Geometry of Love

     A couple of weeks ago my "Google Alert" linked me to a posting of a science poem concerning "the geometry of love."  The posting -- at The Finch and Pea -- is a poem that is both elegant and precise (and one that has been included in the anthology, Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics, that Sarah Glaz and I collected and edited several years ago).  Here it is:

The Definition of Love     by Andrew Marvell (England, 1621-1678)

My love is of a birth as rare
As ‘tis for object strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.  

Celebrating a math-woman

I am continually searching for poems that feature past and current math-women.
When you find one (or create one) I will be glad to have you send it along.

The lunar crater L Herschel is named for astronomer Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750-1848) -- and I have celebrated this math-woman earlier with two fine poems:  "Letter from Caroline Herschel" by Siv Cedering , and "Planetarium" by Adrienne Rich.  Now Herschel is the focus of a forthcoming book by poet Laura Long, The Eye of Caroline Herschel: A Life in Poems, (Finishing Line Press, 2013).  Here, from that collection, is "The Taste of Mathematics:  Caroline Herschel at 31" -- this poem also appears, along with a note about the full collection, in the July 2013 issue of The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.