Honoring Peter Cameron

THANK YOU, Peter Cameron,

for your generous sharing of mathematical ideas and their links!

      Happening soon -- the Conference on Theoretical and Computational Algebra -- scheduled to take place in Evora, Portugal, June 29 - July 3, 2025.  (Conference information is available at this link.)   A special feature of this conference will be the honoring of mathematician Peter Cameron.  As mathematicians and poetry-lovers and bloggers, Peter and I discovered each other online.  This  link leads to Cameron's first "Mathematics and poetry" blog posting (on April 6, 2010) and in Cameron's posting on July 14, 2010 (entitled "Mathematics and Poetry, 2") he links to my blog (first posting March 23, 2010) with this statement:

JoAnne Growney has posted on her blog a poem structured using prime factorisations: I think it is a lovely poem, and urge you to take a look.

This link leads to a summary-description of Cameron's blog and this link goes to his first "Mathematics and poetry" posting.   AND, here is a link to the search-results for the term "poetry" in his blog.

     I would like to celebrate Peter Cameron by sharing the opening stanzas of his ten-stanza mathy poem, "Millennium":  

Math lyrics -- Lehrer et al

Mathematicians with poetic tendency often use their word-talents to write song-lyrics rather than poems; a master of the song-writing art was/is Tom Lehrer.  As an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1940s,  Lehrer majored in mathematics; he is best known for songs he recorded in the 1950s and 1960s.  Here are Lehrer's lyrics for "The Derivative Song" -- written to be sung to the tune of "There'll Be Some Changes Made" (by Benton Overstreet, with original lyrics by Billy Higgins).

Counting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . .

At Peter Cameron's Blog, "Counting the things that need to be counted," the July 14, 2010 entry contains a reflective poem entitled "Millenium" which meditates on the ten digits in stanzas whose lengths count them.  Here are the opening stanzas: 

Poets who Count

For some poets, counting is part of the language of the poem. For others, counting determines the structure. Here are two poems of the former sort -- "Counting" by British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) and "Adding It Up" by New England poet Philip Booth (1925-2007) -- followed by opening stanzas of a poem for which counting is part of both content and structure:  "Millennium" by mathematician Peter Cameron .