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.