Celebrate Blaise Pascal

      A couple of weeks ago (on June 19) I learned on X (formerly Twitter) that 401 years ago, mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was born -- more info here.  Probably Pascal is best known for the array of numbers called Pascal's triangle -- and that array has influenced poetry as well as mathematics.

    My source of this info about Pascal was an ongoing collection of postings on X by Mathematics & Statistics St Andrews,  @StA_Maths_Stats, which offers lots of historical facts about math and math people.  Their June 19 posting offered this:

This blog (then and now) and Pascal

     When I began this blog in 2010, I imagined up to 100 postings -- I saw it as a way to share math-related poetry that I had written and gathered during my years of teaching.  Now, as I prepare my 748th post, I am thinking about how I can organize my posts to make them findable and useful to the reader who visits and browses herein.

One thing that I have recently done is to update the blog's searchability -- 
in the right column you will find a search box.  

If you enter a term like "math" into the box, the search finds most of the posts in the entire blog and is thus not very helpful -- but you might try the term "triangle" and you would find about 20 relevant posts; one of them (from October 13, 2010) has the title "Varieties of triangles -- by Guillevic" and is the most-visited entry herein.  If you are, like me, someone who looks for math publicity and opportunities for girls, you may choose to enter "girl" in the search box.  This search, too, will lead to about 20 postings. 

Poetic Pascal Triangle

First published in 2007 in Mathematics Magazine, Caleb Emmons' poem "Dearest Blaise" has the form of (Blaise) Pascal's Triangle.  That original publication offered also a challenge:  what is the next line of Emmons' poem?   What is your guess?