Celebrate Blaise Pascal

      A couple of weeks ago (on June 19) I learned on X (formerly Twitter) that 401 years ago, mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was born -- more info here.  Probably Pascal is best known for the array of numbers called Pascal's triangle -- and that array has influenced poetry as well as mathematics.

    My source of this info about Pascal was an ongoing collection of postings on X by Mathematics & Statistics St Andrews,  @StA_Maths_Stats, which offers lots of historical facts about math and math people.  Their June 19 posting offered this:

Finite vs. Infinite

     One of my frequent interesting reads is the Quote of the Day #QOTD posted on Twitter by Mathematics & Statistics at St Andrews, @StA_Maths-Stats.  A few days ago I found there the following mathy-poetic and thought-provoking quote by Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1984):

     The infinite 
          we shall do right away. 
     The finite
               may take a little longer.

  [Quoted in D MacHale, "Comic Sections" (first published in Dublin 1993)]

They Say She WAS GOOD (for a woman)!

     March is Women's History Month; March 23 1882 is the birthdate of Emmy Noether (1882-1935).  Here is a photo of Noether from a  Twitter X posting from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at St. Andrews -- and it is followed by a stanza from a poem about Noether that I was inspired to write many years ago; following those lines, a link to previous poetic postings about Noether in this blog.

       

Math Biographies at the University of St. Andrews

     One of the very informative and math-related Twitter postings that I follow is @StA_Maths_Stats --which features postings from the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.  These include postings that feature mathematicians.  Today's Mathematicians of the day posting features a list of math people (with links to bios) who were born or died on August 10  -- and it includes this quote from Oswald Veblen, topologist and geometer from the United States who died on this date in 1960:

Mathematics is one of the essential emanations of the human spirit, a thing to be valued in and for itself, like art or poetry.

My search at the St. Andrews website for occurrences of the word "poem" led to a list of 179 responses.  Here is the poem I found at the first item on that list: