A fractal is an object that displays self-similarity -- roughly, this means that the parts have the same shape as the whole -- as in the following diagram which shows successive stages in the development of the "box fractal" (from Wolfram MathWorld).
Michigan poet Jack Ridl and I share an alma mater (Pennsylvania's Westminster College) and we recently connected when I found mathematical ideas in the poems in his collection Broken Symmetry (Wayne State University Press, 2006); from that collection, here is "Fractals" -- offering us a poetic version of self-similar structure:
Fractals by Jack Ridl
On this autumn afternoon, the light
falls across the last sentence in a letter,
just before the last movement of Brahms’
Fourth Symphony, a recording made more
than 20 years ago, the time when we were
looking for a house to rehabilitate, maybe
Showing posts with label Westminster College. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Westminster College. Show all posts
Sunday, December 28, 2014
A Fractal Poem
Labels:
fractal,
Jack Ridl,
JoAnne Growney,
line,
math,
poetry,
symmetry,
Westminster College
Monday, August 13, 2012
Thirty and three
One of my poetry collections is a particular treasure because of its history. My aunt, Ruth Margaret Simpson Robinson, graduated (as I also did) from Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. At Westminster, a Chi Omega sorority sister of Aunt Ruth was Eleanor Graham Vance (1908-1985) who became a teacher and a writer; one of her biographical sketches mentions that she wrote for both children and adults, seeing many similarities between them. Aunt Ruth passed on to me her personally-inscribed copy of Eleanor Graham's 1939 collection, For These Moments, and in it I have found a poem with a tiny bit of arithmetic. I offer it here to you.
Labels:
Eleanor Graham Vance,
math,
numbers,
poetry,
polio,
Westminster College
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Sum of moments
Here is a 3x3 square poem -- inspired by a recently-found margin-note I made in Differential and Integral Calculus (by Ross R Middlemiss) when it was my text for an introductory calculus course at Westminster College all those years ago:
The sum of
the moments
is zero.
While the pages of text near the note go on with discussions and diagrams of slices and sums and limits -- they introduce the centroid, the moment of inertia, and the radius of gyration, and are importantly informative -- it is the margin-note that has today delighted me. I wonder if the girl who wrote it saw it as I do today. I like the mystery.
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