One of the challenges posed by a multi-year blog is locating interesting old posts. One of my frequent early topics was "poems starring mathematicians" and I offer links to several of these from 2011 below:
December 8 "Monsieur Probability" by Brian McCabe
November 13 My abecedarian poems, "I Know a Mathematician" and "Mathematician"
July 5 "Fixed Points" by Susan Case -- about mathematicians in Poland during WWII
July 2 "To Myself" by Abba Kovner
January 30 "Mr Glusenkamp," a sonnet to a geometry teacher by Ronald Wallace
January 28 "Mathematician" by Sherman K Stein
And, here is a link, via PoemHunter.com to "The Mathematician in Love," a poem by William John Macquorn Rankine, a poem that appears also in the multi-variable anthology, Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (AK Peters, 2008), edited by Sarah Glaz and me. Here is the first (of 8) stanza of Rankine's entertaining poem:
A mathematician fell madly in love
With a lady, young, handsome, and charming:
By angles and ratios harmonic he strove
Her curves and proportions all faultless to prove.
As he scrawled hieroglyphics alarming.
Showing posts with label Abba Kovner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abba Kovner. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Mathematicians divide
One of my fine graduate courses at Hunter College was a "World Poetry" course taught by William Pitt Root. One of our texts was Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W W Norton, 1993), edited by Carolyn Forché. In this collection is found "To Myself," a poem that confronts fear, by Abba Kovner (1818-1987), a hero of anti-Nazi resistance. Kovner dares to open the poem with the word "Mathematicians."
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