April celebrates both MATH and POETRY

April is National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month!  Found at the website We are Teachers, a collection of 38 poems for math students; here is one:

Contemplating the heavens

English writer G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was a poet but was better known for his pithy sayings.   For example, we have the following statement (originally found here). 

         The
         difference
         between the poet
         and the mathematician
         is that the poet tries to get
         his head into the heavens
         while the mathematician
         tries to get the heavens
         into his head.

     Alas, Chesterton's comment obeys the common assumption that the male pronoun should be used for mathematicians.  Another poetic comment on mathematicians is found in a poem by Anthony Hecht -- "Mathematics Considered As a Vice" -- available here at PoetryFoundation.org.  Hecht's poem  offers a strongly negative view of the abstract nature of mathematics.
     Rivalry between mathematics and poetry comes to a head in April -- during which we will celebrate both "National Mathematics Awareness Month" and "National Poetry Month."

April celebrates Math and Poetry

     April is National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month. Yesterday I was able to attend several of the popular and crowded events at the National Math Festival (Here's a link to "A Field Guide to Math on the National Mall" where you can see photos of items pointed out to yesterday's visitors.) and tomorrow evening (April 20) I will be part of a reading that features poetry of math and science at the DC Science Cafe (at Busboys & Poets, 5th &K Streets, 6:30 PM).  
     For tomorrow evening's reading I intend to wear my red-peppers earrings; one of the poems I will offer will be "A Taste of Mathematics" (from my collection Red Has No Reason and posted in its entirety at this link). Here is the poem's final stanza:

            She said, "Hot peppers
            are like mathematics —
            with strong flavor
            that takes over
            what they enter." 
 

A poem for your pocket

April is National Poetry Month.

April is National Mathematics Awareness Month.

Today, April 19, is Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day.

Here is a mathy poem that will fit in your pocket.

       14 Syllables     by JoAnne Growney

       A hen lays eggs
       one by one;
       the way you
       count life
       is life.

The poem "14 Syllables" is collected in Red Has No Reason (Plain View Press, 2010).

"Sustainable" in a poem

As I have mentioned previously, April is National Poetry Month and also Mathematics Awareness Month -- and the mathematical focus is "Mathematics of Sustainability."  To try to connect these April celebrations, I went to the website  www.Poets.org  and searched for a poem containing the word "sustainability."  There I found  "Patience" by Kay Ryan which contains these lines:

       Who would
       have guessed
       it possible
       that waiting
       is sustainable —
       a place with
       its own harvests.    

Please go here to Poets.org to read Ryan's entire poem.

Poetry with Math -- BRIDGES 2012, Limericks

During July 25-29, 2012, Towson University will be hosting BRIDGES 2012, a mathematics-and-the-arts interdisciplinary conference. This year's conference will feature a poetry day on Saturday, July 28. -- an event that is free and open to the public as are all "Family Day" conference activities after 2 PM.  Mark your calendar.  More information is available at the end of this post (scroll down) and at the BRIDGES website.

  This weekend in Washington, DC (April 28 - 29, 2012)

enjoy "the largest celebration of science in the USA" --

visit the FREE USA Science and Engineering Festival -- 

featuring more than 3000 exhibits. 

We note here once again the coincidence that comes with April -- when we celebrate both National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month.  Here are three limericks (bawdy, of course) by John Ciardi (1916-1986) that celebrate data collection and numerical information. 

Macbeth and Probability

     Kansas City educator Michael Round of the Center for autoSocratic Excellence has developed a host of math teaching tools -- and within them he often uses rhyming verses amid his diagrams and his prose.  Here are the opening lines of an activity in which he links Macbeth with probabilities:

The Royal Route He Took:  A Shakespeare Poem 
                                                                       by Michael Round

This Shakespeare tragedy,

Macbeth, you know the name.

His eventual downfall thinking

Probability is a game.

Following Euler in Koenigsberg

     The Köenigsberg Bridges have an important link to mathematics -- for mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) took a legendary Köenigsberg puzzle-pastime as the seed for development of a new branch of mathematics, graph theory (which is now generally included under the umbrella of combinatorics).  As the story goes, Köenigsberg residents made a Sunday recreation of trying to tour their city, crossing each of its seven bridges exactly once.  This problem is perhaps particularly fascinating because of its impossibility -- a dilemma cause by the existence of odd (rather than even) numbers of bridges between the parts of this water-separated city.

Statistics -- a lament

     Helping me to continue to connect National Poetry Month with Mathematics Awareness Month (with its theme of "Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge") is the following poem by Halifax mathematician Robert J. MacG. Dawson, and found in the September 2011 issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer. 

     Dawson's poem "Statistical Lament" will be recognizable to many as a parody of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now."  (Still more math songs and parodies may be found in earlier blog postings -- on 5 June 2011, 14 February 2011, 4 January 2011, and 23 April 2010.)

Math or poetry -- must one choose?

April celebrates poetry and mathematics -- it being both National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month -- and this year's math-theme is "Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge."  What better way to mark these joint occasions than with a poem of statistics.  I first learned of Eveline Pye -- a lively and interesting Glasgow statistician, teacher, and poet -- through "Eveline Pye: Poetry in Numbers"  in the September 2011 issue of the statistics magazine, Significance.  Here is one of the poems found therein, aptly titled "Statistics."

Start with a number . . .

     April celebrates both poetry and mathematics -- this month that is the gateway to spring is also National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month (with theme "Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge").

     Last month (March 22-25), mathematics and poetry met at the DC Poetry Festival, Split this Rock where several of us gathered for a workshop, "Counting On" -- where writers were encouraged to use a number (or numbers) as a focal point for a poem. During the workshop hour, several of us picked numbers that mattered to us and started the process of forming a poem; here are lines from Sonja deVries, Yael Flusberg, Janine Harrison, Jaime Lee Jarvis, Margaret Rozga, and me.

Attitudes of Numbers

     I like Bruce Snider 's "The Certainty of Numbers" (which you may already have found online at The Poetry Foundation website, featured in the April 14  posting) even though I disagree with the initial attitude toward mathematics expressed by its narrator.  Writing a poem can be a voyage of discovery with the narrator's view flexing as the poem progresses.  
     Snider's poem brings to mind a view of mathematics that repeatedly bothers me:  I wonder why some people -- who would not complain about the fixendess of spellings of "cat" or "dog" or "sum" -- dislike mathematics for the so-called rigidity of  arithmetic facts such as "2 + 4 = 6."  ? ? ?

Finding poems with "numbers"

     Here's a quick and enjoyable activity:
     Go to the website for The Poetry Foundation.   Browse for a bit and, when you have completed your look-around, go to the search box toward the upper right and enter the word numbers, then click on the search button to bring a list of results.  On that new page, go to the left column menu and click on Poems.   Enjoy "Number Man" by Carl Sandburg and several other poems.
     When your time permits, search using a second mathematical term, and a third.  Bookmark the site.  April is National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month.  Celebrate!

April -- month of poetry and mathematics

April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month  (with theme this year being "Unraveling Complex Systems").  Today's poem by physicist Richard Feynmann (1918-1988) celebrates both poetry and complexity; from the Epilogue of  Feynman's book, What do you care what other people think?, we have these lines: 

April: along with baseball we celebrate poetry and mathematics

Is it coincidence or design that

     April  is  National Poetry Month
            
           and

   April  is  Mathematics Awareness Month
          (This year's theme is  "mathematics and sports")

In my own reading, baseball is the sport for which I have found the most poetry.