Thursday, June 19, 2025

Honoring Peter Cameron

THANK YOU, Peter Cameron,

for your generous sharing of mathematical ideas and their links!

      Happening soon -- the Conference on Theoretical and Computational Algebra -- scheduled to take place in Evora, Portugal, June 29 - July 3, 2025.  (Conference information is available at this link.)   A special feature of this conference will be the honoring of mathematician Peter Cameron.  As mathematicians and poetry-lovers and bloggers, Peter and I discovered each other online.  This  link leads to Cameron's first "Mathematics and poetry" blog posting (on April 6, 2010) and in Cameron's posting on July 14, 2010 (entitled "Mathematics and Poetry, 2") he links to my blog (first posting March 23, 2010) with this statement:

JoAnne Growney has posted on her blog a poem structured using prime factorisations: I think it is a lovely poem, and urge you to take a look.

This link leads to a summary-description of Cameron's blog and this link goes to his first "Mathematics and poetry" posting.   AND, here is a link to the search-results for the term "poetry" in his blog.

     I would like to celebrate Peter Cameron by sharing the opening stanzas of his ten-stanza mathy poem, "Millennium":  

               Millennium                 by Peter Cameron

               An artefact
               of ten fingers;

               an accident
               of dark age monks’
               calendar lore;

               a bonanza
               for marketing
               and preachers on
               television.

               Numbers beguile –
               they turn in quite
               another way from
               sun, moon, planets
               and wheeling stars.

                    . . . .                Cameron's complete poem is available here.

THANK YOU, Poi Liu Bentz.


2 comments:

  1. Such a beautiful intersection of minds—math and poetry rarely get to dance together like this. Grateful for voices like Peter Cameron and JoAnne Growney who show us the elegance in both numbers and words. Hyderabad - Workie









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  2. Dear JoAnne,
    My sincere thanks for this. The conference was an overwhelming event (may I confess to an attack of impostor syndrome) and this was just the icing on the cake. Best wishes.
    Peter.

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