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,
Showing posts with label decimal place. Show all posts
Showing posts with label decimal place. Show all posts
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Poetry Reading 1-11-15 at JMM in San Antonio
at the 2015 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM)
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).
Thursday, September 2, 2010
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.
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.
Labels:
circle,
circumference,
decimal place,
diameter,
digits,
irrational,
Mike Keith,
mnemonic,
pi,
Poe,
rhyme,
WolframAlpha
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