Mathematics gives our world its shape . . . fractals

     Poet Robin Chapman and Julien Clinton Sprott both were professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when their art-poetry collection  Images of a Complex World -- The Art and Poetry of Chaos first appeared (World Scientific Publishing, 2005) -- and now both are emeritus professors: Chapman in the Department of Communication Studies and Disorders and Sprott in the Department of Physics.  Here is one of the poems from that collection: 

          Bifurcations     by Robin Chapman

           This is the path that pitchforks
           in the yellow wood -- the one
           where you wanted to travel both,
           science and poetry,
           physics and art,
           and so bounced unpredictably back and forth,
           taking each as far as you could.

Notes:  The pitchforking path in the opening lines draws my thoughts to Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken." A bifurcation is, in general, a division of a structure into two parts. But when it happens over and over, things might change from patterned to chaotic . . .  Here is a link to earlier postings in this blog on fractals and chaos; here is a link to previous postings of poems by Robin Chapman.  This link leads to discussion of "bifurcation" at WolframMathWorld.  On page 82 of the art-poetry collection by Chapman and Sprott is this comment about the term:  There are dozens of different types of bifurcations, and they represent an active area of current research.  Below (and appearing on page 83 of the collection) is the following illustration:

 

In the preface to Images of a Complex World -- The Art and Poetry of Chaos, Sprott describes his process of choosing mathematical patterns and colors that would appeal to the human eye and Chapman offers insight into the inspirations for her poems.

Images of a Complex World

     One of the treasures on my bookshelf is Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos by University of Wisconsin poet Robin Chapman and physicist Julien Clinton Sprott (World Scientific, 2005).  The following image by Sprott accompanies a poem entitled "The Traveling Salesman's Problem is NP-Difficult." Beneath the art, I offer the poem's opening lines -- and the complete poem and other art-poetry samples from the collection are available at this link.   

an image of chaos by Julien Clinton Sprott

 

from:  The Traveling Salesman's Problem is NP-Difficult   by Robin Chapman 

 

     We were all for optimization of student opportunities

Math-poetry in The Mathematical Intelligencer

     In a recent e-mail, this message:  "The Mathematical Intelligencer. Vol. 42 No. 2 is now available online."  Most Intelligencer articles require a subscription or a fee-payment but one that is freely available to all of us is the poem, "Pandemic Math:  X and Y Axes" by Wisconsin painter and poet Robin Chapman.  Here are its opening lines:

          I'm thinking of those graphs we anxiously scan each day
          carry news of infection's spread, asking if we
          will find death stalking our neighborhoods . . .

Chapman's complete poem is available here.  

In Wyalusing, counting pelicans

     The number in the title of Robin Chapman's poem first attracted me to it and the mention of Wyalusing in the first line drew me further in -- for Wyalusing is the name of a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania (a region in which I lived and taught -- at Bloomsburg University -- for many years).  But, of course, Google was able to tell me of another Wyalusing, a park in Wisconsin, home state of the poet, and a place advertised as having plentiful bird-watching.  Enjoy:

       One Hundred White Pelicans     by Robin Chapman

       Over Wyalusing, riding thermals, they shine
       and disappear, vanish like thought,
       re-emerge stacked, stretched, 
       a drifting fireworks' burst.   

Sieve of Eratosthenes

The Sieve of Eratosthenes     by Robin Chapman

He was an ancient Greek
looking for primes,
those whole numbers divisible
only by 1 and themselves,
those new arrivals on the block,
fresh additions to the stock
of indivisibles spilling through
future time (for what is time

Dividing by Zero

Fairy godmothers have their magic wands and mathematician have division by zero as a way to make the impossible happen -- for example, we can show that 2 equals 3:

Poetry inspired by Chaos

Poet Robin Chapman studies the language learning of children -- and has collaborated with physics professor Julien Sprott on a lovely and fascinating collection The Art and Poetry of Chaos:  Images from a Complex World (World Scientific, 2005).  In the following poem Chapman offers (as she does throughout the poetry of the collection) a human interpretation of technical terminology.