A poet that makes math personal

     Mathematician-poet Marion Cohen has a new poetry collection just out -- The Project of Being Alive.  Here is a sample from that collection, a poem that highlights her relationship with mathematics:

      Statement     by Marion Deutsche Cohen

     A good teacher is supposed to teach students, not subjects.
     But I teach math.
     Whoever the students, math is the subject.
     If there were no students I’d probably still teach my subject.
     I’d teach and I’d learn
     all by myself.

Echoing Marion's thoughts, I think that many of us who love mathematics and/or love poetry, enjoy the challenge of reading and rereading -- and struggling to absorb difficult ideas. 

Loving the difference quotient ... and more ...

     From Philadelphia poet-mathematician, Marion Cohen, a new collection  -- Closer to Dying (Word Tech, 2016).  When I received the book a few days ago and began to read I did, of course, seek out mathy poems.  Two of these are included below. In this first poem Cohen has some fun with the terms and symbols of introductory calculus.  In the second, she tells of an encounter of the sort that happens to many mathematicians  -- meeting someone who supposes that mathematicians do what calculators do. (This link leads to a collection of mathy poems (including ones by Cohen) at talkingwriting,com.)

MathWoman Limericks

My desk dictionary describes a limerick as a nonsense poem; my own experience has found these five-line rhymes to be more often bawdy than nonsensical.  A mathematician and poet who has extended the limerick to verses about mathematics is Philadelphian and Arcadia professor, Marion Deutsche Cohen.  Downloads of mathy limericks are available at her website.  Scrolling down a bit on Cohen's page of downloads, leads to "Permission to Add" -- a collection of limericks based on mathematical ideas. Below I feature several limericks from Cohen's newest collection of limericks -- also available for download --  about women who are/were mathematicians. 

For example: 

Poems starring mathematicians - 2

Published a century later than William Benjamin Smith's "The Merman and the Seraph" (see April 14 posting) we have Crossing the Equal Sign (Plain View Press, 2007)--a poetry collection by Marion Deutsche Cohen.  Cohen lives in Philadelphia and teaches mathematics at Arcadia University where she has used her literary interests to develop a new course, "Truth and Beauty: Mathematics in Literature."  I have chosen several excerpts from Cohen's collection that offer internal snapshots of  her sort of mathematician: