A recent visit to the Poetry Foundation website brought me to poems by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) -- and I counted sadly as I read his poem, "We Are Seven." I offer its opening stanzas below (and the complete poem -- 17 stanzas -- is available here.)
We Are Seven by William Wordsworth
For some students, math is fun BUT . . . if we don't understand something that can keep it from being fun. For those who DO NOT FIND MATH FUN, it is important for the rest of us to try to change that attitude. One useful viewpoint is that math need not be treated as an isolated subject . . . it is connected to our lives in VERY MANY ways. And sometimes, as this blog's postings illustrate, poetry offers non-threatening ways of making connections.
One of my recent discoveries is the website We Are Teachers where I found a collection of 38 mathy poems -- a dozen for elementary school students and the rest for middle and high students. Here is a sample from the elementary school group.
Fourteen years ago, back in October of 2011, I posted a poem of mine entitled, "Like Poetry, Mathematics is Beautiful" (at this link). Written more than thirty years ago, this continues to be one of my favorites of my mathy poems. I offer a portion of it below.
Like Poetry, Mathematics is Beautiful by JoAnne Growney
Timidly I ask
each one I meet if they
find mathematics beautiful
or useful, and each one dares to say,
"Useful, of course. I use it every day."
And if I seem to want a proof,
they all go on to tell
that daily they subtract and add
to keep a checkbook; sometimes also
they multiply to find how many squares
they need to tile the kitchen floor.
Born in New York City (1950) and of Asian heritage, poet Arthur Sze is the 25th US Poet Laureate (named on September 15, 2025) and the first Asian American to hold that position. In the October 20, 2025 issue of The New Yorker, we find Sze's poem, "Library of Congress," which opens with these somewhat mathy lines:
You peer down a lit corridor
on the fifth tier of stacks
where a million books breathe
on shelves, here's a book
on neutrinos, captured in Antarctica,
here's another on solar flares.
A curator displays a book
in Vai script and points to a triangle
with two dots, you wonder . . .
Mathematics organizes libraries!
More poetry from Sze can be found here;
scroll down below the bio to find titles and links.
Poetry-comic-artist Grant Snider posts wonderfully illustrated and entertaining verses online -- on X (Twitter) @grantdraws -- and sometimes his postings are mathy. Here is a link to an interview with Snider. Snider has indicated in his postings that our current month of October is Poetry Comics Month, Here is a link to one of his past poetry-comics-month postings -- and below I offer one of his illustrated mathy haiku.
On X I learned that this week -- November 10-14, 2025 -- is World Nursery Rhyme Week, and I searched and found this website that offers information about the week and these "5 official rhymes for 2025":
Monday, 10th -- Sing a Song of Sixpence
Tuesday, 11th -- Humpty Dumpty
Wednesday, 12th -- When I Was One (I played the drum)
Thursday, 13th -- I Hear Thunder
Friday, 14th -- Two Little Dickie Birds
Here at this website are all of the above except "Two Little Dickie Birds" -- which I offer a version of below. (Here in Wikipedia is more about that rhyme.)
At this link, I found the following math-poetry information:
JOHANNESBURG - Some good news for struggling mathematics students:
Award-winning author Botshelo Mthomboti has a solution for you. In her book, Poetic Atmosphere of Mathematics, Mthomboti simplifies the subject through poetry. The 22-year-old Financial Management graduate has also penned two other books, A Black Child Transformed by Accounting, and The Poetic Atmosphere of Income Tax.
Here is a link to a YouTube video of a news story -- entitled "Poetic Solutions to Complex Problems" -- that tells of Mthomboti and shares her poem entitled "Multiplication and Division of Variables." And here is more about Mthomboti.
THANK YOU, Botshelo Mthomboti, for the enthusiastic energy you give to mathematics.
Stephanie Strickland is a poet whom I know and much admire -- and her work contains a rich variety of math-poetry creations; her poems have been featured in several posts in this blog (Here's a link to those postings.) Today I had the good fortune to refind another of her poems -- not yet posted herein -- and I offer it below.
Who Counts, Counts by Stephanie Strickland
Baby and you
--and me,
we will make three,
but baby-and-me
are different; we're two-
who-are-one.
Posted on X by talented and prolific STEAM blogger, Heidi Bee Roemer (@poetweet4), this Halloween poem relates to the geometry of a carved pumpkin face -- with mathematical shapes.
