A Mathematician's Villanelle

     One of the most active and effective ambassadors for connections between mathematics and the arts is Gizem Karaali. Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at California's Pomona College.  Poet and writer as well as teacher and researcher, Karaali is a founding editor of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, a peer-reviewed open-access journal that publishes articles, essays, fiction and poetry with a rich variety of connections to mathematics.

     Recently I rediscovered online one of Karaali's poems, a villanelle published almost ten years ago in the Mathematical Association of America's undergraduate magazine, Math Horizons (February, 2015, Volume 22, Issue 3).

A MATHEMATICIAN'S VILLANELLE       by Gizem Karaali

When first did I learn to cherish the bittersweet taste of mathematics?
Mental torture, subtle joy, doubt and wonder, me in meaning
Must have come later, after the games, the limericks, the lyrics.

Strange ceremonies awaited me, mystical hymns, magic tricks,
After the first gulp of water, the first bite, the first bloodletting.
When first did I learn to cherish the bittersweet taste of mathematics?

Give HER your support

  
                     In school, many
                     gifted math girls.
                     Later, so few
                     famed math women!

Thank you to Math Horizons (edited by Dave Richeson) for recent publication of "Give HER Your Support" -- a collection of syllable-square stanzas (one of which is given above) that focus on math-women.  Online access to the article is available here -- and this link leads to a PDF of the article that I have downloaded and made available from my website.

Meeting Math People via Poems

     Mathematics classes are crowded with vital material and it is hard to find time to also consider the PEOPLE of mathematics -- one way to do this is by offering poems.  In the September issue of Math Horizons, my brief article, "Mathematics and Poetry" offers a variety of samples -- introducing poems by mathematicians (including William Rowan Hamilton) and poems about mathematicians (Brian McCabe writing about Sophie Germaine, Cathryn Essinger writing about her super-logical brother).  
     Here are a pair of lines from Voltaire about mathematician and scientist Émilie Du Châtelet:

               She has, I assure you, a genius rare.
               With Horace and Newton, she can compare. 

     A wonderful poem to add to those quoted in the article is in the voice of a math student who protests discrimination; it is by Caribbean-American poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992) and entitled "Hanging Fire" -- the complete poem is posted here.

               I should have been on the Math Team
               my marks were better than his

Here is a link to a pdf of the Math Horizons article.  The article does not contain web-links, BUT each of the poems may be found by searching this blog using the poet's name.

Burma Shave Mathematics

     One of the positive aspects of many math journals is that they are not shy about including poems that related to mathematics -- a negative aspect of that practice is that the poems are not included in the Contents listing for that publication.  And so, the fact that my poem "A Mathematician's Nightmare" appears on page 31 of the February 2001 issue of Math Horizons is lost to all but those of us who have a copy of that magazine.  Also unrecorded in these Contents is a page-full of rhymes written in response to a contest that asked for math poems composed in the style of road-side advertising for Burma Shave.  From the late 1920s to the early 1960s, US highway travelers encountered various series of small signs advertising the product.  I remember, as a child, attempting to guess what was coming next as our family car drove past a series of these signs.  Here are two examples (from Wikipedia):

   A shave / That's real / No cuts to heal / A soothing / Velvet after-feel / Burma Shave
   Past / Schoolhouses / Take it slow / Let the little / Shavers grow / Burma Shave  

Think Like a Man

     To publish mathematics,
     a woman must learn to think
     like a man, learn to write like
     a man, to use only her
     initials so reviewers
     guess she's a man!  Women must
     masquerade, pretend man-think --
   
     or can we build
     new attitudes,
     so all of us
     have fair chances?!        ("Square Attitudes"   by JoAnne Growney)