Poetry of Romania - Nora School, Apr 24

     During several summers teaching conversational English to middle-school students in Deva, Romania, I became acquainted with the work of Romanian poets.  These included:  Mikhail Eminescu (1850-1889, a Romantic poet, much loved and esteemed, honored with a portrait on Romanian currency), George Bakovia (1881-1957, a Symbolist poet, and a favorite poet of Doru Radu, an English teacher in Deva with whom I worked on some translations of Bacovia into English), Nichita Stanescu  (1933-1983, an important post-war poet, a Nobel Prize nominee -- and a poet who often used mathematical concepts and images in his verse).
     On April 24, 2014 at the Nora School here in Silver Spring I will be reading (sharing the stage with Martin Dickinson and Michele Wolf) some poems of Romania -- reading both my own writing of my Romania experiences and some translations of work by Romanian poets.     Here is a sample (translated by Gabriel Praitura and me) of  a poem by Nichita Stanescu:

Homage to Euclid

In my preceding post (20 March 2014) Katharine Merow's poem tells of the new geometries 

developed with variations of Euclid's Parallel Postulate.  

Martin Dickinson's poem, on the other hand, tells of richness within Euclid's geometry.

Poet and attorney Martin Dickinson is with the Environmental Law Institute and is a long term activist. The Nora School Poetry Series has scheduled both of us (along with Michele Wolf) to be part of a reading next month on April 24, 2014 .  It is my additional good fortune that conversations with Dickinson have included his sharing with me this mathy poem:

     Homage to Euclid       by Martin Dickinson

     What points are these,
     visible to us, yet revealing something invisible—
     invisible, yet real? 

Wartime recurrence

In mathematics, it is not unusual to define an entity using a recurrence relation. 
For example, in defining powers of a positive integer:
       The 2nd power of  7  may be defined as  7  x  7¹ ;
               the 3rd power of  7  may be defined as  7  times  7², 
              and the 4th power is  7  times  7³,
              and, in general, for any positive integer n,  7ⁿ⁺¹  =  7  x  7ⁿ. 

Several weeks ago I attended a reading of fine poetry here in Silver Spring at the Nora School  -- a reading that featured DC-area poets Judith Bowles, Luther Jett, and David McAleavey.  I was delighted to hear in "Recessional" -- one of the poems presented that evening by Jett -- the mathematical pattern of recurrence, building stepwise  with a potentially infinite number of steps (as with the powers of 7, above) into a powerful poem.  I include it below: