September Brings THE BLOOMSBURG FAIR

     During the past weekend, long-time friends in Pennsylvania have reminded me that this is the week of The Bloomsburg Fair -- an annual event held in Bloomsburg, PA (where I lived with my family and taught mathematics at Bloomsburg University for a bunch of years).  Public schools in Bloomsburg started their fall classes a week early so that students could have vacation-time during Fair Week -- held near the end of September.  The fair brings farmers and gardeners and cooks and other creative country folk together to show their products and it was easy for me to get involved since I lived just a few blocks from the Bloomsburg Fairground.  Moreover, Pennsylvania county fairs were familiar to me from my childhood.  I grew up on a farm near Indiana, PA  -- home of the Indiana County Fair, in which my father participated by exhibiting crops and animals and which I attended to enjoy Ferris-wheel rides and other carnival entertainments.

     One of my celebrations of this fondly-remembered Bloomsburg event was to write a poem entitled "The Bloomsburg Fair," a poem with bits of math.  Here is one of its stanzas.

Picture a Mathematician . . . describe HER . . .

     Mathematicians are not always white and nerdy and male . . . but, for the others who dare to specialize in science and mathematics, there are many stereotypes that need to be busted.  Written by Gioia De Cari, a former MIT student, the play "Truth Values" reveals a woman's experience as a student in a male-science environment.  And the documentary film, "Picture a Scientist" describes the unequal treatment -- and payment -- of female professors.

     While you are seeking ways to view Truth Values and Picture a Scientist perhaps you will want to write down some of your own views;  while you are gathering your thoughts, here are three of my syllable-square stanzas about women in math to reflect on.

Syllable-square thoughts about Math Women

A Math-Poetry Essay -- in the Time of Corona

     Springer Publishing is developing an e-book, Mathematics in the Time of Corona, an online collection of various reactions to the pandemic – due for release sometime in May 2021.  One of the chapters to be included is by me, “Counting Syllables, Shaping Poems:  Reflections”  and this 4-page essay of mine will be available for free online reading (and download) until the end of March at this link:  Counting Syllables, Shaping Poems: Reflections | SpringerLink.

Pandemic   (Haiku)

Exponential growth:
small numbers doubling quickly—
a world upended!

To explore other postings of Haiku in this blog, click on this link. 
A copy of the essay "Counting Syllables . . ." is also permanently available here.

TalkingWriting with Mathematics

     TalkingWriting is an online journal that's celebrating its 10th birthday -- TEN YEARS of including mathematics in its mix of poetry.  This mathy connection has grown strong through the poetry editorship of Carol Dorf, poet and retired math teacher.  In this anniversary issue, poems are paired with works of visual art and the effect is stunning; from it,  I offer below samples of poems by Amy Uyematsu and by me.      
      Amy Uyematsu's poem "Lunes During This Pandemic"  thoughtfully applies the counting structure of the "lune" (aka "American Haiku") with three-line stanzas of 3/5/3 words per line.

Links to mathy poems . . .

     The Annual Bridges Math-Arts Conference will not be meeting this year but mathematician Sarah Glaz has arranged for lots of math-poetic activity online -- go here and scroll down for links to poetry-presentations that she has arranged.  
     Glaz has gathered a Bridges 2020 Poetry Anthology (not yet published) that contains five of my mathy poems.  I read aloud two of them -- 

"Love Mathematics" and "A Baker's Dozen" -- here on YouTube.  

Thanks to my neighbor, Mark Willey, for help with the YouTube recording!

Celebrating 10 Years of Math-Poetry Blogging

     This blog's first posting, "Poetry of Logical Ideas" -- found here, occurred ten years ago today on March 23, 2010.    This link leads to a list of topics, poets, and mathematicians contained in the 1200+ postings made since then.
 

Word Cloud for this blog -- created at https://tagcrowd.com.

Observe Pi-Day by writing in Pilish

      Many poets use constraints to shape their writing but few are as constrained as mathematician Mike Keith who has written many works in Pilish -- that is, a language in which the flow of words have lengths that follow the digits of Pi.  In honor of 2020's Pi-Day on 3.14, I have developed a small bit of Pilish, a poem of sorts, which I offer below.

 

 Entering the term "Pilish" into this blog's SEARCH box finds these earlier postings that celebrate Pi. 

 The first 50 decimal digits are 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510 . . .

"Numbers and Faces" and 23 more math poems

     "Numbers and Faces" is the title of a poem by W. H. Auden -- and I also have used it as the title of a collection of poems that I gathered into a small anthology for the Humanistic Mathematics Network in 2001.  The collection is out of print BUT is available here as a pdf -- and the Table of Contents is shown below:

Is TWO more than ONE?

     A poetry friend reminded me recently via email of the poetry of Shel Silverstein (1930-1999) -- both humorous and provocative.  The emailed poem was "Zebra Question" and it employs the strategy so often considered in mathematics -- in testing the truth of a statement, consider also the opposite.   Silverstein's "Zebra Question" opens with these lines:

       I asked the Zebra,
       Are you black with white stripes?
       Or white with black stripes?
       And the zebra asked me,
       Are you good with bad habits?
       Or are you bad with good habits?     

Counting the Women . . .

     Sometimes a professional group or a meeting-agenda or a table of contents contains so few women's names that they are easily counted.  In this syllable-square stanza, I praise the absence of that condition: 

     This stanza and others with similar attitude appear in "Give Her Your Support" -- a poetry-page published recently in Math Horizons.  For the entire collection, follow this link.

