Love and Mathematics -- Please be my Valentine!

Poet extraordinaire Maxine Kumin (1925-2014) died yesterday.  

Here is a link to a wonderful eleven of her poems from Persimmon Tree. 

Late in 2007, AKPeters released Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics, edited by Sarah Glaz and me.  Recently at a Howard County Math Festival I met a young man who browsed my copy of this anthology and found it the perfect Valentine.  And so might you.  Below I include a sample from the collection -- a love sonnet by Jean de Sponde (1557-1595), translated from the French by David Slavitt.

 Several previous postings have offered love poems of mathematics and mathematicians; 

these include 9 February 2013, 12 February 2012, 12 February 2011, 10 November 2011,  

30 August 2011, 12 February 2011, and 20 July 2010.

Remembering Sophia Kovalevsky

With Reason: A Portrait     by JoAnne Growney   (June 2012)

        Sophia Kovalevsky *    (1850-1891)

Because she was Russian  . . .
Because she had abundant curly hair . . .
Because she loved mathematics . . .
Because she was born in the 19th century . . .
Because lecture notes for calculus papered  her nursery walls . . .
Because her parents forbade her to leave home . . .
Because a woman could not travel abroad from Russia 
                    without her father or a husband . . .
Because she found a kind man to marry . . .
Because ideas came to her in torrents . . .
Because she married a man she did not love . . .