The Role of Zero

     In mathematics, as in poetry, multiple meanings are common and create power for the language.   For example, the number 0 is an idempotent element, an additive identity, a multiplicative annihilator -- and it also plays the role of something that may represent nothing.
     In Dorothea Tanning's poem below -- I found it at poets.org -- zero takes on still another of its roles, that of place-holder -- as in the numbers 101 and 5000, for example.

       Zero     by Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012)

       Now that legal tender has
                    lost its tenderness,
       and its very legality
               is so often in question.
       it may be time to consider
       the zero--
                    long rows of them.
            empty, black circles in clumps
                              of three, 

Poetry Reading 1-11-15 at JMM in San Antonio

You are invited to a poetry reading 
sponsored by the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

at the 2015 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM)

Gonzalez Convention Center   Room 205  San Antonio, Texas
Sunday, January 11, 2015, 5:30 - 7:00 p.m. 

     All poets who write of mathematics and all who are interested in mathematical poetry are invited. Join the gathering to share poems and to enjoy the company of like-minded poetic-math people!  The reading is sponsored by the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics  and will be hosted by Gizem Karaali and Larry Lesser.    
     Although last-minute decisions to participate are possible -- you may simply show up and sign up to read -- we invite and encourage poets to submit poetry (≤ 3 poems, ≤ 5 minutes) and a bio in advance, and, as a result, be listed on our printed program. Inquiries and submissions (by December 1, 2014) may be made to Gizem Karaali (gizem.karaali@pomona.edu).

Rhymes help to remember the digits of Pi

Calculated at the website, WolframAlpha, here are the first fifty-nine digits of the irrational number π (ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter):

     π = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749...

Before computers became available  to calculate π to lots of decimal places in an instant, people who did scientific calculations could keep the number easily available by memorizing some of the digits.  The website fun-with-words offers several mnemonics for  π , the most common type being a word-length mnemonic in which the number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit. For example the sentence, "How I wish I could calculate pi," gives us the first seven digits.