An Interview of/by a Mathy Poet

     University of Connecticut mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz has interviewed me on behalf of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts.  The article Sarah wrote is now available online -- but the online version requires a costly subscription.  I offer instead this link to a pdf file of her "Artist Interview: JoAnne Growney."  The article gives some of my personal and mathematical history -- growing up on a farm, studying mathematics because of a scholarship, loving both poetry and math and eventually finding time to follow both interests and see their connections.  And it includes some poems. I invite you to follow this link and browse a bit!  

Thank you, Sarah!

BRIDGES, 2018 -- math-art-poetry -- in Stockholm

       During each summer since 1998, mathematicians and visual artists, poets and musicians, have gotten together at a BRIDGES conference to celebrate the overlapping connections of their arts.  This years conference, BRIDGES 2018, will be held July 25-59 in Stockholm.  As she has done in several previous years, mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz has organized a poetry reading as part of that event; this link leads to information about the participating poets.  Available for purchase, a poetry anthology with work from past and present Bridges poets.  The small poem offered below is one that is featured in the anthology.

          Good Fortune       by JoAnne Growney

          is good numbers—
          the length of a furrow,
          the count of years,
          the depth of a broken heart,
          the cost of camouflage, 
          the volume of tears.

     "Good Fortune" also is found in my collection, Red Has No Reason (Plain View Press, 2010).

Mathy poems OUT LOUD

     Here is a link to "Applied Mathematics" written and recited by London poet Dan Simpson.   This link leads to several math-arts samples (including two poems -- the first is by Gizem Karaali and you may scroll down to hear my poem, "A Taste of Mathematics") recorded by Samuel Hansen. (The complete text of "A Taste of Mathematics" is available here.)  This link connects to information about a 2014 YouTube video featuring a varied list of mathy poets.

JMM Seattle, 1-7-16 -- Poetry+Math+Art

 Read your mathy poems in Seattle!

An invitation to participate -- in January!  Read on!

 ANNOUNCING Poetry + Art + Math

 January 7, 2016, Thursday, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm.

Room 608, Washington State Convention Center, Seattle 

     At the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) organized by Gizem Karaali, Pomona College; 

Lawrence M. Lesser, University of Texas at El Paso; and Douglas Norton, Villanova University. 

March 23 -- Emmy Noether's birthday

Today, March 23, 2015, Google celebrates the 133rd birthday of mathematician Emmy Noether.  In support of the celebration here is a link to "My Dance is Mathematics," a poem I wrote to honor this pioneering mathematician.  I hope that celebrations of Noether and other math-women will help to create a world in which these lines from my poem about her are no longer true:

          If a woman's dance is mathematics,
          she dances alone.

A Fractal Poem

    A fractal is an object that displays self-similarity -- roughly, this means that the parts have the same shape as the whole -- as in the following diagram which shows successive stages in the development of the "box fractal" (from Wolfram MathWorld). 

   
Michigan poet Jack Ridl and I share an alma mater (Pennsylvania's Westminster College) and we recently connected when I found mathematical ideas in the poems in his collection Broken Symmetry  (Wayne State University Press, 2006); from that collection, here is "Fractals" -- offering us a poetic version of self-similar structure:

       Fractals    by Jack Ridl

       On this autumn afternoon, the light  
       falls across the last sentence in a letter,
       just before the last movement of Brahms’ 
       Fourth Symphony, a recording made more 
       than 20 years ago, the time when we were  
       looking for a house to rehabilitate, maybe  

A thousand Christmas trees

My email poem-a-day today from www.poets.org is "Christmas Trees" by Robert Frost (1874-1963); this 1916 poem includes some calculations and reflections based on the line:

       “A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Frost's poem has provoked me to thoughts of inflation and conservation; for the full poem, follow the link given with the title above.  And, if your time permits, go back to previous "Christmas" postings in this blog at these links:  23 December 2013,  24 December 2012,  21 December 2012,  22 December 2011, and 2 September 2010.

Dimensions of Discovery

Along the one-dimensional straight line
there are points and segments
but no curves or squares.

In the flat plane of two dimensions 

there are points and segments 

and circles and squares.

In the vast space of three dimensions 
there are points and segments 
and squares and spheres.

In a space of four dimensions 

there is more than 

we can imagine.

Poetry Reading 1-11-15 at JMM in San Antonio

You are invited to a poetry reading 
sponsored by the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

at the 2015 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM)

Gonzalez Convention Center   Room 205  San Antonio, Texas
Sunday, January 11, 2015, 5:30 - 7:00 p.m. 

     All poets who write of mathematics and all who are interested in mathematical poetry are invited. Join the gathering to share poems and to enjoy the company of like-minded poetic-math people!  The reading is sponsored by the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics  and will be hosted by Gizem Karaali and Larry Lesser.    
     Although last-minute decisions to participate are possible -- you may simply show up and sign up to read -- we invite and encourage poets to submit poetry (≤ 3 poems, ≤ 5 minutes) and a bio in advance, and, as a result, be listed on our printed program. Inquiries and submissions (by December 1, 2014) may be made to Gizem Karaali (gizem.karaali@pomona.edu).

Changing colors, counting syllables

Changing Colors

by JoAnne Growney

Blue

yoyo --

awkwardly

stopping-starting,

rising-plummeting,

seeking self-control. Please,

mother-friend-lover-child, don't

pull string.  Let me collect myself.

I  lift  myself  to  the  treetops,

soar with the golden eagle,

find rest on fleecy clouds.

My orb embraces

everybody --

powerful,

yellow 

sun.