Robert Dawson, a mathematician and poet from Halifax, Nova Scotia, is wide-ranging in the mathematics that he includes in poetry. Here is a link to my posting of his "Statistical Lament." Still others may be found with a SEARCH using the poet's name.
Dawson's poem below is motivated by chaos and period doublings -- and their patterns -- a complicated system that, under certain conditions approaches a number called Feigenbaum's constant. (Mitchell Feigenbaum is a mathematical physicist who did pioneering work in chaos theory. "Feigenbaum" is a German surname meaning "Fig Tree" -- hence the title of the poem.) Probably you will want to read the poem aloud to get a feel for the rhythmic patterns -- and chaos -- that Dawson has designed for us.
Fig Tree Rag (after Scott Joplin) by Robert Dawson
The music drifts across the room:
from clarinet and saxophone
a sliding stream of melody,
piano chords beneath it, and
upon the cymbal and the snare
the drummer paints a lazy beat
with wire brushes, regular
and cool and uninflected as
a music teacher’s metronome.
Showing posts with label chaos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chaos. Show all posts
Friday, October 14, 2016
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Arnold diffusion (and poets of Romania)
I have had the good fortune to attend two BIRS Math / Creative Writing workshops in Banff (most recently in January 2016) and one of the organizers of these workshops has been Florin Diacu, a Romanian-Canadian mathematician-poet at Canada's University of Victoria. (For a bit more about my interest in Romanian poets, you may visit this posting from 2012 ; for still more, use "Romania" as a blog-search term.)
Recently I discovered the following poem by Florin in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics and that online journal's open-access policy permits me to offer it here. I have wondered whether it is prudent of me to present a poem about Arnold diffusion, a topic about which I have scant mathematical background. But I like it, even though my understanding is incomplete; I hope you like it too.
Recently I discovered the following poem by Florin in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics and that online journal's open-access policy permits me to offer it here. I have wondered whether it is prudent of me to present a poem about Arnold diffusion, a topic about which I have scant mathematical background. But I like it, even though my understanding is incomplete; I hope you like it too.
Monday, June 30, 2014
A recent butterfly effect
The term butterfly effect has entered everyday vocabulary from the mathematics of chaos theory and refers to the possibility of a major event (such as a tornado) starting from something so slight as the flutter of a butterfly wing. This sensitivity to small changes is a characteristic of chaotic systems. Recent news in Science magazine (9 May 2014) has drawn my attention to sea butterflies -- and the effect that ocean acidification is having on the lives of these tiny, fragile creatures -- and the environmental warning that this portends. From the details offered in Science, I have constructed this poem of 4x4 square-stanzas:
Warned by Sea Butterflies by JoAnne Growney
Sea butterflies --
no larger than
a grain of sand,
named for the way
Warned by Sea Butterflies by JoAnne Growney
Sea butterflies --
no larger than
a grain of sand,
named for the way
Labels:
butterfly effect,
chaos,
JoAnne Growney,
mathematics,
poem,
sea butterfly,
square stanza
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Love mathematics!
In the stanzas below, I have some fun with math terminology. Hope you'll enjoy it too.
Love! by JoAnne Growney
Love algebra! Through variable numbers
of factored afternoons and prime evenings,
party in and out of your circle of associates,
identify your identity, meet your inverse.
Love! by JoAnne Growney
Love algebra! Through variable numbers
of factored afternoons and prime evenings,
party in and out of your circle of associates,
identify your identity, meet your inverse.
Labels:
arithmetic,
calculus,
chaos,
identity,
imaginary,
Integral,
inverse,
Mobius band,
pi,
prime,
rational,
real,
symmetries,
tangent
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
From order to chaos -- a sonnet
Fractals by Diana Der-Hovanessian
Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare
--Edna St. Vincent Millay
Euclid alone began to formulate
the relation of circle, plane and sphere
in equations making it quite clear
that symmetry is what we celebrate.
Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare
--Edna St. Vincent Millay
Euclid alone began to formulate
the relation of circle, plane and sphere
in equations making it quite clear
that symmetry is what we celebrate.
Labels:
Benoit Mandelbrot,
chaos,
Diana Der-Hovanessian,
Euclid,
fractal,
symmetry,
turbulence
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Shifting patterns
This poem by California poet and scientist Lucille Lang Day weaves a shifting display of images -- the flight patterns of birds made vivid with mathematical terminology. As the poet's observations meander, they build to a question: is a galaxy something like a sparrow?
Form/Formless by Lucille Lang Day
A flock of red-winged blackbirds
swooping and swirling
in cyclonic and anticyclonic patterns
always in motion like Jovian clouds
that appear, then disappear
according to the mathematics of chaos
in yellow, brown and salmon-colored layers
Form/Formless by Lucille Lang Day
A flock of red-winged blackbirds
swooping and swirling
in cyclonic and anticyclonic patterns
always in motion like Jovian clouds
that appear, then disappear
according to the mathematics of chaos
in yellow, brown and salmon-colored layers
Labels:
chaos,
cyclonic,
form,
layer,
Lucille Lang Day,
mathematics,
poem
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Chaos and Order -- Stevens
An article by Jeff Gordinier, "For Wallace Stevens, Hartford as Muse," in the Travel Section of last Sunday's NY Times gives a gentle introduction to one of my favorite poets; the article also provoked me to escape for an hour into a rereading of selections from my copy of The Collected Poems (Vintage Books, 1990). Poems by Stevens (1879-1955) celebrate ideas and are, like pieces of mathematics, suggestive of a variety of situations. (Work by Stevens was featured in these earlier blog postings: 15 December 2010 (from "The Snow Man"), 4 May 2011 ("The Anecdote of the Jar"), and 13 May 2011 (from "Six Significant Landscapes"). Here, reconciling opposites, are two of the five sections of Stevens' "Connoisseur of Chaos" -- also from The Collected Poems.
Labels:
chaos,
mathematics,
order,
poetry,
Wallace Stevens
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Chaos Over the Hors d'Oeuvres
Some systems of equations can produce vast changes in output with only small changes in input. Or not. This sensitivitiy to initial conditions is a key characteristic of chaos. As happens not infrequently in mathematics, the term chaos also carries larger-world meanings additional to the correct ones -- indeed, the phenomena studied in chaos theory are not haphazardly disordered but are complex. Very very complex. Judy Neri's poem addresses this topic.
Labels:
chaos,
Judy Neri,
mathematician,
mathematics,
order,
poem,
poetry,
Umberto Neri
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Mathematicians at work
About her collecton, The Scottish Café (Slapering Hol Press, 2002), Susan Case offers this note:
This series of poems is loosely based upon the experiences of the mathematicians of the Scottish Café, who lived and worked in Lvov, Poland (now L'viv, Ukraine), a center of Eastern European intellectual life before World War II, close to the area from which my own ancestors emigrated to the United States. A book, known as the Scottish Book, was kept in the Café and used to write down some of their problems and solutions. Whoever offered a proof might be awarded a prize.
Here is "Fixed Points," the opening poem from Case's collection:
This series of poems is loosely based upon the experiences of the mathematicians of the Scottish Café, who lived and worked in Lvov, Poland (now L'viv, Ukraine), a center of Eastern European intellectual life before World War II, close to the area from which my own ancestors emigrated to the United States. A book, known as the Scottish Book, was kept in the Café and used to write down some of their problems and solutions. Whoever offered a proof might be awarded a prize.
Here is "Fixed Points," the opening poem from Case's collection:
Labels:
chaos,
Euler's formula,
Lvov,
mathematics,
Poland,
problem,
proof,
Scottish Cafe,
solution,
Stanislaw Mazur,
Stefan Banach,
theorem
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
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.
Labels:
chaos,
complex,
Julien Sprott,
mathematics,
neighbor,
poetry,
Robin Chapman
Monday, November 22, 2010
Butterfly Effects
An equation or system of equations is said to be "ill-conditioned" if a small change in input data can produce a very large change in the output. This inverse relationship between input and output has become popularly known by the phrase "butterfly effect." Two poets from Eastern Pennsylvania, Gary Fincke and Harry Humes, have written poems about this phenomenon.
Labels:
butterfly effect,
chaos,
equation,
fractal,
Gary Fincke,
Harry Humes,
ill-conditioned
Friday, June 18, 2010
Three poems with the word "axiom"
Poems that contain "number" are numerous; those with "axiom" are less easily found. Here are 3 of them -- by 19th century American poet, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), by Canadian poet and fiction writer, Margaret Atwood (b 1939), and by a poet from Virginia, Lesley Wheeler, whose work I recently have come to know. I particularly enjoy Lesley's poems about parenthood--because they ring true and also because when I was a parent of young children I was not finding time to write.
Labels:
axiom,
chaos,
create,
Emily Dickinson,
equation,
Lesley Wheeler,
Margaret Atwood,
mathematical,
mathematics,
nature,
poem
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