Extraneous -- and so on

     Since my junior high math days, when I first heard the word "extraneous," I have loved the sound of it, the feel of my mouth when I say it, the mystery of how solving an equation can lead to extra solutions.   And then learning to check found-solutions to see if they were true solutions -- a process that has been multiply useful to me far afield from mathematics.
     My love for this math-word drew me quickly to the title of a poem by Alex Walsh, a high school student from Oberlin, Ohio, who presented her work at the poetry-with-math reading at JMM in Baltimore last Friday.   Here are her poems "Convergence" and "The Extraneous Solution" :

Euclid meets Broadway

Several years ago while visiting my older son in Colorado Springs I also went to nearby Boulder where, driving along Broadway, I came to a street sign that made me gasp with delight.  I was at the intersection of Broadway and Euclid. That fact, that suggestion of a merge of two worlds, needed to be part of a poem. Some time later I wrote:

   Butterfly Proposal     by JoAnne Growney