Poet and Math Teacher Passes On

     Poet Jonathan Holden (1941-2024) -- who, early in his career, was a math teacher -- died just a few weeks ago.  Seeing his death notice has reminded me to revisit and again enjoy and appreciate his work.  My first mention of Holden's work in this blog was in this posting in January, 2011 -- and here is a link to the list of postings in which his poetry is featured.  

     Two of Holden's mathy poems are included in the anthology that was gathered by mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz and me -- Strange Attractors,  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/ CRC Press, 2008).  One of these is "The Departure of an Alphabet,"  a poem that deals with age-related decline of memory and reasoning.  I offer its opening lines:

from   The Departure of an Alphabet     by Jonathan Holden  

India's National Math Day -- Poetic Quotes

     A recent math holiday that I remembered after it had passed is National Mathematics Day in India -- held on December 22 and celebrating the birth anniversary of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1870-1920).   (An interesting math-item from India is the claim that the first recorded use of zero occurred there.)

     Ramanujan is celebrated in a poem by Jonathan Holden.  Its opening lines: 

Holden's complete poem is found here in this posting from 2/19/2011.

Math and poetry in film

     One of my delights in the last year has been viewing films about poets and mathematicians.   First, "The Man Who Knew Infinity" -- about the mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) and, more recently "Neruda" about the Chilean politician  and poet, Pablo Neruda. And also, the film "Paterson" -- about a bus-driver poet named Paterson in the city of Paterson, NJ -- a city well-known for its earlier poet, William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) who immortalized his hometown in his very long poem, "Paterson."

Here is a link to my earlier posting of a poem by Jonathan Holden, "Ramanaujan."

     I have included elsewhere in this blog several poems by Pablo Neruda 

and offer links here:  "28325674549,"  from "The Heights of Macchu Pichu," 

and a two-line poem, "Point."
     The author of the poetry in the film "Paterson" is Ron Padgett -- 

and here are links to my previous postings of two of his poems: 

 "The Roman Numerals" and "The Giraffe."

 
     At the website Poets.org one may find 38 poems by William Carlos Williams and 11 poems by Pablo Neruda.  At PoetryFoundation.org one may find find 27 poems by Pablo Neruda and 120 poems by William Carlos Williams and 15 poems by Ron Padgett.

Calculus (and calyculus)

For lots of years I have subscribed to A.Word.A.Day, founded by Anu Garg, and on 3 June 2013  -- offered in the category of "words that appear to be misspellings" -- the word that appeared in my email was calyculus (kuh-LIK-yuh-luhs), a noun designating a cup-shaped structure.  From this, of course, my thoughts turned to calculus and to poems on that subject.  Below I offer "UR-CALCULUS" by Jonathan Holden.  This Kansan poet has said that that his physicist father would write equations while sitting at the dining room table -- and "UR-CALCULUS" considers mathematics from a boy-riding-in-the-back-seat-of-a-car point of view.  

     UR-CALCULUS     by Jonathan Holden

               The child is the father of the man. 
                        -- W. W. Wordsworth

     Back then, "Calculus"
     was a scary college word,
     and yet we studied it
     from the back seat, we studied  
     the rates at which
     the roadside trees went striding 

Baseball, math, and poetry

The end of summer approaches and, with it, the end of the baseball season.  This blog celebrated the triplet (baseball, mathematics, poetry) on 9 April 2010, featuring samples from and links to poems by Marianne Moore and Jerry Wemple. Today we herald the same trio, this time with "Night Game" by Jonathan Holden.

A jar in Tennessee

     Several of my early insights concerning the connections between poetry and mathematics grew from ideas presented by poet Jonathan Holden -- of whom interviewer Chris Ellis (in 2000) asked this question:
     Ellis:  You have drawn similarities between poetry and mathematics. Can you explain the association or similarity between poetry and math in a way the mathematically challenged can grasp?
     Holden: The "poetry and mathematics" analogy was simply to demonstrate, for those with some mathematical sophistication, that both languages "measure" things.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

One of the most intriguing tales in the modern history of mathematics involves Indian-born mathematician and genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) who traveled to England to work with G H Hardy (1877-1947).  Poet Jonathan Holden, who writes often of matters mathematical, offers this portrait of the Indian prodigy: 

Integrals -- a poem

Integrals    by Jonathan Holden

     Erect, arched in disdain,
the integrals drift from left
across white windless pages
to the right,
serene as swans. 

Hyperbolic effects

Last month I went to the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History -- for a photo scroll down to the end of this post -- and that visit provoked me to begin searching for the term "hyperbolic" in poems.   I came close when I found "hyperbola" in a poem by Jonathan Holden and hyperbole in a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: