Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Student-Run Math Poetry Magazine

     Several weeks ago I was surprised and delighted to receive an email from Lillian Liu, a high school student in Westchester, New York and also is a mentee of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) -- with mentor Dr. Annalisa Crannell, emerita professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania and someone I have been privileged to know.

     High school junior Lillian Liu has recently founded The Hyperbolic Review --  her response to noticing that "mathematical poetry isn’t as widely discussed or recognized as it should be. It seemed that many people weren’t even aware of its existence." Because this blog shows my connection with mathy poetry, Liu reached out to me, via email, and sent me this link to Issue 1 of The Hyperbolic Review: https://www.thehyperbolicreview.com/issue-1.

Below I offer the opening stanzas of "Asymptotes" by Devanshee Soni; following this sample will be a link to The Hyperbolic Review -- containing the complete poem and lots of others.

       Asymptotes       by Devanshee Soni

          Archimedes claims, 'The shortest distance
          between two points is a straight line',
          but you sit at the apex of some bell curve,
          balanced like a tightrope walker;
          a symmetry I could never replicate.
          So here I lay, fumbling with the
          Pythagoras theorem to find the
          shortest escape route in a room that
          refuses to behave like a right-angled triangle.

             .   .   .         (The complete poem "Asymptotes," is available here.) 

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