Monday, February 10, 2025

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.

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

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.  


Monday, February 3, 2025

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 . . .