I recently learned of a book by creative writer Kellie Krumrie entitled Math Class (Calamari Press, 2022) -- a book of essays that feature teen-age girls. Exploring further I found poetry by Krumrie in La Vague -- an online feminist journal that has ceased publication BUT retains online records of previously published work.
Here is one of Krumrie's poems which I am enjoying puzzling over!
c e m e n t / e m m y n o e t h e r by Kellie Krumrie
‘She had the faculty of visualizing remote, very complex connections without resorting to concrete examples.’
Recently I discovered the website teacher planet and found there a variety of math-related resources including humorous versions of definitions of math terms.
Using a poetry-stanza format, I have included several of these "poetic" definitions below:
Math is like love;
a simple idea,
but it can get complicated.
Mathematician Lauren K. Williams (PhD ’05 MIT, currently Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University) has won a 2025 MacArthur Fellowship, a prestigious honor often called the “genius grant.” The award is presented annually by the MacArthur Foundation to “talented individuals in a variety of fields who have shown exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits.” The MacArthur Foundation praised Williams for “uncovering transformative connections between algebraic combinatorics and problems in other areas of math and physics.”
A varied and energetic and very valuable voice for the importance of connections between mathematics and poetry is STEAM-Poetry advocate Heidi Bee Roemer. Here is a link to her focus on mathy poems. (STEAM is a popular abbreviation for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics.)
Recently Romer has opened registration for a STEAM Poetry Video Contest. Between now and April 30, 2026, students can choose a STEAM-themed poem (from a selection of 40 poems), create short videos for their younger peers, and enter them in the contest. Contest details are here.
And here is a sample poem by Roemer -- a mathy poem written for elementary-school students.
Here in the US, we have a new poet laureate (announced by the Library of Congress on September 15, 2025) -- and this selected poet Arthur Sze sees poetry as a unifying agent -- "verse can bring us together".
Sze is a poet whose work I value reading -- but its links to mathematics are gentle and scattered. Here is a sample -- the closing lines from Sze's poem "Sight Lines". (The complete poem is available here at poets.org.)
A recent discovery that I have found fascinating is a reversible poem -- a poem with word/line choices that read the same from the last to the first as from the first to the last. Author Marilyn Singer offers the following sample on her website from her collection Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse Poems – illustrated by Josee Masse; Dutton/Penguin, 2010.
In this unique collection of reversible verse, classic fairy tales are turned on their heads. Literally. Read these clever poems from top to bottom. Then reverse the lines and read from bottom to top to give these well-loved stories a delicious new spin. Word patterns remain the same -- with changes only in punctuation and capitalization.
IN REVERSE by Marilyn Singer
Recently I found this online article in the Bangi News:
Why poetry has lost its lustre in the modern world
It offers the following forlorn math-and-poetry view:
Today, with schools pushing
math and science over the arts,
poetry feels like an old, boring puzzle.
Why spend time decoding a poem
when you can watch a 15-second reel
that makes you laugh?
Is this view useful? Explore more in the Bangi News here.
Recently I learned via a post on X -Twitter by Anthony Bonato (@Anthony_Bonato) that the new Roman Catholic Pope Leo was, in college, a math major. (For Wikipedia's info on Pope Leo, follow this link.) I celebrate this with one of my favorite poetic forms, a syllable-count triangle.
Math
is a
discipline
that can prepare
for leadership and
holiness -- Pope Leo!
Today I have been thinking about election results and the role that non-voters have in deciding elections and I have shaped my words into the following syllable-count triangle:
Count
the votes.
Elections
are decided
by we who vote -- and
also by those who don't!
This is a quick and brief post BUT its shortness may give you some time to explore these richly populated links:
Math Songs for Kids -- on YouTube.
Each year the Association for Women in Mathematics holds an essay contest -- inviting middle school and high school and college students each to interview a math woman and to write about it. The names of 2025 contest winners -- and links to their essays -- are available here at this link.
One of my delights as I browsed through the contest results was to find male as well as female essay winners. Here is a link to "Bridging Worlds through Mathematics" -- an essay by Alan Zhang of Francis Richmond Middle School, telling of an interview with Alena Erchenko (Dartmouth College), that won first place in the Grades 6-8 contest group. And this link leads to "Where Dreams Can Take You" -- an essay by Peter Holman of Frances C, Richmond Middle School telling of an interview with Kim Luke (Simbex).
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