been involved with biomathematics, patterns in genetic variation, and chaos theory.   She currently works as an educator and presenter with the aim of encouraging women and minority students to pursue graduate degrees in mathematics and other STEM fields. 

5.) Katherine Johnson (1918-2020)  Katherine Johnson was the main character of the critically acclaimed film "Hidden Figures." Her contributions in the field of orbital mechanics, alongside fellow female African American mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, were critical to the United States’ success in putting astronaut John Glenn into orbit in 1962.  She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2015.

Halfway Up . . . Halfway Down

     Recently I came across the following poem -- posted by the source English Literature on Facebook --  and it reminded me with delight of the good times I have had reading aloud to my children and grandchildren and, since the poem is a bit mathy, I share it below with you!

     Halfway Down     by A. A Milne

          Halfway down the stairs
          is a stair
          where i sit.
          there isn't any
          other stair
          quite like
          it.
          i'm not at the bottom,
          i'm not at the top; 
          so this is the stair
          where
          I always
          stop.

Counting and Rhyming

     Several days ago my email contained a surprise message -- containing a mathy poem --  from Ramandeep Johal, a theoretical physicist at IISER Mohali (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) in northern India.  I offer Johal's poem below -- a poem from his 2016 collection, The Sea of Tranquility 

     From One to Ten     by Ramandeep Johal

          Some things you find in pairs
          some exist just alone.
          While a trinity needs
          some degree of unity,
          a group of four
          requires bit more.

Imaginary Numbers

     Current politics has made me take more notice of several politicians' imaginary numbers -- far from fact and human needs.  And, after a while -- to relax -- my mind moved on to the imaginary numbers of mathematics, and I found (at the PoetrySoup website) this poem which I'd like to share.

Imaginary Numbers       by Robert Pettit

Anybody can consider this statement as moot:
Negative real numbers cannot have a square root.
When working with real numbers with values less than zero,
the squared product will be positive; so where do you go?
In a parabola, all points except zero lie above the x-axis.
Many students get confused because of this.
This placed mathematicians in a bit of a quandary.
That was until numbers were invented that are imaginary.

I did not find online biographical information about poet Pettit but I did find this link to his many many poems available at PoetrySoup -- a list going back all the way to 2010.  AND here is a link to his 2010 limerick, "Seventeen."

This link leads to previous mentions of imaginary numbers in this blog.  

Math-Poetry Blog -- An Invitation to Explore

      Yesterday I made a blog posting with the same title as this one -- and this morning I discovered that my posting was full of links that were not working as I had expected.  And so, I have deleted the post.  I do, indeed, invite you to explore the blog -- lots of labels in the lower right-hand column can help you find specific posts.  And another posting with come soon . . .

Collections of Mathy Poetry

    My friend and colleague, Marian Christie, has let me know that the math-poetry collection (with commentary) that she published in 2021 -- From Fibs to Fractals: Exploring Mathematical Forms in Poetry -- is now available for free download on her website. Here is the link for downloading.   AND, this link leads to samples of Christie's own mathy poems. published earlier in her blog.

      Today I have been browsing From Fibs to Fractals.  In an entertaining and informative chat in Christie's opening chapter about the Fibonacci numbers, I encountered this sample, a six-line syllable-count Fib poem by contemporary American poet B. A. France:

       Looking     by B. A. France

               moon
               light
               rising
               above the
               skeletal treetops
               she wonders what tomorrow brings   

Poet and Math Teacher Passes On

     Poet Jonathan Holden (1941-2024) -- who, early in his career, was a math teacher -- died just a few weeks ago.  Seeing his death notice has reminded me to revisit and again enjoy and appreciate his work.  My first mention of Holden's work in this blog was in this posting in January, 2011 -- and here is a link to the list of postings in which his poetry is featured.  

     Two of Holden's mathy poems are included in the anthology that was gathered by mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz and me -- Strange Attractors,  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/ CRC Press, 2008).  One of these is "The Departure of an Alphabet,"  a poem that deals with age-related decline of memory and reasoning.  I offer its opening lines:

from   The Departure of an Alphabet     by Jonathan Holden  

A Tetrahedron leads to a Poem

     Minnesota teacher and writer Ben Orlin has done lots and lots to make mathematical ideas popular and accessible.   One of his prominent activities is his website Math with Bad Drawings.  In this posting from 2018, Poem on a Pyramid, Orlin uses the special pyramid called a tetrahedron to structure a poem.  Each of the edges of the tetrahedron is associated with a line of verse and each triangular face is thereby associated with a three-line stanza.  The poem below was constructed by associating a line with each of the six edges -- with a stanza for each of the four triangular faces.

A tetrahedron -- for designing a poem

Below, I offer Orlin's poem; for more details about its construction, visit and explore Orlin's wonderfully informative and stimulating website.

Seeking Student Math-Poems . . .

     A quick reminder that the American Mathematical Society Student Poetry Contest DEADLINE is coming soon -- on February 2, 2025.  Poems from three groups are solicited:  middle school, high school, and college students.

Here is a link to my December blog posting that gives details about the contest.

This link shows a poster with the winning poems from last year's contest.

Here are this year's contest rules from the AMS Website.

Lots and Lots of Math Blogs . . .

     Recently I was informed by Feedspot that this blog of mine, Intersections -- Poetry with Mathematics,  was selected as one of the Top 90 Math Blogs on the web.  At Feedspot's request, I invite you to follow that link and explore their list.

Geometry in New York City

     As I grew up on a farm, mathematics -- with planting depth-and-distance measurements, with counting of animals and fenceposts, with angles of tree-branches, and many other basics -- was important background knowledge.  As I grew older and experienced more city-time, the mathematics I encountered was more complex.  When I visit Pittsburgh or San Francisco or New York City or . . . I feel the geometry that surrounds me.  And I was reminded of those geometric feelings when I recently encountered this poem:

Mayakovsky in New York:  A Found Poem     by Annie Dillard

     New York: You take a train that rips through versts.
     It feels as if the trains were running over your ears.

     For many hours the train flies along the banks
     of the Hudson about two feet from the water. At the stops,
     passengers run out, buy up bunches of celery,
     and run back in, chewing the stalks as they go.

     Bridges leap over the train with increasing frequency.

Enhanced Understanding of Math through Poetry

If you have TWO ways of saying something,
that enhances your understanding of it!

     For those of you going to the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle (JMM 2025), an important session available to attend is this one, scheduled for the morning of January 9 and sponsored by AWM, the Association for Women in Mathematics:

AWM Special Session on Exploring Mathematics through the Arts and Pedagogy in Creative Settings

And a very special presentation within this session that explores connections between Mathematics and Poetry is "Enhanced Understanding of Mathematics Through Poetry" -- presented by scientist, teacher, and writer Emily R. Lutken.  Lutken's presentation is scheduled for the morning of Thursday, January 9 -- here is a link to the abstract and scheduling details for that event.  Here is one of the mathy poems that will be part of Lutken's presentation: