Showing posts with label color. Show all posts
Showing posts with label color. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Poetry in Math Journals

         The Mathematical Intelligencer (publisher of the poem by Gizem Karaali given below) and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (an online, open-access journal edited by Mark Huber and Gizem Karaali) are periodicals that include math-related poetry in each issue.  For example, in the most recent issue of JHM, we have these titles:

Articles:
     Joining the mathematician's delirium to the poet's logic'': Mathematical Literature and Literary Mathematics     by Rita Capezzi and Christine Kinsey
     How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways for Syllabic Variation in Certain Poetic Forms     by Mike Pinter

Poems:
     Computational Compulsions     by Martin Cohen
     Jeffery's Equation     by Sandra J. Stein
     The Math of Achilles     by Geoffrey A. Landis

And here, from Gizem Karaali, is a poetic view of the process of mathematical discovery:  the blank white page, the muddy flow of thoughts, the clarity that eventually (sometimes) blooms:

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

What color is 3?

     Long before there were six-digit hexadecimal codes for color (red #FF0000 or green #000800), there were paint-by-number craft activities.  And there is synaesthesia (syn -joined, aesthesia -sense),  a neurological condition in which two or more senses are connected. For example music might be "seen" in colours and patterns, or taste may have shapes, or letters and numbers have textures.
     Miroslav Holub (1923-98), Czech poet and research scientist (and one of my favorite poets) establishes number-color pairings in the following poem: