Black History Month -- celebrate Haynes and Hughes

Living on the border of Washington DC I am exposed to items of local history for our nation's capital.  One such item involves the "discovery" of Langston Hughes (1902-1967) by poet Vachel Lindsay (1879 - 1931) at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, a leading conference hotel in the city.   A second story is a mathematical one.  Martha Euphnemia Lofton Haynes (1890-1980), a fourth-generation Washingtonian, was the first black woman to earn a PhD in mathematics -- conferred in 1943 by Catholic University. 

Puzzles, puzzlers, and parody

     For lots of fun, go to plus online magazine at this link to find a poem that requires a knight's tour of a chess board for you to unscramble its words and read its eight lines.

Poetry with base 10

In his collection, Rational Numbers (Truman State, 2000) Harvey Hix presents "Orders of Magnitude" -- a collection of 100 stanzas in which each stanza has ten lines and each line has ten syllables.  Beyond this numeric structure is frequent use of mathematical imagery; here are samples (stanzas 42 and 100):

Theorem-proof / Cut-up / poems

     For mathematicians, reading a well-crafted proof that turns toward its conclusion with elegance and perhaps surprise -- this mirrors an encounter with poetry.  But can one have that poetry-math experience without being fluent in the language of mathematics?  Below I offer a proof (a version of Euclid's proof of the infinitude of primes) and a "cut-up" produced from that proof-- and I invite readers (both mathematical and non-mathematical) to consider them as poems.

The Length of a Coastline

In the nineties, fifteen or so years ago, when I began posting mathematical poems on the Internet, two of my earliest connections were Ken Stange, a poet and polymath and professor of psychology at Ontario's Nipissing University, and his daughter Kate, then a teen.  Kate publicized her love of mathematics and poetry by creating an online collection,"Mathematical Poetry:  A Small Anthology" which she has continued to maintain for many years--during which she has completed undergraduate and graduate studies in mathematics. 

Ideal Geometry -- complex politics

Christopher Morley (1890-1957) was an American poet, novelist, and publisher who was the son of a poet and musician (Lilian Janet Bird) and a mathematics professor (Frank Morley) at Haverford College. His "Sonnet by a Geometer," below, is written in the voice of a circle and compares mathematical perfection with human imperfection.  For us who read the poem 90 years after its writing, Morley's phrase in line 13 -- "They talk of 14 points" -- is puzzling at first.

What is the point? -- consider Euclid

A two-line poem by Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda (1904-73), found in my bilingual edition of Extravagaria, reminded me of the poetic nature of several of the opening expressions of Euclid's geometry.  Both of these follow:

Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) -- The Circle of the Brain cannot be Squared

Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) was a writer who published under her own name at a time when most women published anonymously.  Her writing addressed a number of topics, including gender equity and scientific method.

Mathematical 'grooks' from Piet Hein

Piet Hein (Denmark, 1905-1996) was many-faceted--by times a philosopher, mathematician, designer, scientist, inventor of games and poet. He also created a new poetic form that he called 'grook' ("gruk" in Danish). Hein wrote over 10,000 grooks, most in Danish or English, published in more than 60 books. Some say that the name is short for 'GRin & sUK' ("laugh & sigh", in Danish).  Here are samples, with links to more:

Poems starring mathematicians - 5

In my own library this next poem is found (untitled) in Collected Sonnets by Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950),  but it also is found online at various sites. The first line of the sonnet, which announces Euclid as its subject, is well-known to most mathematicians; enjoy here all fourteeen lines.

Poetry and Mathematics -- Similarities

HOW are mathematics and poetry similar?

Often-quoted in mathematical circles are words from mathematician Karl Weierstrass (1815-97): “It is true that a mathematician, who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.”    And from physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955):  "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." More recently, from Lipman Bers (1914-1993): “  . . . mathematics is very much like poetry . . . what makes a good poem—a great poem—is that there is a large amount of thought expressed in very few words."

W. H. Auden's Kingdom of Number

Some poetry is termed "mathematical" because mathematical terminology is included in the text of the poem, often to vivid effect. Such is the case in this poem by W H Auden, in which it is also the case that most lines have 11 syllables.