On my mind in recent days is the problem of "so little time." About a year ago I posted a wonderful mathy poem by Californian Brenda Hillman
about time. The complete poem is available here; below I supply the opening lines:
Time Problem by Brenda Hillman
The problem
of time. Of there not being
enough of it. ...
Over the six years of this blog, the most-visited post has been "Varieties of Triangles" with poetry by Guillevic. Here is another of that poet's charming geometric offerings:
Diagonal by Guillevic (Englished by Richard Sieburth)
To get where I have to go
I claim right of way.
Because I provide communication
Between two angles
I take precedence
I take up residence.
I cross first,
Come what may.
"Diagonal" is found in Guillevic's Geometries,from Ugly Duckling Presse (2010). Buy it!
Canadian poet Madhur Anand is also an Environmental Scientist; her love of nature and concerns for preserving a habitable climate pervade her work -- and she also scatters throughout it some mathematics. You can imagine my delight when I found in her new collection (A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes) a poem (included below) that features the identity matrix. Read on!
No Two Things Can Be More Equal by Madhur Anand
In undergrad I learned about the identity
matrix. Ones on the main diagonal and zeros
elsewhere. Anything multiplied by it is itself.
Poems offered in this blog vary in the levels of mathematics they contain. One mathematical reader commented privately that in some of the poems the use of mathematical terms is "purely decorative." Indeed, some people have particular expectations for poetry that relates to mathematics -- they want the content to use mathematical notation or to present a mathematical truth. Such as, perhaps, this abbreviated statement of the four-color theorem (formulated as a 4x4 square):