Inventing Zero

     A Pennsylvania friend who is now in Oklahoma, Sharon Solloway -- whom I got to know when we were both faculty members at Bloomsburg University (now part of Commonwealth University)  --  shared with me on Facebook the following mathy poem,  "Inventing Zero" by Canadian astronomer Rebecca Elson (1960-1999).  Found in Elson's collection,  A  Responsibility to Awe (Carcanet Classics, 2018)  "Inventing Zero" is available along with other samples of Elson's work here at this link.

       Inventing Zero      by Rebecca Elson

               First it was lines in the sand,
               The tangents, intersections,
               Things that never met,
               And you with your big stick,
               Calling it geometry,   

Using poetry to open dialogues with science . . .

     Recently I have obtained a copy of Sam Illingworth's book, A Sonnet to Science:  scientists and their poetry (Manchester University Press, 2019)  -- a collection of essays-with-poems that features these six scientist-poets:  Humphrey Davy, Ada Lovelace, James Clerk Maxwell, Ronald Ross, Miroslav Holub, and Rebecca Elson.  
       A dust-jacket blurb describes the author:  
            Sam Illingworth is a Senior Lecturer in Science Communication, where his work involves
                   using poetry to develop dialogues between scientists and non-scientists, 
                   especially amongst traditionally under-served and under-represented communities. 
             Illingworth also is a poet -- with a poem-a-week-blog available at this link.
From Rebecca Elson (1960-1999), an astronomer and poet whose life was cut short by cancer, we have these math-linked lines (written in 1998 and on page 168 of A Sonnet to Science):

     Is there any language, logic
     Any algebra where death is not
     The tragedy it seems