A 3-4-5 Triangle of Poetry

     A wonderful feature of the Internet is the opportunity it offers for rapid connection with ideas from people around the world -- and I have found delight in mathy poems from Africa, Australia, Canada, China, India . . . and many other places.  Today's poem comes from poet Marian Christie -- who grew up in Zimbabwe and now lives in Kent, England (and has been other places in-between).  (Here is a link to previous mentions of Christie's work in this blog.)

     Here, below, is a screenshot of a poem by Christie that she posted recently on X (Twitter) (@marian_v_o) --  her poetic interpretation of the Pythagorean Theorem: 

Generalized Pythagorean Theorem--a visual poem?

While thinking about my December 13 posting featuring work by Richard Kostelanetz -- visual poetry with numbers -- I was browsing a fascinating book by Ivan Moscovich, The Puzzle Universe:  A History of Mathematics in 315 Puzzles (Firefly Books, 2015) and came to the following diagram.  I offer it as a visual poem. 

In addition to the squares, what other areas constructed on the sides of a right triangle may be correctly summed to give a third area of the same shape?

Right Triangle

The shape of a poem influences our reading of it -- short lines cause reading with lots of pauses whereas we read long lines quickly to get the entire line completed in a single breath. Moreover, some poetry is intended to be primarily visual -- to be taken in as a seen-image rather than read.  UBU Web offers several example of early visual poetry and one may also explore the  UBU Web site for modern examples.  Visual poetry may also be termed "concrete" poetry; consider, for example, "Concrete Block" by Michael J. Garofalo:

Word Play with the Hypotenuse

Here we have a playful treatment of the language of the Pythagorean Theorem in "Talking Big" by John Bricuth.