Poetry with Math -- BRIDGES 2012, Limericks

During July 25-29, 2012, Towson University will be hosting BRIDGES 2012, a mathematics-and-the-arts interdisciplinary conference. This year's conference will feature a poetry day on Saturday, July 28. -- an event that is free and open to the public as are all "Family Day" conference activities after 2 PM.  Mark your calendar.  More information is available at the end of this post (scroll down) and at the BRIDGES website.

  This weekend in Washington, DC (April 28 - 29, 2012)

enjoy "the largest celebration of science in the USA" --

visit the FREE USA Science and Engineering Festival -- 

featuring more than 3000 exhibits. 

We note here once again the coincidence that comes with April -- when we celebrate both National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month.  Here are three limericks (bawdy, of course) by John Ciardi (1916-1986) that celebrate data collection and numerical information. 

A septina ("Safety in Numbers") -- and variations

Recall that a sestina is a 39 line poem of six 6-line stanzas followed by a 3-line stanza.  The 6-line stanzas have lines that end in the same six words, following this permutation pattern:

   123456   615243   364125
   532614   451362   246531

The final stanza uses two of the six end-words in each of its three lines.  An original pattern for these was 2-5, 4-3, 6-1 but this is no longer strictly followed.

Can sestina-like patterns be extended to other numbers?  Poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud of the OULIPO investigated this question and he considered, in particular, the problem of how to deal with the number 7 of end-words -- for 7 does not lead to a sestina-like permutation.  Rombaud circumvented the difficulty (see Oulipo Compendium -- Atlas Press, 2005) by using seven 6-line stanzas, with end-words following these arrangements:

A Prayer of Numbers

     Whether our language is music or mathematics, computer code or cookery --  as we learn to love the language and treat it with good care, we find poetry.  Because mathematics is a concise language, with emphasis on placing the best words in the best order, it often is described by mathematicians and scientists as poetry.  Alternatively, and more accessible to most readers than poetic mathematics, we find verses by poets who include the objects and terminology of mathematics in their lines.

     One of my favorite poems of numbers is the portrait "Number Man," by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967),  found in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, 2003).  This poem also appears in Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters, 2008) -- a varied collection of math-related poems edited by Sarah Glaz and me.

     Number Man     by Carl Sandburg

          (for the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach)

     He was born to wonder about numbers.

Mathematics in Romanian poetry

     When I first visited Romania, I met Doru Radu, then a teacher of English at Scoala Generala "Andre Muresanu" in Deva. And Doru introduced me to his favorite poet, George Bacovia (1881 - 1957). Over time, we together translated many of Bacovia's poems -- and the bilingual collection plumb de iarnă / lead of winter was published in 2002 (Ed., Gabriel Stanescu, Criterion Publishing). Recently I scrutinized that collection (no longer available in print, but here, online) to look for mathematical lines to post in this blog. Alas, Bacovia offers no more than a couple images from geometry: "alone in deserted squares" (in Pălind / Fading) and "the wide, oval mirror, framed with silver" (in Poemă în oglindă / Poem in the Mirror).
     Although Bacovia did not use mathematical imagery, a considerable number of Romanian poets do, and below I offer links to my earlier blog postings of work by Ion Barbu, Nina Cassian, Martin Sorescu, and Nichita Stanescu. Enjoy!  

Mathematician-Poet Glaz

     Sarah Glaz, a professor-mathematician at the University of Connecticut -- and a poet -- is at the forefront of appreciation and advocacy of mathematics as an art and closely connected to other arts, particularly poetry.  Her webpage offers more than a hundred links to "Undergraduate Resources; Math Links for Information and Fun" and to scholarly articles that offer teachers and students math-poetry ideas to ponder carefully.  This link, for example goes to an article entitled "The Poetry of Prime Numbers" that Glaz presented at the Bridges 2011 Conference in Portugal.
     One of my favorites of Glaz' poems is this one whose structure relies on the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (see note following the poem).  Here is "January 2009"  :

Action at a distance

One of the great things about writing this blog is the people who have -- out of the blue and across the miles -- sent along a great poem or tidbit.  One of the valuable contributors is Tim Love, a British computer guy and poet -- and also a blogger (at LitRefs). The mysterious concept of "Action at a Distance" drives this Love poem:

Can a mathematician see red?

Held late in July, this year's 2011 Bridges (Math-Arts) Conference in Coimbra, Portugal included a poetry reading for which I'd been invited to read but was, at the last minute, unable to attend. (See also 26 July 2011). Poets Sarah Glaz and Emily Grosholz each, however, read favorite selections from my work.  Glaz read one of my square poems, "The Bear Cave" (see 19 June 2011) and Grosholz read the poem shown below, "Can a Mathematician See Red?"

Bridges in Coimbra

     Newton's binomial is as beautiful as Venus de Milo.
     What happens is that few people notice it.

                -- Fernando Pessoa (as Álvaro de Campos) (1888-1935)
                    translated from the Portuguese by Francisco Craveiro

Teaching math with a poem

Sarah Glaz is an algebraist (University of Connecticut) who uses poetry to teach mathematics. At her web page, scroll down to "Recent Articles" to see titles and links to three such papers.   One of the articles is "The Enigmatic Number e: A History in Verse and its Uses in the Mathematics Classroom" -- and it contains an annotated version of the poem whose opening stanzas are found below; it's found in the Digital Library of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), Loci:  Convergence (April 2010). 

Coleridge: A Mathematical Problem

 "A Mathematical Problem" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) -- found online at Elite Skills Classics -- uses verse to describe construction of an equilateral triangle; Coleridge introduces the poem with a letter to his brother telling of his admiration of mathematics, a view rather rare among poets.   

Poetry-and-Math -- Interdisciplinary Courses

     On July 1 my posting considered math-poetry anthologies and began with a reference to Against Infinity, the discovery of which was a catalyst for my own inclusion of poetry in my mathematics classrooms.  Other mathematicians and writers have gone further and developed interdisciplinary courses--such courses are the topic for this posting. 
     I begin with a small item from Against Infinity, this one a "Found Poem" by Elaine Romaine (found in the math textbook Calclulus on Manifolds by Michael Spivak):

Poetry with Mathematics -- Anthologies

More than thirty years ago at a mathematics conference book exhibit I stumbled upon Against Infinity:  An Anthology of Contemporary Mathematical Poetry, edited by Ernest Robson and Jet Wimp.  This collection, now out of print, became a resource for my mathematics courses--an opportunity for students to see the links between mathematics and the surrounding world.   One of my early loves was "Arithmetic Lesson:  Infinity" by Linda Pastan.  Found also in Carnival Evening, the poem opens with these these lines:

Poems of Calculus

In her thoughtful poem "Calculus" mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz writes of sharing with her students some of their subject's history--a drama enacted by two different sorts of mathematician.  Here are Glaz' opening lines: